Create Your Own Papers

In addition to the Papers available in the Paper Shop, you can also create unique Penultimate papers from any image to fit your note-taking needs. Here’s how it’s done:

1. First, take a photo or scan an image of a blank document you’d like to use as the background of your paper. Then, save it to the Camera Roll on your iPad.
2. Inside any Penultimate Notebook, tap the Papers icon on the top right corner of your screen. Hit the (+) sign, then Continue to add a new Paper.
3. Select the image you’d like to create your Paper from, and name the Paper whatever you would like.
4. Click on your custom Paper to start writing or drawing, just as you normally would. It will now be the default Paper when you create new pages in your current notebook. If you switch Papers or Notebooks and then want to return to the last selection, you can find it in My Papers.

Bonus: To add this paper to Penultimate on your iPad, open the link to this shared note, then tap and hold the .ppr file and tap “Open in Penultimate.”

Any form, diagram, or template that you frequently reference is now synced to all your devices and searchable at a moment’s notice. Custom Papers are a just another way that Penultimate and the rest of Evernote’s apps make getting organized around your projects easy and fun, no matter what information you need to keep track of in your work or daily life.

What kinds of handwritten notes do you take with Penultimate? Share your story in the comments below!

Many seasoned Evernote users have been saving recipes to their Evernote accounts for a while. If you’re like us and you’re more than a little obsessed with collecting recipes, then your food-related notebooks may include recipes in various formats, from JPEGs to web clips to scanned and hand-typed ones.

With Evernote Food 2.1, you can now import designated notebooks with all of these recipes into My Cookbook in Evernote Food. You can also do this with tags if that’s how you organize the notes.

Don’t have Evernote Food 2.1? Download it for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now ».

Let’s review how this feature works.

1. First, launch the app and tap the elephant icon at the top left corner of the screen.

2. Scroll down to Recipe Settings. Tap ‘Include Recipes from Account.’

3. To select Notebooks, tap ‘Include notebooks.’ To select tags, tap ‘Include tags.’

4. On the Notebooks screen, choose the Evernote Notebooks that contain the recipes you want to see in Evernote Food. You can select as many as you want. Don’t worry, you can change your selections whenever you like.

Bonus Tip: make sure to edit your recipe notebooks in Evernote before getting to this step, so only the recipes you want to import show up in Evernote Food. If recipes show up in the app that you don’t want there, you can hide them by tapping the edit tool at the bottom of the recipe screen and then tapping ‘Hide.’

The steps are exactly the same to select tags assigned to recipes you want to see in Evernote Food.

5. Once you’ve made all of your Notebook and tag selections, exit from Settings and open the My Cookbook section in the app. Et voila! You’ll now see all of your recipes in one place within Evernote Food. Give this feature a spin and let us know how it works for you.

Want to learn more about how to use Evernote Food? Check out the following blog posts:

Build a Restaurant Wish List
Build Your Own Cookbook
Chronicle Your Culinary Adventures

For more information on using Evernote Food, check out our Evernote Food user guide and also stop by our Evernote Food Facebook page for regular tips.

Get Evernote for iOS from the App Store »

Snippets on iPad

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that our users love having options when viewing their notes. That’s why we’ve added Snippets to our iPad version. It’s a new note list mode that makes it easy to quickly scan your notes and jump to any month with a handy date scrubber along the right edge. To switch to Snippets, pull down from the top of the note list and tap on the icon.

When you’re viewing Snippets and you tap on a note, the note slides in from the right over part of the Snippets list. This design lets you view and edit the note, while also letting you scroll through the note list.

By default, Snippets contain the title, date, tags, an image, and some text from the note’s body. If you prefer seeing less information, simply tap on the gear icon in the lower right corner of the screen and choose what you want to see.

Improved PDFs

For this update, we’ve embedded a new PDF viewer that makes reading PDFs a much better experience.

• Multi-page: Jump to any page in your PDF by tapping on the page images along the bottom of the PDF or the grid icon in the top left corner.
• Search: Tap the magnifying glass to search within the PDF. Premium subscribers will also be able to search inside scanned PDFs.
• Landscape view: Turn your iPhone or iPad on its side to get a two-page view.
• Rotation lock: Tap the rotate icon in the top right corner to lock the PDF in place so it doesn’t move when you turn your device.

