< Evernote Video Training Library

It's back to Evernote basics during this Untethered with Evernote Hangout on Air. Learn key skills such as creating notebooks and stacks, getting started with the Evernote Web Clipper, Evernote's new work chat feature, the basics of sharing and publishing notebooks, image annotation, searching, and how to digitize your data so it can be centralized in Evernote. And, attention PC users, this webinar demonstrates important account settings for the Evernote PC client.

Video Highlights

Original Air Date: January 2015
Platform Demo: Evernote for Windows App

[5:59] Basic building blocks for Evernote notes
[8:19] Structuring & sharing Evernote notebooks
[12:00] Evernote stacks
[13:26] Naming Conventions: Easy sorting & searching
[15:44] Tags: Keywords for Your Notes
[22:21] Use case demo: Starting your brand new Evernote account
[25:04] Configuring your account: Default notebook
[27:24] Creating new Evernote notebooks and stacks
[32:47] Your unique Evernote email address
[36:06] Using Evernote web clipper
[41:23] Annotating an image in Evernote
[43:21] Searching within Evernote
[48:08] Getting Your Paper into Evernote: Photos from your device, scanning and new tool: Scannable
[54:32] Sharing & Collaborating notes and notebooks
[58:51] Evernote work chat 

Transcript

Good morning and welcome to our first hangout on air for 2015. You are are watching the Get Untethered Hangout on Air and I’m Stacey Harmon. I'm here with the lovely Kristi Willis, my co-author for Untethered with Evernote: Tips and Workflows for Independent Entrepreneurs. Thank you for joining us.

We’ve got a couple of new things in 2015. You might have notices a new look on our art on our home page for this. I have a new platform to demo for you. I now have a PC and we're gonna be giving you both perspectives in 2015. Today is my first Hangout on Air that uses the PC verses my Mac. Mac is still my primary platform. I think some of you might benefit from seeing the interface on the PC so I’m going to bring that to you as well. I have a lovely little Android device now as well. So we've got all our platforms covered and we have another thing, we’re going to have our first guest this year so you'll get more information on that during Kristi's section a little bit later.

We welcome you, we are here to talk today about starting fresh with Evernote and we wanted to ring in the New Year by going back to basics and address the fundamentals and core skills that really allow you to utilize and effectively use Evernote in your business and work life. And Evernote is constantly evolving so there are some new fundamentals so we’re going to be covering a couple of basics as well as giving you instructions on the new core skills that will really fuel your adoption of Evernote and as is our style, we are going to be illustrating the elements through case studies. Each of us is going to use a case study that is going to act as homework for you to kind of get started as we move forward with our hangouts in the New Year, which are once a month.

Just quickly, a little bit of background. Kristi and I co-authored Untethered with Evernote which is available on GetUntethered.com. It is also one of three books available in the Evernote Market so you could certainly get directly from Evernote if you are interested.  We are both Evernote Business Certified Consultants which is a designated expert in the Evernote Business Platform and is a certification process designating us as experts in the business tier of service. We are also both Evernote ambassadors which is a group of sixty power users that are located all across the globe and are passionate power users with specific use cases. We love that role and needless to say are Evernote geeks.  We are based in Austin, TX and that is where we are coming to you from today. 

Today’s topic as I mentioned is going to be Evernote core skills and starting fresh and let me go ahead and share my screen and hand it over to Kristi to tell you how the hangout is going to work, give you some background information, and we’re going to do some screen sharing today and a live demo as well so that …  

Some other things I mentioned, you can reach us on Twitter @staceyharmon and @kristifarm2tbl which is a great place to ask questions - use the hashtag #getuntethered to make sure we are seeing your question. We also have a playlist of our prior Hangouts on Air on YouTube where you can rematch the sessions that we did last year. and watch on-demand. these are recorded  and you an watch on-demand at any time at the Get Untethered YouTube channel. You can see the sessions we did last year and watch them as you go along. We also invite you to join our GetUntethered community in the many channels including Facebook which as over 500 members talking about their latest Evernote questions and Google+, YouTube, and Twitter and obviously on the web. And, as I mentioned, you can get the book on the website or the Evernote Market in a variety of formats. I’m going to pass it over to Kristi so that she can get started. 

