At last I'm getting the hang of Evernote

I've had Evernote on my computer for several years, but haven't used it much until now.

It came on one of those discs that come stuck to the front of computer magazines, and I installed it, and when I read the description of how it worked I thought it must be useful, but I somehow never managed to do much more than write a few test notes. The description made it sound as though it must be useful, but I could never get the hang of using it.

But when, on genealogy forums, people asked, as they do surprisingly often, what you do with all the notes scribbled on bits of paper, I would sometimes suggest that they have a look at Evernote. Though I didn't use it much myself, it sounded as though it could be useful.

As recently a couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article on that topic, Genealogy notes and news: Managing research data: hastily scribbled ideas, scraps of paper and sticky notes, and I forgot to mention Evernote.

But after writing the article, I thought I must really make an effort to get to grips with Evernote, and so I sar down with the book, and re-read it. And then sat down in front of the computer with it, and tried out everything. It worked.

So what is Evernote?

Do you know Microsoft OneNote?

It's a program that comes with Microsoft Office, but none of the books you can buy about using MS Office tell you how to use it (sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when softwere came with actual documentation). I couldn't even get a third-party book for using OneNote. But my daughter who is studying for a doctorate in Greece discovered it, and said it was very useful for taking notes.

Well Evernote is something like that, but it's free. And I found a book about it.

My Evernote by Katherine Murray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've read the book a couple of times, and some parts several times, and I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it now.

One of the useful things about Evernote is that it synchronises across all devices. That means that I can have a copy on my desktop computer, my cell phone and my laptop computer, and I can enter and access data in all three places. And you can also access it on the Web, as the Evernote server is where all the synchronisation takes place. And if that isn't enough, you can send entries to it by e-mail, or even by tweeting from Twitter.

So what does it do for genealogists who want to know what to do with all those notes scribbled on scraps of paper, and on paper napkins and the like?

My method, described in my other post, is to make notes in a text database program, which means that even if I lose the original scrap of paper, I can find the information again, which makes it much more useful. But some people, like this blogger, don't like retyping, Marian's Roots and Rambles: Taming all that Information! - Part 1:

Ok, I know some of you are thinking, how does she get those handwritten transcriptions into the computer?!! Most of the time, unless there is a very good reason, I will scan my original notes and capture them as a pdf or jpg. That way I can save time by not retyping them and I don't have to worry about introducing further errors.

But if you have a zillion pdf and jpeg files, how do you find them again? She does it by typing long descriptive file names. But how much easier to scan them directly into Evernote (Yes We Scan!) And Evernote claims to be able to read and search for text in graphic files (I haven't tried that yet).

Evernote lets you have up to 250 different notebooks (one for genealogy, one for recipes, one for gardening, one for your PhD notes etc.) And its free. If you really need more, there's a premium version you can pay for.

Evernote also lets you clip web pages -- either the whole page, or a particular article, or selected text. It even advises you on which way to do it, but you don't have to take the advice if you don't want to.

And what if you really like working with pieces of paper? I know some researchers do like that. Well Evernote can print out your notes for you, on 3x5" cards, if that's what you want, so that you can shuffle them and spread them out on the dining-room table.

So why not go to www.evernote.com and give it a try? There's nothing to lose, and it could solve your filing problem.

What about Microsoft OneNote?

Well Evernote can import that too.


View all my reviews

Update

I've just discovered that some other bloggers are also discussing the genealogical uses of Evernote, so check for more tims and resources here UpFront with NGS: Evernote -- is it part of your genealogical arsenal? Should it be?

Managing research data: hastily scribbled ideas, scraps of paper and sticky notes

What do I do with the small scraps of paper, hastily scribbled ideas and the sticky notes plastered everywhere? This article suggests scanning them with long file names: What do I do with the small scraps of paper, hastily scribbled ideas and the sticky notes plastered everywhere! | Genealogy Circle, and quotes another article, which you can find here.

Most of the time, unless there is a very good reason, I will scan my original notes and capture them as a pdf or jpg. That way I can save time by not retyping them and I don’t have to worry about introducing further errors.

That's all very well, but how do you find them again?

I can think of at least two ways to deal with it that may be better.

One is to use a program like Evernote,which can store (and automatically back up) all that stuff in a single file, or series of linked files (called "notebooks"). This saves having to fiddle your way through lots of long file names.
Something similar to Evernote is Microsoft OneNote, which comes with Microsoft Office. Unfortunately it is poorly documented, and while you can buy third-party books that tell you how to use the other components of MS Office, the ones I've seen devote only one or two uninformative pages to OneNote. Evernote can import stuff from OneNote as well. And Evernote is free, though you can get a paid version that will do a bit more.

Another way of dealing with small scraps of paper and hastily scribbled ideas is to write them out in a text database program like askSam (where you can also store a scanned copy, if you like).

This is a screenshot of the askSam for DOS version of my note storing template:

Sorry if it's a bit distorted, but the "new and improved" Blogger editor makes it extraordinarily difficult to get graphics right and readable.

The Windows version of askSam looks slightly different, but the principle is the same. I write the contents of the note in the Note[ field, and askSam will let me produce a report that will sort on any of the fields.

