< Evernote Video Training Library
Evernote expert Stacey Harmon walks users through a step by step demonstration on how to properly configure the Evernote desktop client. This tutorial is what Stacey reviews with 100% of her Evernote consulting clients. Watching the video is like getting an hour of consulting for free and will set the stage for effective use of Evernote moving forward.
Video Highlights
The desktop version of Evernote is the most powerful of the Evernote applications. Users will learn what settings to adjust and why they should be configured in the way recommended. The tutorial is specific to the Mac desktop app with many of the lessons also transferrable to the Evernote PC app.
Original Air Date: November 2014
Platform Demo: Evernote for Mac
[10:15] Downloading Evernote
[12:15] "View" settings
[22:45] Interface "view" settings
[29:00] Default notebook
[32:00] Evernote preferences
[42:00] WebClipper set-up
[51:00] Installing Skitch
Transcript
Hello, I'm Stacey Harmon and welcome to this Evernote tutorial. I cover this material with every single private consulting client I work with and everybody has a question when they go through it. It just so happens that I'm in a position where I need to actually configure the settings for my personal Evernote desktop application so I thought "Why not record that and give a training about how to properly set up your Evernote account?" So that is the topic of this particular hangout on air. A couple of housekeeping items: This session is being recorded so you can view it later; or if you're live now and would like to ask questions you can do so in the question and answer area that's on the side. I can see those as we go along.
A little bit of my background. My name is Stacey Harmon, Principal of Harmon Enterprises. We do Evernote-centric workflow design, consultation and training. I am an Evernote Business Certified Consultant, as well as an Evernote Ambassador. I co-authored Untethered with Evernote: Tips and Workflows for Independent Entrepreneurs. It is available at the Evernote website as well as the Get Untethered website in both ebook and print version. I also spoke at the Evernote Conference in both 2013 and 2014. At the end of the session I'll be happy to give you the links or put them below in the recording so you can access all that information, but needless to say I love Evernote! I work in Evernote every single day. It has totally transformed my life.
One of the things that I find though is that in order to really benefit from the training that people - like me - do about these Evernote tips and tricks, is that you really have to have the software configured optimally to support the best productivity that you've got. So, that's really what we are going to go through today. I've got two screens here so if you see me look up it's because I'm looking at my Evernote account. I am going to share my Evernote screen with you so you can see what is going on and what I am talking about. So it's really going to be a live training - again, exactly what I go through with my clients. If you want to communicate with me either during or after this training Twitter is a great place to do that. My twitter handle is @StaceyHarmon and if you include the hashtag #GetUntethered it'll be a great way to connect and meet up with other people who are discussing these similar topics. And you can get to my website at HarmonEnterprises.com.
As I mentioned this is what I go through with every single one of my consulting clients. For some background information, what I want to clarify about how Evernote works is that your web client is really your account. So when you go to Evernote.com and you sign in to your Evernote account on the web you're really at the core where all your data lives. However, one the powerful things about Evernote is that they offer web channels or site clients for each device it's out there. For the Mac, PC, iPhone, Android, your tablet whether Surface or an iPad. They have pods of development teams that develop those applications that maximizes the best opportunities on that platform between the technology and Evernote.
So what I'm going to talk about today is the desktop client. The first takeaway is that if you have not downloaded the desktop client for your particular operating system, you need to go to Evernote.com right now and do that. This is the most powerful application that Evernote offers and it's where I did ninety percent of my work. On my laptop I have the Evernote desktop app installed and anytime I'm on my computer, I am working there. That information will sync backup to mine a Evernote web client, but it is the predominant and most powerful place that I do the majority of my work. So that’s going to skyrocket your productivity right off the bat is to make sure you download the web client.
This tutorial is going to talk about how to configure the settings there in that web client. A little bit above disclaimer: I am working on a Mac. I'm going to show a live demo so everything I show you today is going to be working off of the Mac client. I'm on a MacBook Air using OS10 (Yosemite) and I am using the latest version of Evernote- 5.7.0. I'll show you how to find what version you have when I share my screen with you. I also use Chrome as my browser, so everything that I'm going to show you today is going to be centered around the Mac desktop version and Chrome. The settings do appear in the PC interface but how do you get to them is different. The interface can be slightly different, because again, Evernote is developing the best platform for each device. I will probably do another demo specific to PC usage so if you are on a PC and you want to go through the setup elements I would keep an eye out for that in the future. Your takeaway for now would be the concepts about what you can configure in your desktop client. You're going to want to try to poke around a little bit and figure out exactly where to find things in the PC version. It's not much different but it can be under different menus as I've noticed in several of the clients I set up.
