Linking Files to EverNote 2

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. But, before I did that, OneNote asked me to download a tool called Windows Search. There is Search, of course, in Windows XP, but I didn’t know it could be on the Taskbar. Has it been here all this time and I never noticed? It’s like Copernic except I hardly ever used Copernic and I use this all the time. Go figure.

In the meantime, 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. When you try to paste some types of files into Evernote 2 it will give you this choice:

Either one of these options will create links to your files so make sure you have them where you want them to be and they won’t be moved or you’ll have to re-link them later.

Then, as I watch the videos and read the 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.

(Although some days ‘focus’ seems over-rated. People my age drop dead for no reason at all except that they’re old and tired. And then after they’re dead, what do they think about being focused? Maybe they think they should have spent more time gazing randomly on the magnitude of creation; maybe it would have been more fun. Now would be the time to decide.)

Anyway, what I discovered about this is that EverNote 2 opens mp4’s directly into the QuickTime player. Which I like. Click-click and here comes my video to watch. But it won’t open wmv’s or flv’s into my main player, VLC. It will open wmv’s into Windows Media Player if I make it the default player.

It will open pdf’s if they’re dragged and dropped into EverNote 2 but not if they’re copied and pasted.

This is not a deal-breaker, it’s just irritating. Working with computers all day, by mid-afternoon every extra click can feel like a bomb going off in my head. If anyone knows how to get EverNote 2 to open flv files directly, please tell me. Is there a little slice of code I can add somewhere? Like next to the place where it says to open files in Windows Media Player and QuickTime? It’s got to be in there somewhere. Please help me hack EverNote 2. In the meantime, here’s the fix:

Just copy the file name, and paste it, or Ctrl+V, into the Search box.

and instantly, the search results show up and the file can be opened directly from there.

I know this is not rocket-science but some days I get the biggest charge out of the smallest things. You may not have a use for linking videos, but some other files that you want close at hand to make notes of. I have no idea how this works in EverNote 3, or if it does, and I have no intention of finding out.

Tagged with: Evernote • Organization