And having written it there, and backed it up, I throw the sticky note away.

You don't need those things cluttering up your life, with dirt and bits of hair adhering to the sticky bits. At least I don't need them. 

One can use this for any kind of sticky notes, scraps of paper, stuff written in your Moleskine notebook/diary, or on a cigarette packet or paper napkin. I use keywords like "famhist" or "genealogy" to select the genealogy ones. askSam will search, by default, in every field, though you  can also tell it to do more selective searches. But with such notes typing "Hayes genealogy", for example, will bring up all notes containing those two words.

In this post I'm talking about fairly short notes that occupy no more than one sheet or scrap of paper. Multi-page documents are a bit different, and with those I don't usually throw away the original, but I file them, and use computer programs to keep track of where I put them. If you want to know more about that, see my article on Keeping track of paper files.

But if you really can't face the prospect of retyping all those notes, there's also Evernote. See my review here.

Can Clooz replace the Research Data Filer to keep track of paper files?

For a long time now (about 20 years) I have been using the Research Data Filer program to keep track of paper files in my genealogical research.

As you might guess, a 20 year-old-computer program is getting close to retirement age, ready to hand over to a younger and more vigorous successor, and take a well-earned rest.

The trouble is that there is no successor anywhere in sight. There is no program that I know of that can do what the Research Data Filer (RDF) did (and for me, still does).

In 38 years of genealogical research one accumulares a lot of paper -- notes, letters, family trees sent by other people, notes from books and other published sources. How do you keep track of this stuff? How do you remember where you put that note or letter?

Using the ResearchData Filer (RDF) you give every document a number, and you file the documents in numerical order, like this:

There is no need to file them in any order but numerical, in the order in which they are filed (the KISS principle -- Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Then you use the Research Data Filer to write a description of each document, like this:

(Sorry that the reduced functionality of Blogger makes the screenshot small and hard to read - that's one of the reasons I've moved my other blogs to Wordpress)

If you look hard you can see that item 3, DOC 00003 is a printed book. No, I did not put the printed book in the file. What I put in the file was a piece of paper with biblographgical information about the book, and extracts of relevant information from it. When I want to see what I put in those notes again, and want to remember where I put them, RDF tells me that it is filed as Document 3, which I filed between Document 2 and Document 4. Simple, isn't it?

If I'm not sure which document has the relevant information, I can search the document descriptions. RDF has a "focus" capability. I can focus on all document descriptions that contain the word "death", for example, and then I can focus again on only those that contain the word "Beningfield"

But that's not all.

In addition to the "Document" file, RDF also has a "Data" file, which indexes the data within documents. Because we're doing genealogy, we're interested in people, and that's what it indexes.

That screen shows a "focus" search on Id 14952, which happens to be the RIN of Adam Cottam in my main fata file. It shows references to one document on this screen, but could also show references to him in many documents. The fields shown are Name, Sex, ID, Event, Event Date, Event Place, Relations, Ids of Relations, Comments, and of course the Document number.  And one can sort the results of a "focus" by name, Id, date, place or relations, and print them out, or save them to another file.

There's more about RDF and how tt helps me to keep track of my paper files here.

RDF used to come with early editions of PAF, the Personal Ancestral File program distributed by the Church of Jesus Chrtist of Latter-Day Saints. PAF itself has been updated to a Windows version, but RDF hasn't. It is more difficult to use in Windows, because most Windows printers won't print output from DOS programs directly, and you have to resort to clumsy workarounds that take longer.

Also, RDF was designed in the days when most genealogists who used computers had computers with 360k floppy disks and no hard disks at all, so one of the important design considerations was to take up as little disk space as possible. My GENERAL.DAT file is about 1,2 Megabytes, which would be reaching the limits of a high-density floppy disk of the late 1980s.

Nowdays, with hard disk capacities being measured in terabytes rather than kilobytes, it would be nice to have an updated version that would give a little more room for additional information.

And there's the rub, because there isn't an updated version. RDF was designed in 1989 or earlier. But it still hasn't been surpassed. I know of no other program that can do what it does, as well as it does it. I can think of lots of ways in which it could be improved, but it still does what it does better than any other program out there.

  I've looked at some other programs that I thought might be possible replacements. There were Genota and Genforms being developed by Dennis Allsopp in Australia, which didn't do quite the same thing, and there was Clooz. I bought Clooz 2.0 to test as a possible replacement, but found it too clunky and awkward to use, and entering information was too time-consuming.

Clooz 3 is now available -- an updating and streamlining of Clooz 2. But they are now working on Clooz 4.0, which will be a complete redesign and rewiting of Clooz 3 from the ground up, rather than a mere tweak. So I'm now hoping that, whatever else it includes, it will include the functionality and capability of RDF, enhanced, rather than diminished.

Yes, you could keep the information in RDF .DOC and .DAT files in a spreadsheet, but most spreadsheets still can't handle dates before 1900, nor can they handle partial or fuzzy dates like "ABT May 1832" or "AFT Sep 1856".

I wish I knew who wrote RDF. It was a work of genius, making the most of the capabilities of computers of its time. If it were updated to make use of today's computers, it would be very powerful indeed.