That's kinda the main disclaimer. The other thing that you should know while you're watching this tutorial is that and I am an Evernote Business user. There are three tiers that Evernote has: free, Evernote premium, and Evernote business. Some other things you'll see in my account you may not have been yours because you may be on the free or premium version. It doesn't really impact this setup much, but I’d like to mention it in case things looks a little different. The other thing is that I really have a seasoned account. I have about 11,000 notes in my Evernote system, so I've been using Evernote quite a bit. Even though I'm going to show you what a fresh install looks like in terms of the default settings and how I manipulate those, your account may look quite different because you might not have a lot data and might be new to Evernote. There may be some visual differences but I chose to keep it in the seasoned account because it really emphasizes the reason why I choose some of the settings that I’m going to cover here.
The other thing is I'm really going to show you my account live, okay? So consider yourself warned… I have no idea what kinda data you're necessarily going to see. I mean I don’t think I'm exposing you to anything that would be inappropriate but just know that really I’m going to take you live into my Evernote account so take whatever you see with a grain of salt. In addition I'm doing something with this recording that's fairly bandwidth-intensive so sometimes the performance can suffer. You always run the risk of having issues when you do a live tutorial like this. I think the value in it is making sure that you're actually seeing everything in live time. I don’t have to read you a tutorial or show you screenshots.
One tip as we get started is your username and password for Evernote is one of those things that you're going to want to have handy. A lot of times I work with people through this setup process and they’ll forget their Evernote password. It’s a total brick wall when you don't know you're Evernote password. So keep it handy; you're going to need it several times to set up many of the affiliate applications that I'm going to recommend. Make sure you know your email account associated with your Evernote account, your password, and possibly your username as well. Those three are pieces of information you're going to want in order to properly configure the environment up for your most productivity.
I do see a question asking about versions of the operating system. The question is if Evernote offers a Linux client or have any plans for one. I don't have any idea and I don't believe that it is one of the options. You'd have to go to the user forums in order to really pose that question. I don't know if it's something that they have. I don't have any tips on that right now, so sorry! I’m a power user, but I'm not an employee. Evernote would be a better resource for you but I appreciate the question.
So again what I'm going to cover here is the live demo, and what I'm going to go ahead and do right now is start sharing my screen with you. Hopefully you’re seeing my screen right now and the first thing I'm going to pull up is the web browser, because for those of you who don't already have Evernote downloaded on your machine, you want to be sure to go to Evernote.com/products and or even the Evernote.com main website.
There's lots of ways to download the desktop app and Evernote well auto-sense what application or what operating system you're on Here they've got a strong call to action in the upper right hand corner to download as well as the menu area you can download from. A third way is to go to Evernote.com/products and you will see in the Evernote products right here, the different on options you have: Mac OS, Windows desktop in Windows 8. So today again, I'm focusing on Mac OS 10.
I'm recording this and you'll be able to replay it and apply it to your own situation after the fact if you need. Download the Mac OS 10 client, it will automatically download it. Now double click and install it, then launch it. Down on your dock on Mac you’ll be about to see the little elephant icon. Launch the elephant icon and application and it's going to look something like this.
Now if you've been an Evernote user for a while you are going to see data in there like you see in my account. If you have not it'll be a little more blank. This is the main version and interface that you typically see when you start up the Evernote client. Now the very first thing that I coach people on is to get rid of these tutorials. They take up screen space and one of the powerful things I’m going to talk to you about is trying to get as much information on your screen and on what I’m going to call your dashboard.
This here in the middle column is all optional, its kind of a quick start tutorial that Evernote is trying to I'm get you to mess with and it's really not necessary. You simply can close out that with I clicking that “X” in the upper right hand corner and you gain a lot in real estate space. Now if you ever need to get back to that you can go up here to the “Help” menu and you can see that there are some options for exploring Evernote. You can get the “Getting Started Guide” back. There's lots of options for you with the help bar up here in order to retrieve that, but I can't tell you how many people don't ever close out that “X” and it makes an immediate difference in terms of visibility.
The first thing then is I like to make sure that the visual overflow of our Evernote account is giving me the most information possible. So what I’d like to do is go through the visual things that I tweak every time I start on a new desktop. The first thing is I like to go to the View menu here and you'll notice that there's something called “sidebar options.” Now what the sidebar options are referring to are these things that are over here on the left hand side (if you can see my cursor going up and down on the left hand side where you see all these different options). We'll come back to this view menu, but these I refer to as buttons some people refer to them as tabs right now I'm on the notes button. You can click on the notebooks button as well and it'll change what you see over here. You can see this button here is the business home for my business account; if you're not a business customer you won't see this. Again when you click on these things I like to quit these tours. I personally don't find them very helpful; you can even get back to it through the Help menu.