Thanks and just as a point of clarification, I’m an Evernote nerd, not an Evernote geek... but yes, we love Evernote and everything that you can do with it. So, I’m going to take you through the basics if you are newer to Evernote and these are some of the things you need to know as you are setting up your system. I’m first going to go over the basic building blocks that you use with everything that you create, so your notes, notebooks, stacks, naming conventions and tags. These were all taken with the Mac, but a similar functionally works on the PC, it just might look a little different if you are working with the PC. So Evernote is organized around notes and if you think about it like a modern workspace, these are digital notes where we used to have stacks of paper stack up now we have digital notes and that’s the way that Evernote is organized. With every note that create, I’m going to choose a title for that note, which is important because I’m going to use that to search it later. I can add photos, I can add audio notes, I use that personally a lot when I’m writing and interviewing people, I can attach files so I have all different types of information stored inside the notes that are not just text, but I can also have a checklist, bullet lists, tables, you name it. 

The third choice I wanna make with every note is where I'm going to store it and that's my notebook and with every installation at Evernote there's a default notebook that is created for you but then you can create however many notebooks that you want. I wanna pick the notebook just like I would with a paper note, I’m going to pick where I’m going to store that. In Evernote I would do that by notebook. So that's how that looks on the screen for my desktop but now this is what it looks like on my iPhone or my iPad, again same three choices. What do I wanna call the note, where do I wanna put it and what kind of content do I wanna put inside it. 

Those are my basic building blocks. So within those notes I’m going to choose where to store it and again by default we're gonna have one notebook; and you could, some people do, just put everything in one notebook but on that there are a variety of reasons that you might want to create more than one notebook. If you read our book or watched any of the previous hangouts, you may know Stacey likes a lot of notebooks while I have a more minimal notebook structure. Although Stacey now we're talking about the longer we work together I've created more notebooks and she's using more tags, so I think were rubbing off on each other.

But one of the reasons I would choose to create a notebook is that it’s a great way to keep things together, maybe I just have too much in one notebook and I need to break it up, and it makes it easy to share information with others. I can share an entire notebook or I can select which notebooks are available offline. So I frequently work on my iPad or my phone offline, if you’re a premium user, you can choose which notebooks are available to you. For example, in my recent blog post on our GetUntethered blog I talk about studying for the sommelier exams, those certified specialist in wine exams. I do that at the gym where I don't have WiFi, and so I've made that notebook that contains all of my study notes available offline so that I can access those no matter where I am. That's been a great best practice as well. That’s how I would choose to create notebooks. Do I need it available offline? Do I need to share that information with someone else? Or do I just need to segregate it a little bit and have a different grouping for it? That's when I would choose to use a notebook.

When you create notebooks for sharing, that’s one of the things you would want to think about. For example, Lillian, who is running in the background of this hangout course today- our production manager - we are in the process of writing a cookbook. Which is an example I’ll use a couple times today. We have multiple notebooks for that cookbook. One of them the internal a project organization notes that we're using and that notebook is shared with three people: Lillian and I have access to it and then we also share it with our photographer but that's part of my business. We’ve chosen to share it with just a few people. 

We have a different notebook for our recipes which we will be sharing with a lot more people and we will actually be sharing some are with a few people that whole notebook publicly and so for that when we needed it to be a personal notebook that we could share with anyone. You can tell that one is a business notebook and one is a personal notebook because the business notebook has that little on building icon over to the left. That tells me a Business Notebook. The icon that shows the people told me that both these notebooks are shared. So different people have access to both those but one is stored with my Evernote business installation, and one is part of my personal Evernote installation, through which I have an Evernote premium account.

