5 Tips To Making The Most Out of Evernote
Evernote is a magnificent tool that lets you keep track of almost anything and everything that could be presented as digital information. Yes, it makes life a lot easier if you have a virtual assistant do things for you; but, that’s only possible when you know how to use it. Don’t get lost in the “tech-maze” of Evernote – these five tips will help you use it best:
1. You Need To Know The Shortcuts: Shortcuts will help you create a new note without you having to leave your current application. For instance, if you are on Mac OS X, you can use the shortcut Cmd-Ctrl-N to create a new note without leaving the application you happen to be using. In the case of Windows, the shortcut would be Ctrl-Alt-N.
If you want to search for something that’s inside Evernote, a quick Shift- Win-F would pull up Evernote to the foreground and let you search anything you want immediately. In the case of Mac, the shortcut’s going to be Cmd-Ctrl-E.
A full list of Mac and Windows shortcuts are just a Google search away – learn them and you can begin using Evernote like a pro.
2. Use It As Your Second Address Book: Of course you got your phone address book to work as your contact manager and you can definitely sync that with your computer to use it more efficiently, but there are people out there you touch base with far less frequently, right?
Use Evernote to keep your address book clutter free and keep track of conversations with your PR people, your potential clients or just people you don’t converse with frequently.
How to do that? Tag your messages in your contacts folder with keywords that would help you remember contexts later on – simple!
You could also scan business cards and sync them into Evernote. It’ll use character recognition to identify your contacts so you can find someone just through their business cards.
3. Use The Favorites Bar: If you have something that you need to pull up pretty often like a sales performance sheet, a rate chart or anything similar, you could just create a note and add it to the Evernote favorites bar in your browser. This feature really makes this easier. However, there’s one caveat – this is available only to Windows and Mac 10.7 or later users – the earlier versions of Mac don’t gel with this feature for some unknown reason.
4. Choose Local Notebook: Worried about going over quota because you have large files? Don’t worry. You can still use Evernote – you just need to create a local folder for the application that won’t be synced
Choose the “Local Notebook” option instead of “Synchronized Notebook” option when creating the new folder and you won’t overshoot your quota. However, this feature is not available with the Web Service version of Evernote.
5. Share your Notebooks: This feature is widely underutilized, but if used could save you the trouble of sending over information repeatedly to those whom you want to share it with. Depending on your platform, you could easily share folders with the rest of the world and even allow them to modify information at the click of a button – without you having to send over the same stuff repeatedly to different users. Platform based information on how to do that is available on the Evernote blog.
The above five tips are definitely going to make you like Evernote more and use it to your advantage.