The Atlas is a way that you can actually retrieve notes based on geography and where you created them so I like to leave this visible. The Market is a place for actual physical goods that Evernote sells and you can purchase directly through that market button or tab. You can see here that my book, Untethered with Evernote, is now available at the Evernote website. It's also available GetUntethered.com. If you want to print copy you need to get it from our website versus the digital copy at the Evernote marketplace. You can see here the premium button really just talks to you about some other features that are associated with the premium account.
So that's an introduction to what's there. There's also this shortcuts, announcements, and this recent notes tab in the upper corner that really helps you be a little bit more productive. So now that we know what these things are on the sidebar, as Evernote calls it, we want to go to the view and sidebar options so we can configure them in a way that's going to work for us. By default I believe most of these are turned on and you can see that by clicking over it you can actually turn them on or off.
So I personally don't care about the announcements, I will go to the blog for that. I can find that in their site so I’m going to clean it up to make my workspace as efficient as possible. I definitely want shortcuts on. Work Chat is brand new if you're on this version; It literally launched on Halloween. I am leaving it on because certainly its added functionality that they had announced at the Evernote conference and is expanding what Evernote is possible for. Again this is going to be a business feature, so you may or may not have this option but in my case I'm going to leave it on.
Shortcuts are like bookmarks that let you access most readily available notes and I'd definitely like to leave those on. I think they're very useful especially for accounts that have a lot of notes. Recent notes as well make sure those are on. “Notes” will be on by default. You absolutely want to be sure that your Notebooks are selected. You can choose to have tags. I don't use tags a lot so I tend to turn it off. You can leave it on if you want. I certainly always recommend that as a business customer you leave the business home button available. Atlas is very functional as you get into some other more advanced and “find” features.
My co-author Kristi Willis and I have done a series of webinars on the Get Untethered YouTube channel where we cover some other features and functionality and how we use these things. Atlas we cover in the business cards webinar; if you want to review that you'll see why I advocate leaving this on. I tend to turn off market and then I also go back to sidebar and turn of premium as well. I don't need access to those items in my day-to-day productivity; I know how to reach them otherwise. I don't find an impact on how effective I am on a day-to-day basis with them on so I remove them from my interface.
So this is already tidier here than what I had, and it's the beginning of functionality. The next thing I do is look at these three options down here: Show Note Counts, Show Notebook List, and Show Tags List. So this is referring to those buttons are tabs, but down here is referring to additional information. The first one I’m going to show you is Show Notebooks List. I really love this. This is a key element that you’re going to want to turn on. Notice how when I turned that on how it changed my sidebar here. It actually shows me all of the stacks and notebooks that I have. You can see here these little carrots are Stacks that allow me to expand or contract my system. I have a lot more information here when I got this visible. This is about my personal organization which is not the topic at this particular tutorial but when you have a purposeful organization you can see that- I've gotta a system here it's a GTD strategy, again a topic for another webinar- but I can see my notebook structure. This mirrors the notebook structure that I can see here in the right pane when I click on the notebooks button. You can see “Inbox” onward and so on.
On the Mac, the Notebook List will sort alphabetically on the left-hand sidebar and just know that that's kinda how it works. On a PC it's actually a little bit different; they group them by personal versus business notes. If you’re a business customer you will notice a difference in the interface. If you’re a premium member you shouldn’t have that issue it should be alphabetical as well. But on the Mac they group everything together whether it’s a business or personal notebook and it's sorted alphabetically. I find that really helpful in actually quickly moving amongst notebooks and stacks. I have an immense amount of data in here; I've got 11,000 notes, I've got over 300 notebooks. But my system collapses down to this 12 notebook and stack structure here on my left. That works really well for me and you can get there with your own personal account even if you organize it differently.
The next thing I do in the sidebar options is I choose to show the Note Counts. There's an immense amount of information that you can get by actually showing. So watch what happens on the sidebars as I turn on the “show now counts.” Suddenly I have a lot information. It tells me that I have a total 11,000 notes; I have this many personal notes. I know how many notes I have in my different inboxes and in all my different notebooks.
For example in my book keeping process with Untethered with Evernote: my Raw Scans tell me how many receipts still need to be processed. If that’s eighty-six versus two I have a lot of information about how much work there is to do. Turning on that note count can be very, very helpful. The note count will appear next to any one notebook- not a stack- but any notebook that's there. Now on the stacks, if you want to see how many notebooks are in the stack, you can again click on this notebook buttons in this sidebar and it will demonstrate for you on how many notebooks. So in my project support materials, I have 25 notebooks, Active Clients I have 21, Harmon Enterprises bookkeeping I have sixteen, etc.