Both share notebooks but shared in a different way and created in a different way because different people needed access. Over time you may have a number of notebooks and you can organize your notebooks into stacks. We think of stacked like shelves. If you think of your notebooks like books and your stacks like shelves… I organize my books or group them together by topic or area where I'd want to be able to find it quickly. That's what the stacks do for you. This is a snapshot of my stack and you can see that I group six of my finance notebooks together. I have some personal notebooks grouped together in my Kristi stack.

I have our business notebooks from like KW Solutions Group in a stack. I have a separate stack with my clients. I like to travel, so I have a travel stack. Each of those is basically a different shelf for my Evernote notebooks. It's how I like to organize my notebooks. Stacks are personal, so even if you have an Evernote business installation, other people don't see your stacks. For example, Lillian gets to organize her Evernote business notebooks however she wants to. My stacks don’t get forced on her. She gets to put the notebooks together and whatever grouping wants. It's nice that you get to say, “I like all these notebooks on one shelf for one sack.” And Lillian can say “you know I really think about it differently this way.” Everybody gets to have their own stacks which is great.

So we talked about notes, notebooks and stacks, which are the basic building blocks of Evernote organization. There are other couple other key considerations as you're using and creating notes and trying to find things. One is naming conventions. How you name your notebooks and how you name your notes place apart and how easily you can find them how they sort together and the search techniques that you can use. For example, here we are back to my wine study notes. For each different topic I have a note and what I've done it's I’ve created a naming convention for those notes. I put the name of the country and underscore in the region and then in the title I put whatever the question or the topic is and then inside the note I put the answer or the information that I need to remember.

The great thing about using this naming convention is I can sort that notebook alphabetically and all my France champagne notes will come up together; all my France, burgundy notes will sort together and that makes it easy for me to study. I also could search for France_Champagne: and it will pull all those notes up together and I don't have to worry about what else is in the notebook. Using those naming conventions both for notebooks and for notes makes it too easy for you to group similar topics together. For example for the cookbook, all the notes for the cookbook have the same prefix at the beginning and then whatever the detailed topic.

We used something similar when we were writing the Untethered with Evernote book. Using those standard naming conventions just helps you organize your system a little bit; there is no right way or one way to do it, its whatever works best for you and your system. Think about how can I make it easier for me to find things by using a prefix or specific naming convention. Lillian and I use naming conventions for all kinds of things including receipts or our weekly meeting.

Another idea to use when you're creating notes is something called tags. Tags are like keywords for your notes. There are some people that really love tags and use them heavily, and some people use them less often. The nice thing about tags is that I place a tag in a note, then I can search by that tag, and it will find any item that has that tag from whatever notebook it is stored in.

For example you can see that I have “best practices” here; or you can see have one called balance ball that's my fitness notes. Account info is a perfect one; if I have information about an account with the company or for example their social media accounts for my company, I put account info on those notes (you can see there are 33 of them). It doesn't matter what notebook they end up in, I can search by account info and all those notes will come up. They're like keywords for your notes. 

As a writer I have a different story ideas I wanna pitch and those can be stored in a variety of different notebooks. I store it in a notebook for a certain magazine that I want to pitch it for, it might be in the notebook for my blog… but i wanna be able to pull up the story ideas once a month and put together my pitches for this month and the things I'm gonna post this month and so I use that story ideas tag as away a to pull notes from across the notebooks. That may be something that we use initially or maybe something that you work up to you but again those tags allow you to add a keyword that might not otherwise appear in the note and allow you to pull for that keyword across notebooks. That is a really helpful way to be able to use those things depending on how you're organizing your system.

