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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Evernote: Jack of all trades
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Evernote: Jack of all trades

It helps to synchronize your notes but can do many other things too. Are you making full use of Evernote?

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NEW DELHI :

Evernote, a free app that lets you sync notes across different mobile devices and computers, now has more than 1.5 million users in India, according to the company. While the app started off simply as a way for people to synchronize their notes, users have been finding new uses almost from the start, in 2008. Over time, Evernote has added many new features and as a result, it remains one of the most popular applications on the app store.

While some people might prefer to use stand-alone apps—such as Dropbox for syncing, Pocket for Web clippings, or Paper by Fiftythree for handwritten notes—Evernote’s all-in-one approach makes it a powerful tool for managing digital presence.

With so many options though, it can be a little overwhelming at first, so if you’re getting started with Evernote—or even if you’re a long-time user who has just used it for notes—here are a few things to get you started. And if you want stand-alone options, we list our favourites.

Use Web clipper to save pages that will expire

Found a listing for a sale or a blog entry that you think might get deleted soon? Maybe you’re researching something and found a page with some essential information. A bookmark won’t always help because if the page expires, then the link isn’t going to load any more. The Clipper lets you save the page, with the text and pictures, so you can refer to the page any time you like.

Or you could use: Pocket, free on Android and iOS.

Pocket lets you clip stories and articles, and you can save them in a text-only view or as full Web pages. You can read them offline, and sync your reading list across multiple devices. This app also integrates with popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox, for easy clipping.

Make use of checklists

Aside from notes, the Evernote app lets you make checklists, which you can tick off as you complete the tasks. This can be useful when making your daily to-do list—especially because you can make a notebook with each day as a separate note, so you can quickly look at the work you’ve accomplished over time. You could also use it for your grocery list.

Or you could use: Clear, 55 on iOS; Koalcat’s Clear, free on Android.

Clear and Koalcat’s Clear are identical apps and super-simple to use—create lists with a single tap, use simple touch-screen gestures to add and remove entries, or mark them as done, and move things up and down in the priority list. The only drawback is that you can’t easily use it to check trends across lists.

Keep annotated pictures handy

Aside from text, you can also save pictures in Evernote, and annotate them with typed text or handwritten notes. This could be handy when shopping—for example, you could take pictures of designs and annotate that with sizes so that the salesman can help you more effectively. Or, if you’re looking for some obscure cables, then you could take a picture of the plug and write down the standard’s name on the side.

Or you could use: Evernote Skitch, free on iOS and Android.

Skitch does just one thing, but does it well—you can take pictures, add notes and annotations, and save or share the files quickly and easily. Tools like arrows, shapes and freehand drawing let you mark sections of text on a website, or point to the location in a map without difficulty.

Save searchable menus

Evernote has an optical character recognition (OCR) feature that is incredibly useful. It can turn handwritten text into machine-searchable words, so if you take notes in a meeting, instead of typing them, you could just take pictures of them. Another fun use of this feature is to take pictures of the home-delivery menus of nearby restaurants. So the next time you have a craving for a cheese, chicken, chilli and pineapple burger, you can just search for those words, to track down that one hole-in-the-wall café which makes it.

Or you could use: Dropbox, free on iOS and Android.

If you want your menus to be accessible no matter which device you’re sitting in front of, then Dropbox is a great tool for keeping all the files handy. You won’t be able to search for individual items in the menus, but you can add tags for things like cuisine, budget, or even how long deliveries take, and use that to find the menu you want.

Simplify research

If you’re working in research, then you’ll often get data from archives in the form of a CD, containing PDFs if you’re lucky, and Jpeg files if you’re not. While PDFs are searchable, it would require you to deal with them one file at a time, and with Jpegs you’re out of luck. Evernote lets you quickly organize all your research material, add tags to each file, annotate it, and search for key terms through your raw data in seconds, thanks to the OCR function. It also syncs with Dropbox, so you can keep your important files safe.

Or you could use: Google Docs, free on iOS and Android.

Google Docs includes an OCR function, so you can store and sort your files on the cloud using that as well. It’s accurate and has got access to document-editing features that are better than Evernote’s, but isn’t as easy to use for file management as the app is.

Start using third-party apps

Evernote syncs with third-party programs as well as your devices, which add a lot of power and flexibility to the app. The most powerful example is probably IFTTT (If This Then That, a free online automation tool). With IFTTT, you could set up things so that everytime someone tweets about a particular hashtag, for example, a notebook in Evernote gets updated. Or if you’re following a blog like Lifehacker—and love their food hacks—you could have each new article on the subject clipped to Evernote automatically, to read whenever you have time. It’s simple to set up, but incredibly powerful.

Or you could use: Third-party apps like IFTTT. The advantage of Evernote is that you need just a single login to handle many tasks, but with IFTTT automating things, you could link up Evernote with Dropbox, Google Reader, Pocket and other tools to get the same kind of results.

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Published: 07 Jan 2014, 08:03 PM IST
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