So already I'm getting a lot more information than I had before. The other item is the show the tags list. I personally keep this off; I don't run a very tag-centric model. I have clients though that certainly do and if you show the tags list you can see down here at the bottom that they will actually expand your tags. Now I prefer to hide the tag list; I don't mind having a tag button there because I do access that at times. Again if you right click here you can show the tag list or you can remove the button entirely from the took bar. It's totally up to you and what works in your personal workflow. I want you to know what the options are here.
That's the visual view and already we're seeing lots of improvements and the sidebar options is really where you can configure those to whatever your business preferences are. The other thing I’d like to show you is just an interface thing. You can actually widen and shrink these different bars. If you are interested in collapsing or expanding the actual real estate space that is on your screen you can configure that your own liking. This really can help, especially depending on how long your notebook titles are and things like that.
Moving on on the visual side of things, when I'm working with particularly business users who are trying to garner a lot of information from their interface here- again this is very Mac centric because the PC displays this different- you'll notice here these are in what are called a card view. These are my notes and again if you don't have any notes you won’t have anything in this middle panel. You can change the view options to something that is more suitable to your workflow. For people who are just beginning I prefer to change this to the snippet view. It's my preferred view. By default, Evernote puts it in card view but again it can depend on your profession and what your goal is.
I know that in the design world, lots of people pick the card view because it's a little more visual. I'm dealing a lot with entrepreneurs and business owners and I find that snippet view actually provides me more information. I find that to be a little more functional for what I do on a day-to-day basis. I like it because I can quickly see the note title and I can see three lines of information that are useful in my overall effectiveness. I want you to go into here and play with these features. This is card view, this is expanding card view which is going to lose the preview pane. It's not something that I would necessarily recommend for putting as much information on your screen as possible.
Snippet view is the one that I like a lot. I have clients that like the side list view. The nice thing about the side list view is that it collapses down a lot of information, but it allows you to sort really quickly through these titles. If you right click on it you can change the sort columns that are available. If you're collaborating with other people you can an author column to find people that have created notes. By sync status, by sort URL, by size. I can sort by notebook by alphabetical which can be really helpful as well. This is top list view; you've always got your preview pane down here and the bottom (much like email). Then your option to view is over here.
I recommend changing it to snippet view and working with that for a while. If that doesn't work for you feel free to change it. I also like to point out here when I’m at the notebooks button on the Mac, you have another view. You can also go to card view as they call it here in the upper right-hand corners where this little toggle is. It's between a list view and a card. I prefer to list view; I think when you have a lot of data it's easier to work with. It's much easier to drag and drop these notebooks in the stacks around which is something that you're going to do in order to organize your system. My GetUntethered Hangouts with Kristi give you a lot tips on that but for now these are the background tools and interface items that you might want to look at.
I'd also like to bring your attention to these four buttons up at the top. These are actually sort buttons that allow you, under the notebooks button, to view your notebooks either by owner, by name, by how many notes are in each notebook or when the notes book was last updated. So depending on what you're looking for that may be useful. I typically view by name and this just works best for me. Depending again on what version of Evernote you’re in whether business or premium or free this may have some variation for you. This will become very helpful as you become more sophisticated with the system.
The other thing I'd like to bring to your attention is up here- the “all notebooks.” There's actually three types of notebooks that you might possibly have in your account if you’re a business user. If you are business user and have business notebooks there’s going to be notebooks that are owned by the company that you knew are a business account with. My notebooks refers simply too those that are in your personal account. As a side note, if you are a personal user and you join a business that has a business Evernote account, you can actually view both your personal and business notes in one account. The ownership of the data stays segregated. So you keep your own information and it is not shared with the business. The business you’ll still have access to and your single one account you can associate. That's how this breakup kinda works. “All notebooks” is going to include the third type of notebook: that includes business, personal and it's also going to include notebooks that have been shared with you. If somebody else shared a notebook with you, you're going to be able to see that in this particular view.
That is a helpful toggle as well and one to be aware of when we talk about set up here. Now we’ve kinda gone through most of the interface types of view things. The next thing I’d like to do is make sure that you have actually renamed a couple of key notebooks to really hope your overall organization and productivity. One other things that you need to know about Evernote, no matter what version of Evernote you’re on, is that all Evernote accounts come with a single default notebook. Notes have to go somewhere and Evernote gives you, when you first sign up for an account, a default notebook. Typically they name this notebook something like “user names first notebook” or “your username” and you'll see it in your list.
Mine has been updated already, but you can see me here by going to the notebook settings that you'll have a checkbox about make this my default notebook. What I'm going to suggest is to actually rename that notebook to “.Inbox.” It'll help you to understand where data is going when you are adding it to Evernote. The dot is going to force the notebook always to sort at the top of the list.