New Formatting Options

In past updates, we’ve given you the tools you need to add all sorts of text styling and formatting to your notes. In today’s update, we have two new options to strip unwanted formatting away. To access the options tap on the “A” above the keyboard on iPhone or the “no-formatting” icon above the keyboard on iPad when editing a note.

• Simplify Formatting is great for cleaning up any formatting issues that you may encounter in a note. This is particularly useful for cleaning up web clips.
• Plain Text removes all rich text, formatting and images from your note leaving behind only the text.

New Evernote Business Features

This update adds two great new features for our Evernote Business users.

Offline Notebook Support
Evernote Business users can now download any or all of their Business Notebooks to their device, allowing the notes to load instantly even without a network connection. Select the Business Notebooks you wish to take offline by going to the Business Premium view on the home screen, then tap “Offline Notebooks.”

View the Business Library on iPad
The Business Premium view also lets iPad users view your company’s Business Library. From there, you can see all of the Business Notebooks published by your colleagues and choose the ones that you’d like to sync to your account. Once you join and sync a Business Notebook to your Evernote account, it will appear in your notebook list.

The Evernote Trunk on iPad

There are thousands of amazing developers across the globe building integrations that extend the power of Evernote. Now, you can explore everything that our community has to offer right from the app. Tap on your user name in the top-left corner of the home screen and select the Trunk. When you see an iOS app that you like, you can install it right from the Trunk, no need to go searching in iTunes.

And More…

In addition to these great features, we’ve also improved our handling of large notes, fixed tons of bugs, and we now let you open PDFs and images in other apps. We hope you like the latest version of Evernote of iOS. Let us know what you think.

Get Evernote for iOS from the App Store »

Dolphin, the popular mobile browser, recently released a new version for iPad that integrates Evernote’s Web Clipper technology. This means, for the first time, you can seamlessly clip web pages to Evernote from your iPad, and get the same quality experience as when you use the Evernote Web Clipper on desktop browsers. Add that to Dolphin’s other features, such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks, and customizable gesture-based navigation, and you have a great browsing experience on your iPad.

Download Dolphin now in the Evernote Trunk.

Clip on the Go

Whether waiting for your plane at the airport or sitting in a coffee shop, you can look up whatever is on your mind, and clip it to Evernote to reference later. Anything from travel information to discounts you discover to information for a research project can be clipped, and Dolphin will format it properly in Evernote where it will be searchable and accessible. Just as with the Evernote Web Clipper, you can specify the destination notebook, and add tags or comments. Additionally, taking advantage of the iPad’s touchscreen, you can annotate your Web Clips to note anything you don’t want to forget.

Working Closely Together

This is the first time a partner has integrated Evernote’s Web Clipper technology to provide the best clipping experience on iPad. Previously, Dolphin had an Evernote plugin available only on Android, but Dolphin heard from the Evernote community that they wanted the full Evernote Web Clipper experience on iPad. “We listened to their feedback, and worked closely with Evernote’s Dev Team to make it happen, and we are very happy with the result,” said  Edith Yeung, Head of Corporate Strategy at Dolphin. Working together with our partners to create the features and experiences that our users really want is the kind of integration we strive for, and the Dolphin Browser for iPad is a great example.

Enter Our Swag Giveaway!

To celebrate the integration, we’re giving away two gift packs that include Evernote and Dolphin t-shirts, a Dolphin notebook, and Evernote stickers. We’ll randomly select one person from our community of beta testers who helped polish the integration, and one from those who comment on this blog post. For a chance to win on the blog, please leave a comment by noon February 15th, with the hashtag #Dolphin, and let us know why you like Dolphin.

Are you a developer interested in joining the more than 20,000 developers worldwide who are building with Evernote? Visit dev.evernote.com to get more information and get started!

Get the latest Evernote for iPhone and iPad »

Business Premium

When you join your company’s Evernote Business account, your current Evernote account is upgraded to Business Premium, which gives you access to the content and knowledge of others in your organization. When you upgrade, you’ll notice some new things appear in Evernote.

Learn more about Evernote Business »

Business Notebooks

Evernote for iPhone and iPad now let you create Business Notebooks, in addition to your existing Personal ones. To do this, go to the Notebook view and tap the Edit button. Next, tap on New Notebook and choose Business from the list.