Here's a great example of how you can pull naming conventions and tags together. This is an example from our cookbook recipes notebook. We have been using naming conventions at the beginning of each note name to tell us what stage it is in the development process. If it is still being developed, is it ready to be tested, those that need to be revised. We use that naming convention; again, I love that with the naming convention I can sort that note and get all the things that need to be tested together, all the things that need to be revised rise together… it's been really helpful for that quick cue of where we are with that recipe. We've been using tags differently within that notebook. The cookbook is going to be organized by season, so we have each season tagged to that note and then we also have been using the photo tag so that we know which notes are scheduled for a photo shoot.

That has been really helpful because a few times we need to pull quickly all the recipes that are still up, or that are going to be scheduled for a photo shoot. This has been helpful in that place again great example of how you combine that naming convention and tags. Just a quick overview of some of the building blocks in Evernote: notes, notebooks, stacks, tags, naming conventions and how you can use them together.

[Stacey] Those really are the fundamentals that you need in ordered to succeed with your Evernote organization. The book is structured so that in chapter 3 we talk about all these core skills that Kristi just outlined and then we expand upon those. Then we use about 15 workflows in the book that showed you how we deploy those particular skills.

[Question] What’s the purpose of the underscore?

[Kristi] When you search, you can type in the keywords and it would pull anything on that had France “space” champagne. Champagne and France were actually mentioned in a lot of the notes. By having it be France_Champaign, it severely limits the note that it could be in. I do that because I needed a separate phrase as opposed to two separate words. I can achieve the same thing by asking a more advanced search in using some search logic. You can actually get pretty creative with the searches. We talked about that in a previous hangout. I’m a little lazy, so I use France_Champaign to find what I’m looking for.

[Stacey] It's actually a really good nuance that Kristi is exploiting. It’s a good power tip. I am gonna go ahead and move into the live demo portion and then I’ll move into my prepared slides. What I want to show you is something that we get some feedback on, is that when you're looking at Kristi and my accounts in Evernote you're really looking at what I like to call a seasoned account. If you look at my account it’s got 13,000 notes in it, a lot of people are getting started with Evernote can’t necessarily identify with that. Your account doesn't look the same so what I wanted to do was start a brand new account, make it a little bit more parallel to what newer users really are experiencing and really get into some of those core skills that Kristi just introduced you to as well as some of the key things that you need to be able to do in order to execute workflows that we’re gonna show you.

I’m going to demo this with something that everybody has to do: pay taxes. Both Kristi and I use Evernote to manage and support our bookkeeping and tax paying processes and we want to illustrate some of those skills using this workflow. It is a workflow we detail out significantly in the book, it’s also one that we’re going to talk in much more detail in next month's hangout. And we’re going to have a guest speaker as well that lays out his format and really compare and contrast how the three of us use it.

When you first get a new Evernote account, most users start with the free version and hold on to it for a very long time. First, in your account, you will have the left sidebar here, the middle panel, and the right pane as well as your welcome to Evernote note. Some of you probably have gotten involved and figured out that you can write checklists and you can have to-do’s and you have different things that you want to get done. Maybe you’ve taken notes at conferences, but it's time to start building notebooks and stacks.

There's a couple things that I want you talk about in terms of configuring your account. Kristi had mentioned that there's a default notebook, depending on the platform it may just be named “first notebook” or depending on the version you have it may be different. If you have a free or premium account it will generally be called something like First Notebook or Stacey Harmon’s Personal Notebook or Stacey Harmon’s business Notebook.

We recommend renaming this immediately, and I simply am right clicking on it and using term Inbox and preceded it with a dot. This is the naming convention much like Kristi just introduced that allows us to force that default notebook always at the top. This alone will really help you to understand where data is coming in to Evernote and Kristi's gonna show you the importance of digitizing everything that you have and centralizing it into Evernote and the simple renaming of your default Notebook will help get your arms around how to centralize and process your notes. 

[Kristi] You might just mention that the default notebook is, and there are lots of different ways to get things into Evernote, Stacey is going to show you a bunch of them… Some let you pick what notebook is default and some don’t. Having your default notebook called Inbox, it gives you that ability to say this is some place I go to process like an inbox so that when notes are sent in there you can move them to their proper place. It's kinda that inbox mentality and we both use that.

