When will Evernote allow drag and drop re-ordering of notes?

Question

Phil Libin · Answer

Thanks for asking! Let's see:

One of my favorite things about Evernote is that I never feel like I'm stuck in a particular organizational scheme. I change my mind about how to organize things every few months and it's easy to move things around.

Mostly, I don't rely on organization in Evernote; I just search for what I'm looking for. There are some new features coming out soonish that'll make that really nice.

As of the time of this answer, I have about 9,000 notes in my Evernote account divided among 45 notebooks. However, the majority of these notes are in my single, default notebook.

I use the other notebooks to control sharing. I have a "board" stack, for example, which has a notebook for each of the past few board meetings. Each notebook is shared with my board members and management team. I have a notebook called "The Things I Ate" (with about 700 notes) which I share more broadly. You'll never guess what's in it. I have a stack for conferences with a separate notebook for some of the major conferences I attend containing meeting notes, business cards, encounter entries from Hello, etc. I have an "autographs" notebook which has ebooks signed by authors I meet (take a screenshot of the front page in Kindle or iBooks, sign with Skitch). I have other shared notebooks for travel, presentation materials, etc.

In addition to my own notebooks, I have linked about 30 shared notebooks into my account. These are mostly from Evernote coworkers and have things like design assets, status reports, etc. We have an employee directory that's automatically generated as a shared notebook and stored in a Peek-friendly format so people can study up on new names and faces. There's a takeout-menu notebook that somebody keeps updated. The new Activity View on the Mac and Windows desktop clients really helps with shared notebooks by showing me when people update stuff. That's going to get a lot better soon as well.

I don't use many tags. I have a tag called "want" that I slap on things I want to buy; mostly webclips but sometimes pictures from the real world. I have a "travel" tag for quick access to itineraries, travel notes, etc. I had a "@todo" tag, but realized that was a hack and stopped using it. We're just going to make that functionality a first-level feature of the app instead. I have about 20 other tags which I use intermittently. We have users with thousands of tags, so I know I'm not really representative of tag use.

I'd estimate that about 30% of my notes are webclips, 30% are from Food, Hello, Skitch and Penultimate, 20% are typed in text notes, 15% are files and other stuff and 5% are forwarded emails. I think that adds up to 100%.

Hope that helps.

- p

Daniel Gold · Answer

This is a fantastic question. I am an incredibly avid fan of the note links. Both on my blog and in my eBook on Evernote & GTD, I talk about the myriad of ways to leverage this amazing feature. In fact, in my update coming out in December, I have 10 new pages of content focused solely on all the benefits of note linking in various use cases. Before I elaborate on just a few, I did want to highlight that I have never experienced any corruption in my database because of note linking.

Here are just a couple:
1) Master Travel Itineraries: I used note linking to create a master travel itinerary w

Here are just a couple:
1)  Master Travel Itineraries: I used note linking to create a master travel itinerary with note links to my boarding passes, rental car agreements, hotel confirmations, excursions, etc.

2) Master Client Meeting notes: I implement the same idea with client meetings.  I use note links to connect reference notes, contracts in a note, even video testimonials about a product I sell in a note.  It's awesome having one centralized note that links out to everything else I need.

3) Master "Next Action" notes: I know a lot of people have told me that the like to have one note with all of their action items grouped together by context; i.e., a "Calls" note.  You can use the note linking feature to connect next actions to specific projects or other referenceable notes.

4)  Next actions: Similar to above, you can use note linking to link your next action to a note in another notebook to allow you to quickly see exactly what you should be doing.

There's many more examples that I have, but there are just a few.  I hope this helps!

Kate Nikolaieva · Answer

My vote is for Nimbus Note. With Nimbus Note, you can color-code any of your notes and folders. In addition to text searches, use a label color in your search. For example, filter search results further to show only notes having a green label. This feature is handy when you can’t remember the exact name of a folder, but you know its label was orange.

* Nest folders to any depth
 * Add color coding to any folder
 * Share any folder by providing a public link
 * Optionally, secure a folder link with a password. Anyone with this password can access the folder with the web link

Rick Vugteveen · Answer

What Evernote is missing really depends on how you're using it. I mostly use Evernote as digital filing cabinet for a (nearly) paperless life. In this use case my largest gripe with Evernote is the lack of any structured data. I'd love to be able to add a price field to my receipts notebook or presenter and conference fields to my presentations notebook. Tags and hacking around with naming conventions only get one so far. For similar reasons it would be great to have per notebook settings for sort order and display.