Very functional for actually finding information. If this doesn't make sense to you I would advocate you just do it and as you start to work with the system you'll see why this is helpful. It's helpful because you're going to be adding information to Evernote from lots of different channels: from the Web Clipper, from emailing it in, you might be just randomly creating you notes, are scanning notes in… all these types of processes create opportunities for you to put data into Evernote and being able to find them in one centralized inbox is immensely useful.
You can move the notes from there but in your inbox you know that at least where it's going to go by default. If you're an Evernote business user you're going to want to actually also take that first notebook that they assign for you or create for you and rename it and I call it .InboxBusiness. This is more than I can get into in this session but business and personal are really almost two separate accounts just viewed in one common interface. You're going to want to have an inbox for your business side as well. It's not possible to make it a default notebook, but you definitely want to rename it. You can see here I renamed it Inbox-Business to separate it from the business or personal. As you get more sophisticated or work with the consultant like me you’ll understand what the rationale is behind this up. you want to have both here and they both serve a workflow function for each that supports my productivity. Those are just some quick tips for renaming and visually having your notebooks in a pattern that's going to work for you.
The next thing I want to show you is how to actually change some of your preferences and which preferences matter. The first thing I want you to do is go to Evernote in the menu item, and by the way here's where you can check which version Evernote you’re on and you can click “about Evernote” and you can see here I'm on Evernote version 5.7.0 which is the most current version. If you go here to check for updates you'll be able to see if you're on the most current version or not. If you don't have that option, check for updates, something that was recently added it to the interface, you're definitely on an older version. Just simply go to the Evernote.com website and download the most current version and it'll import your existing database into the new version.
The next thing you're going to do is your going to go to the Preferences option right here. I'm going to go through which ones really matter for you as you are setting up your account and again this is kind of a one time thing you know it's worth spending the time to do it now and then you can always know where it is. It’s really not going to impact your day-to-day productivity, it's just going to really make sure that you are optimized to support you’re ongoing work needs in Evernote.
The first thing is I told you that all notes must go into a default notebook. Here's where you can actually define that and you can see that it's going to show me all of my personal notebooks. Your default notebook has to be a personal notebook so if you're free premium or business user you're going to have this option. You want to be sure that you select the .Inboxe that’s one reason I really wanted you to rename it. Definitely make sure that open note links from other applications in a new window selected. I prefer that view and show note counts in the sidebar. Again, this is that option I showed you in the View menu. As for the Evernote helper absolutely I keep these turned on. Keep Evernote helper running in the background when I quit Evernote, start the Evernote helper when I log into my computer. You know we want Evernote loading when we turn on our computer even if we don't have Evernote open because again Evernote is going to be so powerful in many contexts even outside in the application for us.
Speaking of Context, this is a brand new feature that Evernote deployed in the new Mac client and I think PC client as well. Here's the settings for that; you can choose to turn on or off of those based on this setting right here. We'll learn much more about that as Evernote tells us more about Context. Again a brand new feature that's just released three days ago. You definitely want to look at your sync tab here regardless of what version you're on you’ll have this sync button and you want to absolutely change this from the default to whatever the shortest period of time is. So on the Mac you can change this to every five minutes. I believe on the PC the quickest you can have is every 15 minutes, but you want to shorten that so that automatically Evernote is sinking as quickly as possible. Very important when it comes to collaborating with Evernote and making sure your data stays current across all the channels.
What happens here is sync is save. There's no save button but there's the sync button. You can see my cursor in Upper left-hand corner here is a little round button. You can manually force a sync by simply clicking on that but what this setting is telling you is that without clicking that button Evernote will sync every 5 minutes. Just so you know it syncs when you open and close the application. I like it to warn me if I quit while sinking. That's just fine and definitely want to sync your shortcuts.
Software update, again another place to check for the software update and how often you have a check. I choose daily. I do not upgrade to beta versions on my desktop client. It's really my most important piece of software and I prefer to have the majority of the bugs worked out by the time the desktop version comes to me. So I am NOT the one that jumps on the beta version of the desktop client. Again, your own choice, but this is where you would define the settings.
This is another element that can really transform your Evernote usage: whether or not you have the Web Clipper installed. You're going to want to configure the settings and if you do not have the Web Clipper installed… the Web Clipper is a piece of software that Evernote owns separate from Evernote and integrates with Evernote. It's a browser extension and I will get over to showing you this as we go through this. You're going to want download and install this Evernote Web Clipper for every single browser that you have on your system and what you use on most of the time.After clipping I like to bring the clip to the front I like to bounce the dock icon once that's fine I don't mind if it plays a sound.
Here's another setting that is just a user choice. For those of you that use Evernote you know that you can insert a document into a note and you can impact the view of that note at a global level right here. There's a choice between in line or as attachments and if any of you are unfamiliar with the difference there when we get into the notes I can show you the difference. This is where you would change that setting. My preference is in line; I know a lot of people I work with like to have it as attachment. Depending on if they put a lot of data in to one note or not. Again, it's a preference; you can always override it by a note by note basis. If you find that in your workflow you prefer by default have everything one way or the other you can change that here.
