CPD23 Thing 9 – From ‘ugh’ to ‘ah’ in an afternoon through Evernote

The Moral Of The Story part 1…(!)

This is a graphic tale of Evernote. Starting in unconvinced mode, going through very definite impatience and dislike, and ending up finding it incredibly useful in the space of about three hours.

‘Unconvinced’

I’m still running behind CPD23-wise despite heraculean catch-up mode last week, on the good side this means I can bring up lots of other folks’ blogs and see what they thought as part of exploring things.  Most of what I looked at I was less than convinced by. However, there was one by The Travelin’ Librarian about using it for recipes which seemed a useful application for that person, and I liked joeyanne’s tweet about using it to bring together possible things to do on holiday. These made me think the Web Clipper at least had possibilities if I could figure out what for.

Impatience and dislike

So this afternoon (Saturday) I somewhat dutifully set about creating yet more accounts, usernames, passwords, downloading things (took me ages to figure out Web Clipper downloaded automatically if you’re on IE, kept trying to get elephants appearing on the browser which still don’t for all it works!), watching vid’s and reading get started material, sync’ing Evernote on pc and Android phone… Still with no idea what on earth I could actually usefully use it for. By this point as ‘woman with the cold’ not feeling that great to start with I was feeling royally hacked off and sighing mightily.

Coughs – it’s incredibly useful actually…

I was thinking about the recipes use and the holidays one and trying to think of what a current equivalent for me would be and it suddenly struck me.  Which is why I have two busy NoteBooks now. I’m essentially using it as a database application but for edited and annotated notes of web page extracts mostly.  So one is lots of different courses I fancy (all ancient history, culture and languages) from four different institutions, all nicely tagged by institution, mode, term, subjects. It’s wonderful, I can bring up my precise options by tags for, say, Tuesday, or evenings, or Akaddian even, on a search I can see precisely what dates day courses are or search on lecturer... I can bring up all the booking details…  All my options and logistics in the one place and searchable. The second NoteBook is ancient history exhibitions and details of venues, travel options etc, I want to get to. All of these I can easily share very quickly with friends for jointly planned visits or course suggestions. It definitely beats lots of very general bookmarks to PDF prospectuses and long emails about see page x and the course is.... I can see a third NoteBook for holidays getting added very shortly…

What else could it be used for?

Okay, I haven’t used it for a work purpose yet. But gradually I’m starting to think of a few. I suspect it might be useful for keeping training courses and suggestions together for instance. Or for new acquisition possibilities by subject.

I like the idea of it being able to read images from photo’s and handwriting, so I’ll probably experiment with that. I’m wondering for example if I took images of completed training attendance sheets for different training events and changed the way I currently do them, could I bring up from that precisely who has attended what and when? There’s training sessions next week so I’m going to see if it would work.

I’m also thinking linking to Twitter is potentially useful, to be able to send tweets direct into Evernote, so I’ve set that up but not tried it with anything yet.

The Moral Of The Story part 2…

Is that it’s useful to look at both sides (blogs on all angles because it’s different perspectives) but it comes down to is it personally something useful to you, and sometimes you really have to dig into something a bit to know, things can occur with exploration that weren’t initially obvious.