Viewing Business Notebooks

Once you’ve joined your company’s Business Notebooks using Evernote on Mac, Web and Windows, you can view them any time using Evernote for iPhone and iPad. The Business Notebooks are a gray color to make them easy to distinguish. On iPhone, they appear below Personal Notebooks.

It’s important to keep in mind that Evernote Business gives you, the user, a single place for both Personal and Business Notebooks, but your company only knows about the Business Notebooks.

Business Notes View

Evernote Business users will also find a new view in the home screen: Business Notes. Tap this view to jump directly into the note list that shows all of the notes contained in the Business Notebooks that you have joined. When you open the view, pull down to expose search and sorting options.

Sorting options for all users

All users now get a set of sorting options to help them find the notes they’re looking for more easily. When you’re viewing a note list, pull down and you’ll see a Sort button. Tap it and choose to either sort the list by Updated Date or Created Date (the newest note will display at the top). You can also sort notes by title.

And more

This update also allows Premium and Business Premium users to hide the Premium View from the home screen. You’ll see the the option if you tap on the Premium View and scroll to the bottom. You can always bring it back in Settings.

We’re excited to bring this new, better Evernote Business experience to our iPhone and iPad users, as well as some new features for Free and Premium users. Let us know what you think.

Sign up for Evernote Business now »

• Name: Jordan Jones
• Profession: IT Manager
• Hobby/Interest: Genealogy
• Location: Raleigh, NC
• Website: http://www.genealogymedia.com/

Bio

Jordan Jones is a genealogist and director of the North Carolina Genealogy Society. He is also the President of the National Genealogical Society. Jordan finds Evernote to be an indispensable way to gather, store, organize, reference, and retrieve notes, images of records, and research plans.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• iPhone
• iPad
• Mac

I use Evernote for…Genealogical Research

I had been using Evernote on and off for a couple of years and as time progressed, I noticed I was using it for everything from my day job to my personal finances. I wanted to get even more out of it, so I upgraded to Premium and began taking advantage of even more features and monthly upload capacity.

In the genealogy space, Evernote is a popular tool because our work involves building complex databases around the research that we do.

In this day and age, more documents are becoming digitized and the challenge is figuring out how to find and organize them. I use Evernote to capture documents, images, and PDFs I find online, and later add descriptive notes to these pieces of information. Serious genealogists try to keep a record of everything they find, even if it’s full of lies and conjecture. (For example, if you suspect that a document might be fraudulent or inaccurate, you can make a note of it. If you come across it again, you will know that you already saw and evaluated it.) Using Evernote, you can add your own notes, questions, and task boxes to the images of records you find in your research.

Some people outside of genealogy may not realize it, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has the largest genealogical library in the world, a wonderful resource for genealogists. Much of what is in these archives of over 1.2 million reels of microfilm consists of records in the public domain. The church is in the process of digitizing all of these documents, so I’m able to capture a lot of useful information from their website and quickly save it to my Evernote account using the Evernote Web Clipper.

Often times, I find interesting factoids in jpeg, PDF, Excel, and Tiff files, which I save to Evernote and then organize using a hierarchy of tags including ‘genealogy’ or ‘surname.’ I also have a list of tags for individuals so I can quickly search and find all documents I have related to a certain person, family or county. Once I narrow down my notes in Evernote, I can start writing about what I’ve discovered. Having all of the information I’m referencing in one, easy-to-search place saves me a lot of time — not to mention, physical space!

Putting all the pieces together

As I’m collecting my research, I make sure to write source citations so that I or anyone else would know exactly where to find this information and would have some sense of where that document came from, who created it and for what purpose.

If I’m writing the story of a family unit, I add Note Links to information that has an associated notation. That way, I can immediately find where each piece came from, and even quickly refer to related photos and documents that helped me come up with the final write-up, without actually leaving my Evernote account.

“Our goal is to dig through lots of information to figure out what really happened, when, where, and why” — Jordan Jones

The biggest challenge for genealogists is that people jump to conclusions about how history played out. The Internet can distribute these unsubstantiated conclusions very widely. Our goal is to dig through lots of information to figure out what really happened, when, where, and why. Using Evernote to manage the information I find is invaluable to helping me organize my thoughts and never lose sight of my tracks.

