Hi, I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for joining me.
Today I want to take on the rather daunting task of explaining to your Evernote.
Now why is it daunting?
That’s because Evernote is so many thinks to so many people.
In a nutshell, Evernote is a note-taking application.
With Evernote, we take notes on all of our devices, on our computer, on our handheld
phone, on our iPad or tablet, and we store those notes in the Cloud in our Evernote account.
We have our little notebooks in our Evernote account that allows us to add some structure.
We add keywords that allow us to search on the notes when they are in Evernote.
That’s the basis of Evernote.
What’s so exciting about it?
What’s exciting about is the definition of what a note is.
A note is not just text, oh no.
A note in Evernote can be a photo that we’ve taken with our smartphone.
It can be an image that we’ve taken from a photo library.
It can be a clipping of a webpage.
It can be a document.
It can be a PDF document or a word processing document.
It can be an audio clip that we’ve recorded.
It can be a lecture that we’ve just listened to and recorded with our smartphone.
Any of these can be notes and each of these notes then live in the Cloud and then we can
access them on of our devices.
It gets very exciting and as you start to use it Evernote even more and more, you being
to rely on it more and more.
You begin to trust it more and more and it becomes a repository for all those little
bits of data that are rattling around in our head, so easy to forget and lose, and occasionally
they’re there, occasionally they’re not.
With Evernote, they’re there and within access and that’s what makes it exciting.
So now I want to show you how it works.
Again, I kind of struggled just trying to figure out how I should demonstrate this.
I thought about showing you the app because we actually can download and install an Evernote
app which I have done and we will use, and that’s kind of your command central for
using Evernote.
But you don’t spend most of the time in the app, instead Evernote kind of flows into
all of your daily activities.
I’ll show you how that works from that perspective.
Typically speaking in a day you might be browsing through a website and finding an article or
finding a little bit of text that you’re interested in saving and retaining for some
reason.
We’ve all come up with different strategies for saving and retaining that information.
Here this is a little bit of an article here that I want to keep.
I can highlight it.
I can copy and paste it into Google Docs if I wanted and we all know how well that works.
I can bookmark this site certainly and then I can try and remember what site it was in
the bookmark and organize my folders and try to get back to it but that’s not really
going to work either.
Instead, I’m going to use Evernote.
In this case here because I’m in my web browser, I’ve got a little bit of data that
I want to save from the Internet, I’m going to use my web browser plug-in that I installed
from Evernote.
Here, it’s called the Evernote Web Clipper.
I can choose which notebook I want it to save it into because I have some structure to my
notebooks, some order within Evernote.
I’ll just save it in Steve Dotto’s notebook.
I can add tags, “This is important stuff” and then I can choose to either save the selection,
save the full article, save the full page, or just save the URL.
This is great if you want to just, if there are cool little websites that you just want
to remember but you’re not going to return and visit, and they aren’t appropriate for
bookmarking.
It’s a great way for saving them and the cool thing is because it’s all in the web,
it’s all Web 2.0, you then can access that URL from any of your devices.
So when you’re out to dinner with friends and you say, “Hey, there’s this great
website,” you don’t have to go back to your computer, find it in the bookmarks if
you can find it.
You can just find it in your smartphone.
In this case, though, ‘Save Selection, click ‘Save’ and it then takes this selection,
it clips it, and then it stores it online for us.
Now let’s open the Evernote app and see what we’ve done.
In the Evernote app, I can see right away the document or the note that I just saved.
Here it is, all of the text and the graphic that was on that webpage along with the tag
“important stuff” here in my Evernote interface.
But let’s take a look through the overall application just to get a feel for the structure
of it.
On the left-hand side here are all of my notebooks.
These are the kind of major organizational tools within Evernote.
You create new notebooks and you store relevant data in those notebooks.
Some people will have dozens or hundreds of notebooks.
It doesn’t matter how many notebooks you have because you can always quickly search
and find things by keywords or by tagging.
So keep as much information as you want.
You can’t have too much in the Evernote.
I don’t think you can have too much information in Evernote.
So here is all of our basic structure of the notebooks that I have set up here.
Down the center, I can see my actual notes and if I go into any of my notes, my notebooks,
in my cooking notebook I can see I just have one recipe, and I can see all of my notebooks
here which will give me all of my notes, Steve Dotto’s notebook where I just stored that
image that we just looked at here.
I can organize and go through them all this way.
Let me just go into all of my notes.
I can also quickly get to any document.
Let’s actually move away from the one that we just had so that I can go back to it.
There we go.
If I start typing in ‘important,’ you see there.
It automatically finds the note with ‘important stuff’ and all of the other ones that I’ve
keyed or tagged as ‘important’ so you can see that it’s very quick to search and
find data as you go along.
Along the very top we have Account Management Tools.
We have, of course, a series of different menu items that just basically allows simple
management but most of your time is spent here in the screen searching for or retrieving
information in Evernote.