Shortcuts are really personal; if you care, the keyboard commands are here. Same with formatting if you're very sensitive to how the characters look and what the date format is you can modify that here. Reminders: you can receive a reminder emails if you would like that. You also get prompts throughout the system to do that when you are first setting up a notebook. Certainly you can select it on a note by note basis, but certainly you can select those reminders here as well.
I'm not a big reminder user in terms of dated reminders, so I have it as you can see totally turned off. But if your use is to use the reminder feature this would be important. The final one here is the ScanSnap. This is for the specific Evernote market Fujitsu ScanSnap. I personally don't have one because I don’t have a need for it, but for those in need that are looking to get a desktop scanner this is the right one to get. There are some specific settings related just to the scanner that you can set here. It’s smart enough to know when you're scanning a business card verses a receipt versus a photo verses a document. You can have those things auto-file based on tags or definitions that you set up here.
This is kinda where you define that. We also have the beta of Scannable which is a iPhone app that Evernote is getting ready to launch. It integrates with the ScanSnap and my guess is that there will be some additional settings that we’ll have access to at this point.
So that's the Preferences tab; you can go in to make some choices again the key ones are going to be this default inbox and the note counts and your sync. You can see here, here's the sync. So every five minutes it will or I can manually sync by just simply clicking on it.
So your name on the Mac will appear here in your account information and you want to go down here to account info that is a … appearing at the bottom of the pulldown menu. You can see here that there's going to be your account information. It’s going to clarify the you’re at least a premium member; any business users going to be a premium member. This is my personal account and it's going to give you your email address that’s unique to your particular Evernote account. What you're going to want to do is view this in address book and if you have not added it to the address book already it'll say add to contacts list or something similar. I’m going to have this Evernote upload contact that includes my email address. I want to make sure that that's accessible on every place that I access internet. Whether it's my phone, my computer, tablet… in my case my contacts are all synchronized across the platform so I have this Evernote upload email which is a very important part of your setup to be accessible from all places.
That really concludes what the basic setup is that I recommend for the Evernote Web Client. The last two elements that I want to cover are actually the Web Clipper and Skitch which are Evernote owned applications that integrate and provide additional functionality for Evernote. They are stand-alone applications that are an essential part of your overall productivity. Again I used Chrome so I'm going to show you the Chrome item right here. Here is Evernote product page and you can see that both Skitch and the Evernote Web Clipper are accessible there. You can see which platform you use. You want to install the browser extension for all of the ones that you’ve got.
Once you successfully install the Chrome browser I want to bring your attention to this little elephant that’s up here that will appear in the toolbar. The browser extension will appear as an elephant in your browser window depending on which browser. It'll be in a different spot so for I'm Chrome, it's on the right hand side. I think on Firefox it appears over here and Safari I'm not sure exactly where it is. I know for Internet Explorer it actually appears I think in the menu bar. So different locations but you're looking for this Evernote icon and note that you can move and drag these things around here.
It's my most important extension so I have it first next to my browser bar here. The first thing you're going to want to do is actually click on it because when we first install it it will have a little red X and you're going to want to actually click on it. It's going to ask you to sign into Evernote and I want you to actually go ahead and do that because it's a one-time sign in. It will authorize Evernote to save web pages directly to your Evernote account.
The next thing I'm going to have you do, before I show you the functionality of the Evernote Web Clipper is I want to bring attention to this Options button down here. Particularly in chrome. So you want to configure the options for your Evernote Web Clipper by clicking on the Options button. It'll bring these up. You can also get to it from the extensions manager in Chrome browser. I just had a and comment from Enrico, thank you very much, she says Safari shows on the right. So for Safari you're going to see the Evernote icon over here so thank you for that clarification.
These clipper settings can be different based on the browser, but I want to go through them and that's a one-time setup thing. Notebook selection: you can use smart filing; Evernote will attempt to guess and get smart (this Context is a big part of the Evernote experience) but it'll say “oh we think you want to file this in this notebook.” I don't find that useful; I'm too much of a control freak about where my data gets organized so I actually always start in my .Inbox in here. It will go to your default .Inbox unless you override that. In my case I like to send my clipped notes to my business .Inbox because they tend to be business-related.
You can override on a clip by clip basis but this is your overall settings that you can choose. If you use tags you can choose to always tag it. Again I don't, so I don't have these turned on. I don't use smart filings so the tags is something that I personally have turned off.