Another great benefit of using Evernote for my research and writing is that I have a complete archive of everything I’ve ever worked on. It’s organized by notebooks and tags, searchable, and accessible from virtually any computer or mobile device. You never know where different pieces might come into play later, so it’s important to keep everything I find.

A little background on genealogy, and why we do this

Historically, genealogy has been associated with people who wanted to prove they were related to important individuals such as kings and queens. Personally, I am much more interested in exploring micro history — how common people lived at various times, what I like to call “history at ground level.” Most of the history we learn about from books and in school showcases the lives of generals and kings; it misses popular history, how people actually lived. In my research, I constantly come across things that are interesting, surprising, and hardly covered in history books! For example, I discovered that my great-great grandfather was a ‘galvanized Yankee,’ in other words, he fought on both sides of the Civil War, joining the Union army as a way out of the POW camp. There was a very small group of people who were in this position and as a result, this historical fact didn’t get much coverage.

• Name: Mel Walker
• Profession: Software Engineer at Evernote
• Hobby: Writing
• Location: Pleasanton, CA

Bio

Mel Walker is a software engineer on the Evernote Mac team. He calls himself a “novelist” as well, even though he’s still working on the rewrites before publishing. Mel used to own over 1,000 novels before he started donating them to the local library. He’s always wanted to learn French so he could read “The Three Musketeers” in its original language.

I use Evernote, Everywhere:

• Mac
• iPhone
• iPad
• Web

I use Evernote for participating in NaNoWriMo

Writing is a hobby of mine, my main creative outlet. I love the dialogue and description, action and mayhem, plots and themes. I put my poor characters in the most awful situations before I save them.

I got into writing a few years ago by participating in National Novel Writing Month, and now I take part in it every November. NaNoWriMo is a writing challenge, the object of which is to write a novel of 50,000 words in a month. That’s roughly 1667 words to write every day!

Some of the writers in NaNoWriMo just sit down, start writing, and keep it up until they reach “The End.” I’m not much for seat-of-the-pants writing so I collect, brainstorm, and organize everything I need by the end of October. I tend to amass a lot of information that I like to keep handy, so I use Evernote for creating and organizing my notes for my novel.

Before Evernote, I tried to organize my notes in everything from text files to 3×5 note cards. The problem was that I didn’t always have access to the text files (on the train to work, for example) and the big stack of 3×5 cards was too time-consuming to search through. I tried using notebooks both for plotting and notes, but searching didn’t get any easier, and it was one more thing to carry around.

Evernote solved those problems neatly.

I use Evernote for remembering ideas.

Ideas can come at any time, from anywhere. When I stumble over a new story idea, no matter where I am when the idea strikes, I can write it up and put it in my Ideas notebook. I can also create an audio note if the idea shows up when I’m driving.

Sometimes I stumble over the beginnings of an idea while surfing the Web, so I select the text or image and use the Evernote Web Clipper to save it. I don’t lose the context, either, because the Web Clipper captures the URL from each Web clip.

I use Evernote for planning.

I keep notes on my characters, places and plot in Evernote. I use the Evernote Web Clipper to clip pictures, inspiring ideas, and whatever else I think might be useful. I also use the iPhone’s camera to add photos to my notes.

I use Skitch to annotate pictures and Penultimate to draw simple maps to keep track of where the characters are during the action scenes.

I use Evernote while I’m writing.

How tall is the starship captain? What color is the helmsman’s hair? What language does the security chief swear in? What’s the top speed of a shuttle? What hotel became the enemy base? Does it have a pool?

Questions like these have to be answered quickly so I don’t lose my train of thought. I keep my novel notes organized by notebook and tag. I can search my Evernote notebooks to quickly find what I need. If I search for the same information a second or third time, I can create a Saved Search to save me time.

There’s a flip side to all this: What if I haven’t decided what color the helmsman’s hair is? After I choose a color, I add that piece of information to her character note. Now I have it when I need it, either now or for the sequel.

During NaNoWriMo, the local volunteers often hold “write-ins” so we writers can meet and introduce ourselves. We also have a bit of fun while writing, like engaging in word count races (e.g. most words added in ten minutes). I have Evernote with me, so I still have access to all my notes, either on my laptop or on my iPhone.