[Stacey] You can use the analogy there that would be like a wire basket on your desk that people can drop papers off in, that’s your default notebook. When you right click on the notebook in your account you can confirm that this is your default notebook; that's one way to know that and when in doubt if you can't find something go to your inbox that's likely were it is. The next thing is we want to quickly show you how to create new notebooks and stacks. Simply go to File>New Notebook, but there's multiple ways to do that. I’m going to use an archive example and call this my 2013 Taxes.

That simply creates it and say I wanted to create another one for 2013 receipts you can see here on the left that it created a new notebook and now there are two on the side. A common question is how do I create a stack; this skill will really help me moving forward. There are a couple of ways to do it, really it’s a drag and drop issue. I can simply take my notebook and drag and drop it over the other. You can see on a PC here renames it Notebook Stack. On the Mac it's going inherit the name of the top notebook. Then in both interfaces I can rename it by right-clicking and rename it. I will call this Tax Archive.

That is how you create a stack and then you can just drag-and-drop things into there. Now I went ahead and I created another stack called Bookkeeping and taxes and maybe I want to consider these the current or active versus my archive down here. This is where I would be keeping my current stuff like my 2015 receipts and 2014 tax documents that I'm compiling for CPA. Then I'll walk you through what this “raw scans” notebook is in one second but once the year is over and I complete something I can simply drag and drop my notebook into my tax archives. I can segregate my data this way. If this tax document is still an active project I can drop it into there so I'm able to organize and sort my notebooks through stacks in ways that work for me.

Alright so that is stack creation and notebook creation which should bring a lot of opportunities. Let's talk about how we can just move notes around. I could simply right click on this to delete it and it would move it into the trash. I can also move a note around by dragging and dropping. Now you can see in the Inbox I got to notes right here. I have other ways for moving notes around, too, you can see here in the right-hand panel at the top it tells me what notebook it’s in and if I want to move it right back into raw scans or one of these other receipts this simply click on it and it well reposition in the notebook.

I’m gonna show you a couple other quick set-ups in the setup elements that are very important. I'm gonna show you in the workflow every single account has a unique email address associated with it that is unique to your own account. On the PC the way you find this is you go to tools> account options and you can see here that there's an email account associated with my Evernote account. I’m going to copy this and save it has a new contact in whatever contacts system you use. I'm a Google Contacts person.

Whether you’re on Mac or PC, you're gonna want to access your unique email address through one of these two option. You can reference this in the recording as well as I have a blog post about it and we have a resource in the Untethered with Evernote guide on how to use this feature as well. That's how you find your email address.

That is your email address the next thing I wanna show you, and I showed you your default notebook, the third is the Web Clipper. I will illustrate this through this way. If I have an email that has arrived that I want to save… maybe it’s communication on a project, maybe it is a receipt like this that I got I can simply forward it to this contact I just saved in Evernote. I saved this as Evernote Demo which is that you contact that I just created and I hit send my message has been sent. 

Now I can close this, now when I go here into Evernote in my inbox and I sync- sync is save- this is the email I just had. Using that movement I can move this into my raw scans and that begins the process of moving that note around with that email contact. 

[Kristi] I love that. I talk about this in the blog post that we just posted yesterday. I really love that email address; I use that many times a day because email has just become such a burden on me that I'm being able to say this is something I wanna save for later. I’m gonna put it in Evernote because that's where I save things for later and get it out of my email has been just a real lifesaver for me.

[Stacey] Me, too. It’s a key element in me keeping Inbox 0 in my email management. So I manage my email and my email doesn’t manage me. And that email into Evernote is why. There's another thing to do and that’s install the Evernote Web Clipper. This is the Web Clipper. What you're gonna do is you’re gonna go to Evernote.com… and for whatever browser you have it's going to hopefully pull up the ability to install a browser extension evernote has created for whenever browser you use. We both use Chrome. It's the best browser for integration with Evernote. After you go through the process to install it, you will have this little elephant icon in the upper right hand corner. You will need to sign into it. You can see here it has a little red dot next to it that is because I need to sign in.