Default clip action: I will coach a lot of my clients to use less last action used. I will explain what that means in a minute but my preference is always start with simplified article. I find that that's my favorite view of clipped articles, it's mst functional for me. Again I can override it on a case by case basis but by default I like it to start the simplified article. Again I will clarify for you what that means in just a minute. If you're new you can use last action and that will probably suffice for you. After clip, I leave this at default to show successful clip dialogue. If you want to on make it a little more efficient and automatically close the Evernote web clipper you can do that and you can also choose to not display a related note.
Those are just interface options. Related Results: absolutely check this box. This is a really functional thing and it works most the time. I was training demo yesterday and it didn't work for me but it works for my clients. I will avoid not having it work today by not demoing it but the goal is you want to turn it on and what this does is when you do a Google search for something it will bring up your Google search results just like you're used to seeing, but on the right side of the Google search page it will also bring up notes that it found in your personal Evernote account that are related to the search term you are looking for on the web.
That can be really cool; it's like combining the power of the Google interface with your Evernote account. Really neat stuff. Definitely make sure you have this box checked and when you experience it you will definitely see that it's really cool. Those are the options I want you set up. I have a whole demo in the resources notebook for the book so if you purchase the book you’ve seen on the resources notebook that there's a whole demo about the Web Clipper.
It shows what each of these clipping options are so I’m not going to go into them here I just want to point out that one setting that said which clip action do you want is referring to if I want to clip the layout that is associated with the full article, the simplified article, the full page, the bookmark view or with a screenshot. Which gives you some crosshairs and then let’s you kinda drag-and-drop. It’s really functional in maybe a marketing role or maybe in designing a website where you can clip and then you can draw arrows and things like that.
Then I can have it saved. You click the Save button after you decide where you want to organize it. Note here it's going to organize it an based on those settings that I have. You can add a tag right here and if you want “this is a demo a demo note for webinar,” you can add some text and then I can click the Save button and it is telling me that it's syncing that directly to my inbox. I go back here to my desktop client on Evernote and I sync here hopefully this 66 will go to a 67, which it did, I'm going to look up here and you can see there's my note with the typed things.
You can see why it's really important to set up that what clipper because this is a brilliant way to get data into your Evernote account. A couple things I want to point out about this when you do a web clipping. When I have this note clicked and then I go here to the upper right hand corner about it and look at the Info tab little I associated with the Info tab, I'm actually able to see the originating URL and I can click view site and it'll take me back to that website that it originated from. If you weren’t familiar with the Web Clipper before hopefully now you can see why it's so cool and certainly you can up close and edit this note however you want. Maybe this becomes a to-do for you and you need to download Skitch and this is your reminder about how to do it.
Just quick tutorial you can certainly resize images right there so that's really helpful as well. One final thing on the show you here is I went through card, extended, snippet and top view but I’d also like to point out that you can change the sort order of how you’re looking. A lot of data and your system can be very helpful for finding and retrieving information and this is something I covered in much more detail in the Ins and Outs of Evernote search which was a webinar that we did in the GetUntethered group. I will post the URL to that when we're done here.
Often I'll change it to newest to oldest, often I'll change it from day created to the title because I know what I named my note. Or date updated or what URL or maybe size. So play around with these; they are very functional in actually working with Evernote.
In our last couple of minutes I'm going to go over Skitch, which is the final application that you're going to want to make sure that you have installed. Again go back to the web browser; you're going to want to download Skitch which is a full version application outside of Evernote. For Mac you're going to download the Mac OS version; I also recommend you install it on your iPhone or your mobile device. If you're on a Windows machine obviously you can do that here.
I've already gone through the process of downloading Skitch and have a seasoned account. I am going to launch it from my toolbar and when I do that, you can see that I have all of these Skitch notes in my account. What Skitch does is it allows you to take screenshots and then mark-up any image that you capture. It allows you to mark up any image or any .jpeg. Really powerful; then it will automatically sync with Evernote or you can share it to other places.
If you haven't logged in and created the connection between get your Evernote account you’re going to want to do that here. You should be able to sign in or sign out right here. You want to be sure that you signed in, again another reason why having that Evernote username and password is really, really helpful. Then you'll notice that you can take screenshots of whatever you want.
Skitch up here will allow you to create different types of screen snaps. I use the screen snap one most often; you just simply click this button here and then it'll bring you over to your browser with crosshairs and I can pick this image. I can choose to capture it, it will bring it into Skitch here and then you can see I can type, or draw an arrow, move it around, I can drop boxes, I can draw the lines like this. I can highlight text.
There are some cool little icons here that you can ask questions about. You can hit the plus button and I can move these things around. I can say “what is this?” with a question mark. Move it around, that kinda thing. If you have sensitive data, which I have a lot in a lot of my presentations, I can blur something out. I can simply use this blur feature. Then I can decide to crop this like so if I care to. This is probably the ugliest Skitch that ever existed but that's how it works. You can also change the color down here with yellow or if you want to make the line thinner or this arrow is too thick I can make it thinner and I can make it red.