Beyond the use case described above I think Evernote is missing a massive oppor

Beyond the use case described above I think Evernote is missing a massive opportunity by not opening up user's public notes to browsing and search. I think they have the opportunity to outdo services such as Pinterest if they were to execute the idea well.

Mark Bagley · Answer

The notes are sorted based on the date on which they were edited. If you want a particular note to be near the top, you will need to make a copy in the sidebar on the left (in the mac version at least)

Lisa Deutsch Harrigan · Answer

I too love Evernote. It was recommended as a way to share notes from my Android Machine to my home computer. I had been using Outlook. Now I'm transferring all my important notes from Outlook to Evernote. 
I think the best invention was Clipping - Add to Evernote. I find something on the Net and I can now save it and find it again. 
That and just being able to use it Everywhere! That is So Useful.
I use a lot of Tags, a number of Notebooks. 
A Notebook I enjoy is Recipes. All those internet Yummy Things, can now be found again. My old Real Life Clippings Notebook is getting nothing new. I'm sure the trees appreciate it. :D

Anonymous · Answer

Dear Phil

I have used Evernote for many years. And I realy love it. But since the option of coloured tags/labes is no longer availably in the new versions, I removed Evernote and I start using Google Keep. I don’t like this Keep so much but colours are so very important for my visualisation that I have to use it. Is it possible to bring back the colour-option to evernote. As soon as it is back, I’m changing my note-system and I will go back to Evernote

Thanks

Beste Regards

Coen Rijn

Sterling Zumbrunn · Answer

There are lots of great answers on this thread. Let me start by saying that I love Evernote, find it extremely useful, and I've been a premium subscriber since 2008. However, there is a lot of room for improvement, and I truly hope they use some of the $20 Million in funding they raised to address some of the most important issues, especially as the service grows ever more popular.

First of all, Evernote UIs are not great across the board. They're pretty ugly, and their usability is poor as well. When Evernote for iPad first shipped, it was like a breath of fresh air. Then I heard Evernote CEO Phil Libin mention in a podcast that it was the first time that they actually hired an interface designer to put together the UI for one of their clients. It shows. Now they need to do this for all of their clients, including the web version.

Not that the iPad version is perfect - it still needs work too. Things like a list view instead of the cartoony notebook and tag views would greatly enhance usability. The iPhone version is particularly bad. Given the rapid pace of development on iOS, and the truly stunning UIs now available in a plethora of apps from shops of all sizes, Evernote feels like it hasn't evolved much, and needs a complete overhaul. This is apparently underway, so I'm willing to give Evernote the benefit of the doubt for a few more months. But when iPhone apps dedicated to inputting text and images into Evernote spring up alongside the official app because the user experience is so poor, you know you have problems.

Evernote excels at getting content into the system, it does less well at retrieval. Case in point is tag management - it's awful. Evernote has about the worst implementation of tags I've seen in any application. The behavior is strange (try moving them around in the Mac client), the tags are not truly hierarchical (children don't inherit parent attributes), and there is no tag cloud (something that would be extremely helpful now that I have thousands of notes), and there is no ability to search or jump to a letter when assigning tags in iOS. Powerful search capabilities exist, but are poorly documented for the end user. "Saved Searches" should be renamed "Smart Folders" to make it clearer to users what they are actually for.

Until recently, Evernote insisted on a flat list of notebooks, suggesting that users build tag hierarchies instead. There were a lot of issues with this approach, and users continued to demand folders for notebooks. In late 2010, Evernote finally relented and now includes "Notebook Stacks" in the Mac and Windows clients. This was good progress, but they only allow one layer of hierarchy. It would be better to allow as many layers as the end user needs. For better or worse, most folks still to this day are comfortable with the folder metaphor as a way of structuring their information.

