It was a long month at the college. According to my contract, I’ve already worked all my allotted hours for 2010. I’m sure they won’t need another thing until 2011.
The other day I had to purchase Excel because that’s what my life has come to. I resisted as long as I could. So that meant I had to purchase Microsoft Office which meant I had to purchase a Microsoft product. It could have been worse; I could have fallen off the roof.
Which brings me to talking about OneNote which came along with it. This is a bit convoluted so just hang in there.
I made a passing acquaintance with OneNote a long time ago when I was much younger and impressed by such things. Just imagine being able to type a note or make a drawing with your choice of 20 different colors and sizes of pens and drag it around on your screen. Wow! In about 10 minutes I was tired of too many choices and decided even if I had the $100 to pay for it I’d keep the money for something else.
So, last week I spent another ten minutes looking around at it, decided I still don’t like it and returned happily to my beloved EverNote 2.2.
In another effort to get organized, I decided I should put links to my many video courses into EverNote 2; just drag & drop and line ‘em up in a series of notes. Under some conditions, dragging and dropping files into Evernote 2 will give you this choice:
‘Insert Link’ or ‘Create New Note’ will create links to your files.
As I watch videos or read pdf’s on one monitor, I can write notes into EverNote 2 on the other one and have chronological order to what I’m learning and notes to refer back to. Seems a grand plan because it gives me a sense of hope. The world being what it is, every shred of control in my teeny little universe …
… makes things so nice and tidy and focused instead of a big jumble in my head.
What I discovered about this is that EverNote 2 also opens video files directly. Which I like. Click-click and here comes my video to watch.
It also works with any other type of file: text, audio, images.
Of course, if you rename your files or move them to different locations on your hard-drive they’ll become unlinked from EverNote. Because I often move my files, even when I think I’m not ever going to again, I’ve switched to a different method.
I went through EverNote and cut and pasted all previously-linked files to plain text. Ctrl+Shift+V. Although it wasn’t necessary; all I’d have to do is remember that the files are probably unlinked anyway. For anything in the future I use the same method of inserting ‘links’ but do them as plain text instead.
This way I can just use the file-names as markers instead of opening files directly. When I need to open a file, I copy and paste the file-name into my desktop search and it will immediately find the present location. If I was clicking on a broken link in EverNote I’d have to go find the file again anyway.
The other advantage of this is that my database has gotten dramatically smaller. From 120MB down to 10 MB as it was before I started linking files. Really, all you need here is the file-names unless you know, for sure, you’re never going to move your files again.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
JLB:
I have been using Evernote 2.2 for a long time and love it. Some how Firefox upgraded to 3.6 and I lost the Clipper plugin. The is no plugin for Evernote 2.2 plugin for Firefox 3.x, only for Evernote 3.x. I think their have abandoned Evernote 2.2 users for their cloud version 3.x. I have been experimenting with Evernote 3.x
to figure a way to import all my notes into the new version of Evernote even thou I prefer Evernote 2.2.
So beware, if you update to Firefox 3.x, you will not be able to use your Evernote 2.2 any more.
Fred Schwilk
San Jose, California
Hi Fred,
EverNote 2.2 works fine; you just need the installer for it and instructions for how to get your EN2 clipper back again. This is all included in the Comments under ‘EverNote 3: When Good Software Goes Bad‘ started last March and contributed to by many fine folks who are also interested in hanging onto EverNote 2.2 for as long as they can.
If anyone’s interested, here’s a link to download the portable version of EverNote 2.2. I run as much software as I can using portable versions to minimize the time it takes to reinstall applications, not to mention the space they take up on my hard-drive. Also, the portables are handy for carrying around on a flash-drive when traveling. I never had any luck synchronizing the portable version of EverNote to the desktop one, so I run the portable only to avoid confusion.