Evernote: the free tool that keeps my notes in sync everywhere

14 Apr 2009 · Originally published in GP magazine, Apr 2009

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2009. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

Evernote is a multiplatform information manager with numerous ways of capturing information and clever search facilities for getting it back out again. It has saved me hours of time and made me more efficient. I use the free version, which has limits on which file types it works with and how much information it will store, though this has never been a problem for me.

I have it installed on my work PC, my iPhone and my home iMac, and it keeps them all in sync and up to date. Any information I store on one is almost instantly available on the others. There are versions for Windows Mobile and Android phones, plus you can access it from any web browser.

It will store all sorts of information including attachments, photos that you have taken, pictures, screenshots, web pages, handwritten notes and even voice recordings. As you save items you can tag them and say which “folder” to save them in to make it easy to find them again. It reads all documents, including handwritten ones and photos, so that you can then search on any text found.

For example, I used my iPhone to take a photo of a business card, and tagged it. Later it was easy to find, as I could search for the date the note was added, by the place the note was taken - as all photos automatically have their location added - by the tag I’d used, or by typing in their name or company, which it had read off their card.

I find Evernote particularly useful for saving documents such as agendas and all the latest guidance and policies that are produced with such regularity. I find this particularly useful for meetings I attend where I never used to have the agenda or minutes. Now when they arrive on my work PC I send them to Evernote and I can sit in the meeting with my laptop and find them without having to print them out or put them on a memory stick.

There are also some great tools for taking screenshots and for saving whole or parts of webpages that have made my random surfing across the web more productive.

There is far more to this tool than I could go over in a short review, so please check it out at www.evernote.com. It’s so good I might even buy the version that costs money!