You simply will do a one-time sign in and that will integrate it. Now when you go to web sites it actually will allow you to clip or save whatever website you're looking at into your Evernote account. I’ll show you a more practical use case for this. If you go to GetUntethered.com. So on our blog, Kristi just published a post yesterday that talks about use cases for how she uses Evernote. This might be something that I have an interest in replicating. Now I hit this on the Web Clipper, you can see here it pulls up the Web Clipper and it’s going to reformat her article either as simplified or give me options. I can do a whole article, I can click the whole page. I tend to like simplified article for blog reading and say I think that Kristi’s articles is really helpful and I wanna look into Azendoo and I want to remember that. It changes my cursor color and I can actually highlight here then simply click save and you guessed it it's going to actually create a note in my default inbox.

It will pull that in and allow me to retain anything that I had seen on the web. So this is a really powerful way to collect information and organize it into Evernote. You can see it retained that highlighting that I did, as well. 

At GetUntethered.com if you guys sign up for our resources notebook… We go through this in the book but also the resources notebook which at the GetUntethered website under the resources tab, you can subscribe and get access to this list of notes. We actually have a very detailed tutorial on the Web Clipper and how you can configure it and how you can see the differences between the different versions that the Web Clipper has. It's a really great resource and that has an additional training. 

Let me move on to the next course skill set: annotating an image. With Evernote you can actually centralized your images here and Kristi is going to show you how you can get your receipts int here and such. On the PC, I can click and hover over any image. This is a picture of a receipt that I took right at the location and I can click annotate on the Mac it's located in the menu bar and what this is gonna do is it brings up some Skitch annotation functionality which actually allows us to edit our document. We can draw arrows or blur out sensitive information and other nifty features. You can see here now, if it were a business receipts I could simply type in here. There's also a real estate use case here, you can annotate maps or really any image you can get into Evernote… you can annotate. You can see here when I hit the close button it says “saving” and it’s actually refreshing and adding my annotation directly to the image that’s in my note. 

The last thing I wanna show you the core skill is actually finding what you're looking for. Evernote has the search box in the upper right hand corner doesn't matter what your interfaces your Mac or PC but you're gonna use the search box. Kristi and I did an entire hour-long webinar on last year thats on demand that talks about detailed search skills. This is just a high-level overview of how you can find and retrieve information. Evernote, even the free version, will scan the interior of even images that are in your notes. So if I type in “Serrano” and search the notes, it will find this receipt that I took a picture of. It will actually highlight my handwriting that’s appearing in an image that I had added to Evernote. If I’m looking at my statement there are results for that and I don’t know what this purchase was for $270.63… I can do a search for it and Evernote will retrieve that amount. It found that because my receipt was in Evernote.

You can search the interior contents. You can also look for, for example Azendoo which I know was in the clipped note, now it found it and filtered out my 12 notes just to this one note that we have.

My recommendation for your homework to really adopt Evernote particularly for your taxes and booking engine this year and him really all over and talk about in the next hang out is to create these four notebooks- create something called Raw Scans and Kristi is going to show you ways that you can get things into this Raw Scans notebook. One is forward and one is clip. You're going to be able to take pictures and add your documents in there. You can add anything you can add receipts you can take pictures, or emails that you forward on. You can write on here. Then the other thing is you can on sort these things into you know business receipts so that was a taxi receipts and that was maybe business.

That's the basic structure tend to segregate business and personal. Get those set up and I'm all moved back over to Kristi so she can give you the next phase, which are how to get your stuff in there.