All kinds of options and then the cool part is I can just drag-and-drop this image into an e-mail or just onto my desktop. Or you can see here it's syncing with Evernote in the upper right hand corner. I have all kinds options here; I can share it in a bunch of different ways, I can trash it or I can sync it directly to Evernote. If I go back to Evernote I actually have a Skitch notebook. Here’s Skitch, and when I go here out here save changes to Evernote, yes, I’d like to save changes. Now it is sinking and doing its thing and again it's a little slower than normal because I'm doing a webcast. You can see these are all images so this is the one that I saved and then when I go over to Evernote it will bring it in. I’ll let it do that are and then you can go between pulling up the others.
That is Skitch and that's really, really powerful and as a stand-alone product allows you to capture anything that I need to capture and use some visual images.
So that is the base set up; once you have those parts and pieces in place you're really prepared to make the most of most trainings that people like me will give. Here you can see it sunk over to my Evernote account so I've got access to that.
I had a question here let me answer this question from Sam. “Are Skitch text annotations searchable within Evernote.” This is like a stump the trainer question. That's a really good question, Sam I do not know. I would guess that the typing is, I'm really guessing here, but I would guess that any text that you put in there is because of the OCR scanning that is in Evernote. In this example I would say that “what is this” and “type on images” are going to get indexed by the server and should be retrievable, but I would have to test it to be sure. That's my best educated guess. Hope that helps and if I ever find the answer I’ll put it on on Twitter or on the Harmon Enterprises Facebook page. Good question.
I will figure out now what I can. That's my best educated guess that any text that does appear in the image will ultimately get indexed and make it searchable. If there's any other questions feel free to kind of queue them up here. Hopefully you found that helpful. I certainly know that with every client that I work with, they really benefit from having these basic configurations and places. It really sets the stage for you to be a power user.
It has everything kind of up and running but let;s you take the learning curve up the steps and I really get on I'm going with everything. So I see Sam's comment he said “try searching type on image on the one you just did.” I would do that except, just to keep in mind, that the OCR scanning doesn't happen immediately and sometimes has a little bit of a lag. So if it doesn't work it's not that it doesn't work it's that it hasn't been indexed yet.
I just got another notation from Enrico that Skitch annotations are fully searchable which is logical and makes sense. So thank you both for that feedback. Queue your questions up; I just have a little bit of closing material.
I covered the default notebook and the importance of that. So renaming it to your inbox. We talked about how to sort your notebooks and some of those kinds of features and the notebook button. I think we covered the basics that I really wanted to go through.
I will put the Evernote Products URL into the comments underneath. That'll give you access to everything. Now that you have this setup, for those of you that are collaborating with other people, you may get a lot of value out of the presentation I gave at the Evernote conference. They did record it and it’s available on the Evernote YouTube channel. I have actually put it in SlideShare and paired it with my slide deck because they cut out the cameras just on me it doesn't show my slides on YouTube channel Evernote video. So I paired it with my slides in SlideShare. I’ll add the link to that as well.
So now that's the setup, Untethered with Evernote now covers “what are the workflows that you can use to really maximize what Evernote offers you and organize it in a way that's going to support productivity.”The print version is available on GetUntethered.com and then the digital and .epub format is available on the Evernote website or also at GetUntethered.com. We also have .mobi and PDF on our website.
Join me and connect with me at HarmonEnterprises.com. I have a $99, fifty-minute, Skype consulting session or even a Google hangout that I can record and give to you if you want me to look specifically at your Evernote organization and process. For first-time clients, that’s a $99, fifty-minute, dedicated session where I work directly with you. You can self book it; it's on my website and syncs with my calendar. You pick a time that works for you, I just get notified and its on!
That is a great way to can get some so introductory information and one-on-one training that can really fuel your productivity. All the rest of my consulting services are listed on my website as well, which is HarmonEnterprises.com. The training materials that I talked about where my co-author and I do the hour-long hangouts where we cover one specific skill set that we cover in the book is available at the GetUntethered YouTube channel and I'll link to that here below.
I stuck to just about an hour; that was pretty good! These are the essentials; this is the right foundation and for those of you who were on a Mac, hopefully you a ton of info out of this. If you're on a PC, hopefully I’ll be doing the same session with the PC interface for you hopefully sometime in the next month. Please stay in touch and I thank you all for all your nice comments in the sidebar. I appreciate that endorsement Enrico, “best book I've read so far. Based my trainings my colleagues on it and those people are simply happy. Thank you, Stacey.” Well, thank you, I really appreciate. It's good to know that it's been well received. I appreciate your time and till next time thanks for joining me. Stay in touch!