I wish I didn’t have to mention this last one, but having all the character names in Evernote means that I (1) don’t misspell any of them, and (2) don’t spontaneously rename them halfway through the book.

I use Evernote when I’m done writing.

The first draft of a book is never publishable. Often the sixth or seventh draft isn’t publishable. Throw out a chapter! Eliminate a character! Rewrite entire scenes! Such is the lot of a writer. I keep the old drafts around to see what I did before, just in case my new idea was even worse than my old one (which happens too often!). I simply drag the word processing document into a note and add a summary of the changes I made.

I use Evernote to improve my writing skills.

I have a notebook catch-all for articles and notes about writing in general. I can read them anywhere, thanks to having Evernote accessible on all my devices.

While studying is good, the only way to improve as a writer is to write. Ideally, I should write every day. Using Evernote as a journal, I can keep all my practicing in one spot for later review or for sharing with my writing group.

More NaNoWriMo Tips from Paperless Ambassador Jamie Todd Rubin

This November will be Paperless Ambassador Jamie Todd Rubin‘s fourth year participating in NaNoWriMo and he’s sharing his tips for ways to use Evernote on his blog. Check out Jamie’s tips for using Evernote for NaNoWriMo.

• Name: Chris Murphy
• Location: Austin, Texas
• Profession: Co-Owner/Salon Director
• Company: MFX SalonSpa
• Website: www.maximumfx.com

Bio

Chris Murphy is the co-owner and salon director of MFX SalonSpa in Austin, Texas. Chris works with salon and spa owners throughout the U.S. and relies on Evernote to not only manage his business and various speaking opportunities, but to remember people and improve his company’s recruiting and HR processes.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• iPad
• iPhone
• Mac

Favorite Evernote Products

• Evernote Hello for capturing potential salon candidates

I use Evernote for…managing my salon business

I had downloaded Evernote a while ago but couldn’t really wrap my head around how I could incorporate it into my business until I had lunch with Real Estate Ambassador Krisstina Wise. Once she filled me in on the ways she was using Evernote for her business, I thought that I should really have another look. And suddenly, all of the different ways I could be using it just hit me. Now, I don’t know how I could live without it.

I own an Aveda Lifestyle Salon and Spa with multiple physical locations, so one of the most important things to me about Evernote is that it syncs and information I capture is available anywhere. The salon industry is a labor intensive industry so there are always lots of schedules to stay on top of, reviews to keep track of, etc. Being able to manage this type of information in Evernote and be able to access it from anywhere is so helpful.

In addition to the day-to-day management of information, one of the key areas of business that Evernote has majorly impacted is our recruiting process.

Evernote and Evernote Hello for recruiting

Aveda has institutes across the U.S. and because we have relationships with many of them, we tend to do on-site recruiting at different locations. We recruit most heavily from institutes in Austin, San Antonio and Houston. During our visits we usually give a presentation, after which we get approached by 50-60 people who want to learn more about our company and submit their resumes. Prior to Evernote, we didn’t have an efficient system for gathering contact information on site and staying connected with potential candidates.

Having recently downloaded Evernote Hello, I realized that we could be using it to take pictures of candidates who stopped by our table and capture all of their information right then and there. Because Evernote Hello syncs with Evernote, we could even pre-select a specific notebook (in our case, ‘Job Fairs’) to send all of these notes to. Now, instead of collecting business cards or writing down information on scraps of paper, we capture everything using Evernote Hello. I love that Evernote Hello also uses my phone’s GPS to capture the location where the note was taken — this makes it easy for me to connect certain faces with specific institute visits.

Our company has a 6 step recruiting process, and when you have a large volume of applicants rolling in, you can imagine it’s easy to get tripped up over where they are in the process. Between Evernote and Evernote Hello, we’ve been able to essentially streamline our system.

Creating a recruiting system inside of Evernote

We have several notebooks in a Notebook Stack that we use to manage the recruiting process. All of the applicants we capture using Evernote Hello get automatically saved to the ‘Job Fairs’ notebook. We have a separate notebook that includes all scanned resumes that we receive. We have another notebook that includes all applicants who we are interested in; we automatically send all of these applicants a list of questions as a first step. As candidates move through the process, we take notes along the way and funnel them on to the next step. If we decide not to move forward with a candidate, we add them to a separate notebook that we use as a reminder to notify these people.