[Kristi] So a couple things, as Stacey mentioned we are going to be talking about getting organized for your taxes next month, if you want to get a jump start on it before then we do talk about receipt management in the book Untethered with Evernote. We present two different ways to do it. Stacey and I have slightly different organizational methods that we use in part because we have different structures and she's working with a CPA and I am not. So you can see those examples in there. Again will build those out with someone else who has written a book specifically about using Evernote with taxes at next month's hangout. So if you're interested in that, we’ll really be digging deep but you can get a jump start on it by looking at a couple of different ways to organize with the book.

We also have a Google hangout on air we talk specifically about organizing receipts that is up on YouTube that you can check out as well. To build on our basic a little bit more the main thing for me with Evernote has been about just getting my information into Evernote. And what that's done for me it's given me that central repository where I can organize everything and be able to find the information that I want. So Evernote has become that digital workspace.

Stacey showed a couple different ways to get things into Evernote by emailing which I love I'll as well as clipping which is another great feature that I use often and I do use Chrome as my main browser but I also often use Safari and on Firefox. So I actually have the clipper installed for every browser that I use so that no matter which browser I'm on I'll be sure to get things into Evernote. The main thing is: get the information into Evernote. I want to show you just a couple more techniques that are specifically about getting paper into Evernote. So the first is using a photo from your mobile device.

So I use my iPhone all the time; I have what I consider that tyranny of little pieces of paper in my life which is what I call receipts… and I just need to get them into Evernote and out of my paper world. Using my camera to snapshot things as I have those expenses come up is fantastic because I don't have to worry about having to go to the scanner later. So Evernote has a great built-in scanner or photography where you can take a picture of a document or business card or even a Post-It Note and if you don’t want to use the built-in Evernote camera there are a number of third party tools that work well with Evernote for both the iPhone and the Andriod that will help you take great searchable digital images that will store in Evernote. That's the beauty of all this is that these are completely searchable. I'm not just taking a picture I’m taking a searchable picture and Stacey showed a great example that was “Serrano.”

Turning I camera on my phone or my iPad is my first line of defense and when I wanna get a piece of paper into Evernote. I also highly recommend having a scanner a and there are many that are Evernote compatible I have the small one on the right which is the Fujitsu ScanSnap that will allow me to scan directly into Evernote. I love the travel size of this. Stacey uses a Canon that she really likes and again we went through the details that those on in a previous blog posts in a previous hang out. The Big Daddy of all scanners for Evernote is that beautiful Fujitsu scanner on the left and I promised Lillian this last year but I promise we will get one.

The great thing about this scanner on the left and there's a beautiful video on the Evernote website but you can just dump stuff in that thing… it can be paper, business cards, receipts, but you just throw it all in that sheet feeder you hit the button and it starts figuring out and learning where you store that kind of information.

Having a scanner, particularly one that is Evernote compatible and you can these in the market place in the app center to be able to find the best scanner that will integrate with your Evernote system is really helpful. That's another great way to get things into Evernote.

Then a third tool, which is a new tool, is Scannable. Which is a new app that is iOS only right now. The reason they do iOS 1st that it’s only one device easier to update. I feel confident they'll have an Android in the not too distant future. The Scannable app is really fantastic because it allows me to just point to a piece of paper. You can see here, this is a menu that I went to tasting at a local restaurant for their new menu preview, and I want to get this into Evernote so that I have it for reference purposes when I write about this restaurant.

So I point the Scannable app at this menu and it starts figuring out where the paper is and captures it. It shows me what my image is going to look like and then from there I can choose where I'll store that scanned image. What I love about this versus just the camera app on Evernote is that I can very easily mail this or message this to somebody who is not an Evernote user or I can store it to my Evernote all in one place. I can email it to a colleague who didn't get to go and then I can store it in my Evernote notebooks. I love the ease of being able to do multiple things with this. The other thing is that if you have the Scannable app and you have that beautiful Fujitsu Evernote Scanner… you can start the scanner from the app and so in a business environment you can have multiple users using the same scanner but scanning to their Evernote installations without having to move where the scanner is attached.