One thing that always frustrates me about Evernote is their poor security. They consistently claim that there is no reason to have a lock code for any of their apps, including mobile ones. Evernote's management insists that the OS level protection on your device is sufficient. This is just wrong, and PIN codes for the iPhone and Android apps have consistently been demanded by users. Evernote is completely tone deaf on this point. With devices like the iPhone and iPad becoming increasingly more social, it is natural to want to pass around a phone or tablet to let kids play games, or to let friends surf the web. We need that second level of protection at that point - an OS level PIN code does nothing. Evernote's motto is "Remember everything" encouraging users to use the platform to store everything of importance to them. Yet they show a distinct unwillingness to help users protect their content, something I find distressing. Tons of applications offer this functionality - from document readers to simple text editors. It couldn't take much in development to implement a PIN code, I find it absolutely baffling why Evernote insists that users don't need it.

It only takes a little while of using Evernote to bump up against its limitations and annoyances. I've considered leaving several times, but in the end the rock solid syncing keeps me on the platform. My one hope is that rather than trying to develop so many different partnerships, Evernote will really focus on improving its core offering, and make it the best it can be. Things like the Livescribe partnership were introduced with great fanfare, yet is poorly implemented and has not been much improved since launch. Meanwhile, maddeningly basic text formatting issues persist in the Mac client.

Evernote has tremendous promise, and a rapidly growing rate of adoption. They need to be able to scale and adapt at the same time, which is certainly a challenge. I think Evernote's growth will inevitably help fuel their development, and I look forward to seeing what they will achieve in 2011.

Philip Constantinou · Answer

In addition to the answer above, many Evernote notes contain "resources" (images, audio and other file attachments) as well as note links. So the process of creating plain text notes could be lossy.

If plain text notes are important there's a few possibilities. Evernote supports HTML export from its desktop clients. You can get one HTML file per note. From this point existing tools will allow you to create a text export. As an aside, this is a nice way to get all your resources out of Evernote.

Evernote's API also supports getting the text from notes if you're up for a little programming.

Anonymous · Answer

They probably could add this as an export option, but you would loose all of these features and attributes that are the very backbone of Evernote and the versatility the program/application offers, e.g.,

* Note title
 * Created date
 * Updated date
 * Author
 * Location
 * Tags
 * Source URL

For right now we're just talking about a few mouse clicks for pasting a heavily formatted EN as "plain text" into any other software app you happen to be using.

But just for the sake of having a conversation, and in an effort to find out why you pose this question to begin with, what is it you're trying to do?

How often would you be need to do this that the need for an export feature overrides the occasional use of cut, copy & paste?

Jonas Bruun Nielsen · Answer

I have a wet dream where Evernote gets acquired by Apple, stripped from features and has it's interface streamlined.

David Keldsen · Answer

I believe Gaz Umped’s answer is correct in that its assumed to be hard. It’s a (bad) decision that “doing that right is hard” and it’s been neglected.

Now that said, the folder system in Evernote is incredibly weak, and it really needs a fix. Given that folders are (or could be) just delimiter separated strings with a little parsing…

The user interface for folders is poor, too. There’s a hierarchy…but you can’t browse it hierarchically, you have to scroll through the whole flattened list of folders.

Pity.

If this was to be fixed, Evernote would be more than my “web notebook” and would become my preferred notebook for all notes.

Sterling Zumbrunn · Answer

I think it's dependent on iOS APIs, and this is not something currently supported by Apple. For Evernote to engineer their own rich text editor would be a tremendous undertaking, and frankly there are a lot of other areas within their iOS UI that need improvement, especially on iPhone.

Perhaps iOS 5 will include a rich text engine available to developers, it's certainly high on my list of features I'd like to see.

One workaround that I wish Evernote would seriously consider is supporting HTML generation from Markdown. Second Gear has shown that this is a viable option with their excellent apps Elements and Markdown Mail. This would be a good way for Evernote to address this critical need that users are constantly asking for, without having to jump through too many hoops on their end.

Elie Daou · Answer

Because it works exceptionally well at what it was designed to do.

Evernote are in the business of helping people take organized notes. They have a product that allows people to seamlessly take neat, organized and easily accessible notes.

Their core product has been doing what it was designed to do very well for a long time now. Taking into consideration the risk that would come from modifying that product, coupled with the very little perceived benefit of such a change it just wouldn’t make sense for them to do so.