Using Evernote as the central hub for our recruiting has allowed us to be a lot more efficient and provided more clarity around the recruitment process. I’m able to share recruiting notebooks with all of my managers, who can see applicants coming in, in real time. Plus, they can add their comments to all of the notes, so the interview and hiring process is really collaborative. Ultimately, we can process a larger volume of information and yet stay organized. We’re not a huge company with big management systems and using Evernote has really helped us! Evernote has completely changed how we do business; we end up hiring more quality people.

Evernote for performance reviews

In addition to being instrumental in our recruiting process, Evernote has also played an important role in the way that we handle performance reviews. We create a note for each team member in Evernote and then refer to the individual’s note during our monthly meeting, adding notes each time. Because everything is in Evernote, multiple people (including myself and a team leader) can edit the note simultaneously; I can have my iPad in the meeting, while the team lead can be taking notes on his/her device at the same time, throughout the conversation. Later, we can share the note with the team member we reviewed so they can have access to all of our feedback.

• Name: Russell Curtis
• Location: London, UK
• Profession: Architect
• Company: RCKa (employees: 10)
• Website:  www.rcka.co.uk
• Twitter:  @russellcurtis

Bio

Russell Curtis is the founder and director of London-based architectural practice RCKa, a finalist for 2011 Young Architect of the Year. His firm employs Evernote as its main content management and collaboration tool.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• Windows
• iPad
• Android

I use Evernote for managing content and collaborating with colleagues at my architectural firm

I started using Evernote about four years ago, but in the last twelve months, it’s become a core tool at my firm. As a young architecture practice, we were looking for a way to better manage and share information amongst our team and we also needed to find a quality management system for our business. A few of us were already using Evernote on a personal level, so we decided to make the jump to a Sponsored Account. As a Chartered Practice in the UK, we have to have a formal management system in place. We turned to Evernote as that quality management system that we use to record information and make it accessible to other people in the organization. Now, we do everything in Evernote.

Evernote as a central database

Besides being a tool that everyone at the firm uses for various projects, Evernote is the universal database for our practice. We store examples of work (including materials, interesting buildings, etc.), as well as helpful information, such as examples we’ve scoured in journals and on websites, in a Shared Notebook. We tag all of our notes and are continually adding to this library. Previously, this information was stored on a server but it was impossible to organize information in a rational way. In Evernote, everything is searchable, and even accessible on the go. If we want to do a search for buildings made of render, or art galleries, for example, we can just type a few keywords into Evernote to quickly find what we’re looking for.

Working together on the go

Evernote is hugely helpful for storing all information related to a building project because we can carry all of this documentation with us everywhere. When one of us visits a building site, we can immediately pull up everything we need on an iPad, phone or laptop. We have Shared Notebooks for each project, so all of our documentation is neatly organized for all to easily search.

Evernote has fundamentally changed the way we do business. Essentially, every piece of information — whether paper or digital — goes into Evernote. The way we used to do things was quite painful; with Evernote, the sharing of information has been streamlined. Historically, we’ve organized information in folders on a server but the problem with that system was that there were always things that didn’t neatly fall into a folder. Now, people know exactly where to go and because Evernote offers an almost non-structured format, no one has to spend a lot of time figuring out exactly where something is, and they know they can view things in chronological order and search for them regardless of whether they know which notebook they’re in.

Whether we’re at the office or on the go, we are constantly adding information to our Shared Notebooks. We’ve deployed Evernote as a formal way of doing business at various stages of every project. At the office, we have a scanner that we email a lot of marked up drawings to. It’s configured to automatically send everything to Evernote. When we’re finishing a project, we’re often on site and go through a process called snagging — scheduling small items of unfinished work which need to be put right. We go through a list of items that need to be checked off using Evernote on our mobile devices. With Evernote, you can snap a photo and make annotations in that same note about what still needs to be completed. By the time you’re back at the office, you’ll be able to hop on your computer and pull up all of the notes you took on site (which will already have synchronised to your computer). From there, you can evaluate what else needs to be done.