Before Scannable you would have to scan everything into one Evernote installation or hook it up to a different computer and do things differently but there was a lot more involved in trying to get in it targeted to the right user. Now the Scannable app let’s you store things where you want. That's just come out and just learning all the possibilities with that but it's really great way to get the paper into Evernote. 

The other big thing to talk a little bit more about and we talked about creating the notes and getting them in there and organizing your system. But one of the main things with Evernote really be able to share easily and I'm this is one of my favorite things but I use Evernote quite a bit this year with other people. Some of my clients and colleagues use Evernote heavily and some don't. So sometimes I share by sharing a note; so you can take an individual note and share it out. On the Mac there's a share icon in the top right corner something similar for the PC and that would bring up this menu where I can choose how do you wanna share this. If I just choose share note its gonna bring up this work chat window where I can type in who I want to share with, what type of options to I want them to have. You can see by the icon over hear that it's going to share that note out to other folks.

So that is one way that I can share this with other Evernote users so that they will be able to work with that note. I can share it with one person or many people, and then type my message in at the bottom. I can also share email or out on my social channels here. Instead of using this share note option I did something different and I can command click on that notes and that gave me the option to either share note or go to more sharing where I could copy a public link that I can email to somebody or post somewhere.

I can also choose to share on the social channels or email to someone if I know someone  is not an Evernote user I might just email them the note instead which I'll do on occasion with my clients. I also can share notebooks. So Lillian and I use this so much to be able to collaborate together. You can see all the shared netbooks I have just in my company stack because they have that people icon. That’s how I know it shared out. 

I can share the notebooks with other people just so that they can see the information and view it or they can co-edit. As long as one of us is premium member we can both edit notes in that notebook. I can share via work chat or I can if I'm in Evernote business user I can publish notebooks to the business and that makes them available to anybody that I’ve given those rights to. Just a couple quick screenshots on that: I can share notebooks via Work Chat. Notice that I got a little different icon here so instead a it being a piece of paper I have or that notebook icon again I can address it to someone and choose what rights they have and send them a message.

I can also publish. If I'm using Evernote business I create notebooks and then I publish what access they have. For example we have a couple notebooks that I don't share with Lillian, sorry, but most I do. I create notebooks then published so that she has access to him as well. You can do that in the Evernote Web Client. So I went on to the web client and in the bottom left corner has my account information and I can go to the admin console. From there I can see the notebooks and how many people have access to them.

When I click on a notebook name it lets me manage the sharing, choose what permissions I want people to have, and also you can see for this notebook, I’ve invited my photographer that was not part of the business installation but we wanted her to have access to that as well. I can share it the business notebooks with people that are outside the business… for the business notebooks I can just published them and then anybody in the business has access to them.

A little bit different way when I'm working with business notebooks as well. The last thing I want to bring up and this is a feature that Evernote has recently added and I have enjoyed it quite a bit… is that whenever we're sharing information we can use Work Chat not just to share but also to update one another. You can see Lillian and Stacey and I have been work chatting as well as Lillian and I have been work chatting…I’ve been work chatting with a photographer.

These are all just a quick way to update. So over the weekend I was going to test one of the recipes Lillian had in the cookbook notebook and so I did a quick chat of hey is this up-to-date? Or “I don’t understand something…” and she chatted back to me but it allows us to have that whole conversation in Evernote where it gets stored with the note instead of us texting each other separately and then it not being part of the conversation around that note.

Don’t forget about our active conversations going on on our social channels. On our Get Untethered Facebook group. Our next month’s GetUntethered Hangout with our special guest I who has written a book about using Evernote to tame your taxes and so will be looking at his recommendations as well it's just me the highlight that how we personally organize. There isn't just one right way to organize your work so many get you a couple different perspectives and we're very excited to be a focusing on taxes.