Lyna Faucett · Answer

Smart folders. I should be able to set parameters and notes would automatically fall into correct folder. Like iTunes smart playlists.

Yariv Adam · Answer

Let me suggest using Evernote through a chatbot. If you’re used to using Facebook Messenger, I’ve created a free chatbot that lets you connect to your Evernote account, list your notes, create new ones and search your notes.

The reason this is a cool way to use Evernote is that it’s faster. If you already use Messenger, it’s probably already conveniently located on your home screen, and creating a note is as quick as sending a photo or text to the bot. The bot gives you options to add labels, a title, etc., but if you just send it something and then put your phone in your pocket, it will create a new note after a little while!

The search feature is also pretty cool - it uses Evernote’s search, but if (and only if) that comes up empty, this bot uses a cool semantic search to guess which notes you’re looking for, based on labels you’ve given your notes. So, if you have a note labeled “salmon recipe”, and you search for “fish”, Evernote won’t find it - but this bot will!

It’s free, so give it a try: Tags [ https://www.facebook.com/TagsNotesApp ], and tap “Message” to start.

Nikki Navta · Answer

I can't believe the share feature doesn't work on all the devices of the people with whom you share a note. For instance, I thought Evernote would become my household's answer to a ever-present shopping list. I created a grocery list note and shared it with my fiancee, but he can only see it on his computer, not on his iPhone.

Ray Sidney-Smith · Answer

You can always access your existing notes in Evernote, no matter what account type you have (Basic to Business). Visit https://evernote.com/Login.action and enter your login credentials to log into your Evernote account. If you’re not seeing your notes, log out and try to login with different email addresses you may have used (being careful not to accidentally create new Evernote accounts in the process). This happens quite frequently that a user has multiple accounts, some of which are empty so it looks like your notes are lost…but they’re simply in another account.

Good luck!

Ray Sidney-Smith
Evernote Certified Consultant
Getting More Done With Evernote (podcast)

Good luck!

Ray Sidney-Smith
Evernote Certified Consultant
Getting More Done With Evernote [ https://www.gettingmoredonewithevernote.com ] (podcast)

Andy Dent · Answer

Bojan, on what platforms would you want export as plain text and how would you want to handle multiple notes. eg: would you want the choice of generating individual text files or sometimes want them concatenated?

Would you be like the chance to possibly concatenate the notes directly into an RTF document, if you wanted to save just a little formatting, say emphasis with bold and italic?

I ask because I'm working on a plain text client for iPad, Mac and Windows. I'm considering if it is also worth including my OOFILE report writer to be able to do paginated reports of multiple notes out to various formats.

Stuart Cliffe · Answer

My initial view would be “why bother”? I’ve managed big databases in the past, and their one main feature is a constant need for ‘curation’ - queries need to be resolved, missing information added, and from time to time a good search for duplicates. With an address database that last is an important issue: sending out duplicate letters causes annoyance, sometimes offence, and costs money. Better to avoid it wherever possible. But if you clipped this page from a website before, it’s already uploaded to your online database. You’ve ‘paid’ for it in upload allowance. Removing it won’t reduce your usage, or give you additional capacity for this month.

Folks have asked in Evernote’s Discussion Forums [ https://discussion.evernote.com/index.php ] why Evernote can’t warn of a duplicate clip in advance. There are several reasons - want to wait for a search to complete before you clip? What if the page has changed since last time? What if you’re clipping a different selection? How precise does that search need to be? The more specific the longer it’s going to take.

There are three existing protections against duplicates - one is that if you see the same entry as a hit after a search, you can go ahead and look at both and delete one. Another is Context [ https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209004707 ] which will (after a clip is complete) tell you what other notes you have which appear connected to this one.

The final one - provided you use notes with consistent titles - is to look at a List view of notes and sort by title or note size. If you get two items the same… (with a lot of notes you can copy the same list into a spreadsheet and automatically highlight duplications).

I do clean up after myself when looking at search results. I don’t waste time dedicating a specific hour to it every week.

If you feel differently, or have different needs, then try raising a feature request in the discussion forums - Evernote Feature Requests [ https://discussion.evernote.com/forum/304-evernote-feature-requests/ ] - if it gets enough votes, they’ll have another look.