Evernote gives us the freedom to be mobile and away from the office. Since we share so much information in one, central, easy-to-search place, even if one of us is out of the office or on holiday, any other team member can respond to a client query. Because all reference information (including correspondence) is in Evernote, no one is ever out of the loop.

More ways to use Evernote

The more we use Evernote, the more we find interesting ways to get more out of it. It grows with us. We recently set up ifttt (an app you can find in the Evernote Trunk) to send new articles from architecture websites to our Shared Notebook in Evernote. We’ve also discovered how powerful the geo-location feature is. We geo-reference examples of work a lot. That way, when one of us travels abroad, we can quickly work out if we’re close to any locations we want to visit. It’s just another way of filtering information. The close integration of Skitch with Evernote also allows us to mark up drawings and sketches quickly and share these ideas with the office.

Are you already using Evernote for your business? Evernote Business is coming soon. Sign up here to stay up-to-date.

• Name: Ayatomo Miyahara
• Location: Kyushu, Japan
• Profession: Representative Director, NPO Fathering Japan
• Website: http://fjq.jp
• Blog: http://amba.to/7n99UW

Bio

Ayatomo, a single parent of 3 children, is the Kyushu Representative Director of NPO Fathering Japan. He writes a newspaper column about parenting and uses Evernote to manage details about work, housework, and parenting. Ayatomo refers to his parenting style as “cloud parenting,” because of the role that Evernote plays in his everyday life.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• Mac
• iPad
• iPhone

Evernote For Work and For School

I initially started using Evernote to draft my newspaper column because I wanted to save drafts online and access them from anywhere. Then I started scanning all the important papers my kids were bringing home from school using Fujitsu’s ScanSnap scanner. I realized I needed a tool to organize all the paperwork, and Evernote was the perfect solution.

Now, I save everything to Evernote: school notes, recipes, pictures, written drafts, presentations, holiday cards, lottery tickets, home appliance manuals…every piece of paper I come across. I automate the process as much as possible. Appliance manuals are often available online as PDFs, so I have set my computer settings to automatically send these PDFs to my Evernote account. I first save everything to a general notebook and later, when I have time, sort my notes among different notebooks such as “Kids,” “Cooking,” and “Drafts.”

Most recently, I started scanning my children’s old textbooks because there are precious doodles and notes inside that I want to keep. I plan to start scanning in their notebooks and summer projects as well.

Keeping Evernote at the center

At our house, we have an iPad in the kitchen on the fridge. It is very convenient for managing our schedules together via Evernote. We used to have papers and notes all over the fridge; those are gone now.

When cooking, I search for recipes in Evernote as I look for whether or not I have the ingredients in the refrigerator. If I happen to have all of the ingredients for a particular recipe, I bring up that recipe to use right in the kitchen. I maintain a shopping list that I can pull up from the iPad on the fridge, too, so I always have an accurate list of what is needed. Since I started doing this, I never forget to buy things anymore and have decreased duplicate purchasing of things I already have. Having Evernote up on the fridge has been incredibly useful. I assure you that anyone can do this; we actually just use tape to hold up the iPad!

Search in Evernote

Evernote is like an online scrapbook. You don’t have to organize everything you put in there, and since there is no limit to what you can upload, you don’t need to pick and choose. That, and the excellent search, are two of the most valuable aspects of the tool for me. For example, you can do ambiguous searches (like search for the letter ‘O’) that may uncover notes you have probably forgotten about. Most of the files I save I probably won’t ever retrieve, but the time I do need something, I know Evernote will always find it for me.

I’ve tried many different online photo-sharing sites, but they were all hard to use. I found that Evernote, with its strong search functionality, is the best. Since I take most of my photos using my iPhone, I use EverPicture to automatically put my pictures into a photo stream and upload them to Evernote. I then add tags or captions. I tag each picture with the name of the child that is in the photo. I also use these photos in my column on parenting, so being able to quickly search and find the photos I want to use saves me a lot of time.

For Evernote newbies

Instead of using many different services that do one thing, I focus on Evernote, which lets me do many things. The more I put into it, the more useful it becomes. It really is my second brain. For those just starting, I recommend saving anything that comes to mind. How that content becomes useful will become apparent later.