A tour of Evernote's new Templates experience
Feb 24 2025 | Issue 32 | Link to this issue | Subscribe
Hey Reader, great news!
Evernote's templates have gotten a significant upgrade (finally…I’ve been waiting!).
Creating, editing, and organizing your templates is now much easier and more intuitive, making them more fun and enjoyable to use. Best of all, you're no longer limited by the previous constraints.
What’s Been Fixed? (Say Goodbye to the Old System)
This update removes some of Evernote’s biggest template frustrations:
❌ Old Limitation: You could only store 20 templates.
🎉 New: No more limit — store as many as you need.
❌ Old Limitation: Editing a template required deleting and re-uploading a new version.
🎉 New: Edits are easy! Just edit existing template notes and you’re ready to go.
❌ Old Limitation: Your templates lived outside your account in the cloud and you had to be online to access them.
🎉 New: Templates live in a dedicated section inside your Evernote account, making them easy to find and manage. Plus, you can use them offline in both the desktop and mobile apps.
These fixes make the new template system a huge improvement from the old experience. These improvements make your templates more powerful than ever — helping you streamline workflows, standardize notes, and save time.
Tips to Use the New Templates Experience
Templates are intuitive to work with once you understand key details about how they work. Here’s what you need to know.
Pre-Made Templates: Find inspiration and add pre-formatted templates to your account with Evernote’s Template Library. It’s a great place to start with Templates and Evernote provides several useful and effective template options. My favorite is the calendar template.
Creating Templates: It’s important to understand that you don’t really create template notes. Instead, you assign Template status to an existing note.
Any note in your account can be assigned as a Template from its More Actions (...) menu using the “Save as Template” option.
When you "Save as Template" Evernote will:
1. Add a light tan bar to the top of the note clarifying that the note is now saved (assigned) as a template.
2. Add a brown “template note” icon to the note when it appears in the note list
3. Display your note in the Templates Section (on the sidebar on Desktop and in the bottom navigation on mobile)
⚠️ Essential Key Concept (this is confusing MANY users!!!) ⚠️
The Templates section is not a notebook. Notes don't live here. Your note didn’t move locations when you saved it as a template. It still lives in the same notebook/space it did before it became a template note.
Technically, when you saved the note as a template, you assigned special "meta-data" information to the existing note which tells Evernote to treat your note as a template. Notably, you didn't duplicate the note and create a new template note.
Think of the Templates sidebar section as a search filter that displays Notes that have been assigned as Templates. It will display any Notes in your account that are assigned as a Template, even if you move those Note around in your account.
And, if you delete the note that you assigned as a template from the notebook it lives in, it will remove it from the Templates section in your sidebar.
Removing Templates:
You can un-assign a note from its template status from the More Actions menu. This will remove the Template visual indicators from the note and remove it from the Templates Section in your sidebar.
Alternatively, you can delete the Note that is saved as a template. This will also remove it from the Templates Section filter.
How to Use a Template
There are two key ways to use a template.
1. Create a new note and select “My Templates” to apply your template instantly to the blank note.
2. From the Template section, choose your template from the note list and click the “Use this Template” button
Both methods will apply the template note content to your new blank note. You can then edit your new note from there without impacting the source template.
Editing Templates
Notes that are saved as templates can be edited the same way you modify any note.
Simply navigate to the template note – either from the Templates button or its Notebook – and make your changes.
Edits that you make to the source template will be automatically saved in the template and applied to new notes you create using that template.
🧠 Academy Members: See these steps in action and get a full run down of the new Templates experience in our Template feature training. Don’t miss the bonus training covering top use cases and best practices for creating your own template designs.
Ready To Upgrade Your Workflow?
This update makes templates more powerful, flexible, and accessible than ever before. Whether you're a longtime Evernote user or just getting started, now is the perfect time experiment with how templates can simplify your workflow.
💡 Use Templates to their full potential: Templates save you time, reduce errors, and bring consistency to your notes and workflows. And, creating templates that support your unique workflows is a learned skill. Gain access to a deep dive training on the new Template experience, learn best practices for creating your own templates, and find inspiration from real life use-case examples inside the Academy – my community of Evernote enthusiasts all learning to do more with Evernote. Join us and start using templates to their full potential today!
Cheers to your productivity –
Stacey