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Quick Tip Friday: Notebook Sharing with Evernote for Mac and Windows Desktop

Tips + Guides | By Alex Muramoto
Evernote Quick Tip

Evernote Shared Notebooks make it easy to work together, allowing you to give individuals permission to view selected notebooks in your Evernote account. Evernote Premium subscribers can also give other Evernote users permission to edit the notes in their Shared Notebooks.

Shared Notebooks come in handy for both professional and personal uses, whether you’re working on a team projectplanning a family vacation, or just passing along interesting content to friends and family, Shared Notebooks allow you to share the memories that matter to you with anyone, even those who don’t use Evernote. You can create a Shared Notebook from almost any device or computer where Evernote is installed, including Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android.

Sharing in Evernote for Windows Desktop

To share a notebook using Evernote for Windows Desktop, follow the steps below:

  1. Right-click the notebook you want to share in the Notebook List
  2. Click ‘Share Notebook’
  3. Click ‘Invite Individuals’
  4. Enter the email addresses of the people you want to share with
  5. Select the permission level you want to grant to the list of users
  6. Click ‘Invite’

Sharing in Evernote for Mac

  1. In the Sidebar, click ‘Notebooks’ to open the Notebook List
  2. Hover your mouse cursor over the notebook you want to share, then click the share icon
  3. In the ‘Share this notebook’ dialog, click ‘Invite Individuals’
  4. Enter the email addresses of the people you want to share with
  5. Select the permission level you want to grant to the list of users
  6. Click ‘Invite’

Once you’ve invited someone to a Shared Notebook, they will receive a notification email with a link to view your Shared Notebook. Other Evernote users that you invite to a Shared Notebook will also have the option to ‘Join’ your Shared Notebook, which will make it appear in their Evernote account.

Evernote Business

To get the most out of notebook sharing at work, we recommend checking out Evernote Business, which we launched earlier this week.

Evernote Business is the optimal solution for sharing knowledge across your organization, and comes with all the features of Evernote and Evernote Premium, plus a variety of new features specifically tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. Evernote Business features include the ability to create Business Notebooks that can be shared with others, access to the Business Library, where users can publish Business Notebooks for the benefit the entire company, powerful knowledge discovery capabilities with Related Notes and Related Results, increased monthly upload allowance and more. Learn more about Evernote Business.

Do you use Shared Notebooks? Tell us how in the comments!

  • hoyin

    I have used the share notebook function (I am a premium user) with my wife (a standard user) and it worked well. She was able to add notes which was good.

    However what about sharing the folder that contains all the note books? i.e. in your image above for the PC sharing the folder called Personal, Travel or Work. Can you not allow us to share these as well? Rather than individual notebooks? Thanks

  • Laguna Bardwell

    I have a good question which I need to ask, because it is driving me insane. Within the Evernote UI, I understand that to share a notebook, you do the typical right click, share notebook, and invite the individuals.

    However, I have my notebooks by category for stories I write and journals and such which my closest business partners will read. If I want to share all of my notebooks of notes with an individual, is there a way to select all the notebooks to share at the same time, or even by allowing a Ctrl+Click function? Is it also possible to allow pasting an e-mail address into the invite individual field, so that I don’t have to type the e-mail address 30 times? And, lastly, is it possible to set a memory option for remembering the options for logging in to view, and allowing them to be updated?

    Thanks Evernote team. I love the program, will keep using it even when I’m overseas.

  • Laguna Bardwell

    Agreed on both counts. It annoys me when somebody makes a change and I don’t know who to scold. It leads to a long interrogation between my business team and nobody will admit it when they think they’re wrong, even if they’re right.

    Maybe a graph of views would be ideal like in other blogs, only we can have two lines: views and contributions. Then maybe contributions can have a link to a list of users in chronological order from most recent.

    On the second count, I like feedback on notes so I can make it better. Maybe I missed a point? Why not use the Evernote program in order to provide feedback? It gets annoying for us to use because we tend to make a notebook called “Commentaries” and then hashtag-reference the title, say “#Bardwell – 21/02/2013 – Going Green” and we know from Hashtag that it’s just a commentary. We put “!” instead of “#” for possible appending or changes, still in the comment box. It would be great to offer a feedback section instead of having to relay on creating our own notebooks for commentaries and sending it all around. Even a central commentary section similar to blogging, like if you can view the note and a link to “View comments” within the framework exists, you can use the UI to download the comments into your note file.

    Just rambling, but I think it is a great idea.

  • amuramoto

    Hi Laguna

    In response to your questions:

    There is no functionality in the app to share multiple notebooks at once.

    You can paste an email address into the invite field. Another option is to import your Gmail contacts, which will auto-complete email address you type in the invite field.

    There is no memory option. The default user permission setting is always ‘View notes and activity’.

  • AndrewSinkov

    A Premium user is able to grant recipients of a shared notebook the right to edit/add/delete content. The recipients can be Free or Premium users.

  • amuramoto

    The best way to do this is to sort the Notebook List by owner, which will group all of the Shared Notebooks owned by you together in the list.

  • amuramoto

    Yes, you can open the share icon on a notebook at any time to see who you have shared it with.

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