While I take most of my lecture notes in typed text (I type faster than I write), having the flexibility to take hand written notes is great for classes like physics where diagrams are frequent, and lots of other situations as well.
If you like to take handwritten notes, you’d be hard pressed to find a better combination than a tablet PC and Evernote. As you can see above, I searched for counter†and Evernote recognized that word in my hand-written notes. You can create image notes by dragging images into Evernote on your desktop or by taking a snapshot with your phone and the Evernote application.Įvernote applies equally great text recognition to ink notes as well.
Now I can simply search for business hours†in Evernote and the image is right there to provide me with all of the info that I need. I frequently find myself at the post office and to be sure I know what times that the post office is open, I merely snapped a picture of the hours sign on the door - instead of taking the time to write it down somewhere. One of the uses that I find most applicable for image notes is taking pictures of informational posters and hour placards at businesses. Evernote employs some great visual text recognition which means you can snap an image that has some sort of text in it and Evernote will scan the image for text and make that text searchable. Image notes are probably my favorite type because they are so handy. Your voice note will sync to your Evernote account (just like all other note types) and become available to listen to when you need it from any device that you are running Evernote on (even from the web interface.) And like all Evernote notes, you can title and tag notes to make them easy to find later (Evernote will even record geographically where the note was taken if you have an appropriately equipped phone) Hit the record button and record yourself talking or perhaps a lecture or a meeting. Voice notes are about as simple as they sound and can be created on your mobile device thanks to Evernote’s cross-platform availability. If you don’t want to retype documents that are already saved on your computer, you can drag files like PDFs or Word files into an Evernote note and then title/tag/categorize them to organize them with the rest of your notes. Keyboard shortcuts are really handy the ones that I use most frequently are ctrl+shift+B to start a new bulleted list and ctrl+M to indent into a new subsection. When I’m done, all of the text that I’ve written becomes searchable, so when I got to study I can quickly find all of the notes I’ve taken on a specific topic. When I’m in class I use a simple bullet list to keep track of lectures.
The majority of my notes are taken as text notes. Just hit the New Note (ctrl+N) button and you are ready to start typing. Text note creation will be very familiar to anyone who has used a simple word processor.
Evernote supports the following types of notes: The foundation of this flexibility comes from the variety of note types that one has to choose from. You might be able to sort papers into a real filing cabinet, but with Evernote you can do that and so much more. What makes Evernote perfect as a digital filing cabinet is that digital information storage has a lot of flexibility over the old school real life filing cabinet.
If you missed it, see Why I love Evernote (Part 1) Cross-Platform AvailabilityĬontinuing my series on Evernote, we’ll be looking at using Evernote as a digital filing cabinet.