Down the bottom, you can also see there’s an ad.
This is the perfect time for me to talk about the different versions of Evernote, of which
there are two.
There’s the free version which I’m using right now and I see no reason for you not
to use for quite some time.
It’s very robust.
It’s got almost all of the features of the paid version.
The difference between the free and the paid version is in the free version, you get those
irritating ads.
You also get a limited amount of storage which is actually quite a bit of storage but if
you’re saving a lot of audio files and that sort of stuff, you will run out of space fairly
quickly on it.
If you’re just saving graphics and text, it’s plenty of storage.
There’s also some indexing features in the paid version where it will basically OCR your
documents much faster.
Even in the free version, Evernote does a great job of doing optical character recognition
on graphics, on PDF documents to help you find and search within those documents.
But in the full version, it makes it a priority and it indexes them very fast and very effectively
so it make its even better for finding documents because a lot of people just don’t clip
notes like this but they store documents and a lot of people store their emails.
Their important emails are stored in Evernote.
If you’re starting to do all those sorts of things, again the paid version becomes
a lot more appealing because some of you are storing a lot more data in Evernote.
That's the app itself.
I think what I’d like to do now is I’d like to take you into the mobility world.
Let’s fire up my iPad and have a look.
I’ve got my iPad fired up so that we could all see it.
We see the now familiar icon of the elephant, the elephant never forgets, that is Evernote.
When I open it up, we’re brought in to my Evernote account on my iPad here.
Now it looks slightly different on you iPod Touch or on your iPhone or on your Android
device based on the geometry of the screen but the same functionality is going to be
available to us in all of those different Evernote clients.
The note that we just took, that we just captured, take a look.
There it is.
You can see it’s available to us and this, in its simplicity, shows us how powerful Evernote
is.
We just clipped information from a web browser on our computer and we’re now viewing that
in an indexed form on our iPad or our mobility device.
That shows us how elegant and effective Evernote can be.
Now as you start to use Evernote, as you fold it into your life, it will become kind of
organic as you use it.
You’re not just going to capture information on your computer and then view it on your
mobility devices.
You will capture information on all of your devices, share them, and it will just be kind
of ubiquitous through your entire day.
So let me show you creating a new note now on my iPad.
When I go to ‘Create new note,’ I’m given a series of icons along the top.
I can create an audio note.
This is great for students who want to record a lecture or if you’re the sort of person
who wants to do voice memos, you can create a voice memo.
Of course, you can still tag it with text so that you can find it a little bit later
and listen to it on any of your devices.
You can also choose a photo that’s on your photo library within your device and with
a camera icon, we can enable that and then we can take a picture–I’m not going to
take a picture here because there’s nothing to see in here right now–but we can take
a picture and then tag that as our note.
Now I use that to tremendous effect in a couple of different ways.
One, when I have business lunches or dinners now, instead of stuffing receipts in my wallet,
I take a photo of the receipt with my iPhone, tag who that person is that I went to dinner
with, that is if I’m paying, and then when I get back to my office, I can just go into
Evernote, call up the receipt, drag it into my email and send it off to my accountant.
Very effective and again it gets stored so that I can go back anytime and recapture it.
At that same dinner, if we happen to have a great bottle of wine I take a picture of
the label because I can never remember the names of good wines when I’m at the liquor
store.
I always buy the exact same thing because I can never remember what it was that was
good that I had at XYZ restaurant.
I can tag that information, in the liquor store call up my iPhone, take a quick look,
find the bottle and then we can have better wine when we’re going out to visit friends.
It works great.
I want to show you a few of the other features that are in here as well.
One of them is–I want to go back to the home screen, that’s where I want to go–and
I want to touch on the more–this is cool.
Evernote also respects and recognizes what’s in your calendar and where you are as it makes
your notes.
For example, I was at my daughter’s school concert and it was in my calendar that I was
at the concert so when I made a quick little Evernote note at the concert and it was nothing,
I just made a note that Evernote takes into account calendar details.
When I did that there, it actually says note from Emma’s concert in Delta.
That’s because it took that information from my calendar, the concert, and my location
that I was in Delta, and it put them into the note so that I could search not just on
keywords but on my calendar events or on my physical location, and it shows you on a map
where the notes that you captured were taken.
It just kind of adds that much extra richness to the overall experience.
I could go on for hours and hours about so many different things that we can do with
Evernote.
Now maybe not hours but I can go on for minutes more and I think we’ve reached kind of the
limits of what we should be doing on a video cast like this.
So I’m going to call a halt to it right now but we are going to do more videos on
using Evernote for productivity.
If you’ve enjoyed this video, if it’s been useful to you, drop by our website at
DottoTech.com.
We’ve got lots more videos there and we look for your recommendations on any videos
that aren’t there that you might like to see there.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for spending this time with us today.
[END OF AUDIO]
Steve Dotto0Evernote0September 5, 2012