Note Links are great for linking together different pieces of travel-related information like itineraries, articles and passport photos, as well as organizing project elements and class research. One of the coolest things you can do with Note Links is create a table of contents for a set of notes inside of a notebook. This is particularly useful if you are sharing a notebook with other individuals.

To do this:

1. Grab the Note Link to a note by right-clicking on the note and selecting to Copy Note Link.
2. Create a New Note in your notebook or go to a note where you’d like that Note Link to go.
3. Paste the link (it will show up as the hyperlinked title of your note) into your New Note or existing note.
4. Do this for all other notes you’d like to include in your table of contents, putting them in the order that you’d like people to look through the notebook.

You can perform this as a batch action, too. Select multiple notes, right click and then add them to your new or existing note.

Are you using Note Links? Share your tips in the comments!

Bio

Daniel works at LexisNexis, where he consults with attorneys on how to be more productive and effective by using LexisNexis litigation software. He’s also an attorney and recently penned an e-book, which is for sale in the Evernote Trunk, about ways to use Evernote to be more productive.

I use Evernote, Everywhere:

• Windows (work)
• Windows & Mac (home)
• Android phone
• iPad

I use Evernote for Work

At LexisNexis, I oversee business relationships with 150 of the largest law firms in 8 states in the Southeast. I quickly found that managing this business was much more complex and challenging than practicing law, and I realized I needed a much better system to organize everything I do at work and responsibilities at home (I’m a dad to three children).

Evernote changed everything for me. It shook the very essence of how I stay organized.

• Evernote is much more than a note-taking app. To me, it’s a life management tool. It allows me to organize everything that I do in my life — from my work, to my blog, to my e-book, and my life with my wife and kids.
• I use one notebook to remember everything except shared information. I have a couple of levels of organization. I use separate tags to break out my GTD methodology (such as contexts, things I need to do today, next actions, active projects, inactive projects, etc). I have a major category for tags, such as Home, Work, Clients, Reference, Stuff, etc., and then minor categories nested underneath, such as insurance, mortgage, doctors, and so forth. I use Notebook Stacks to stay organized as well. Anything that needs to be shared with clients, colleagues or family will go into a Shared Notebook inside of the Stack. To search, I look through my tags, or do a Saved Search. Some of my tags and Saved Searches are dragged to the awesome Favorites Bar!
• When compiling content for a client, I include a lot of information in one note. I’ll include contracts, literature pieces, Powerpoint presentations, and notes where I talked to the client on the phone. I’ll use Note Links to paste a link if the information resides in a separate note within Evernote. A real bonus is that Evernote auto-populates the date and time for me with a single shortcut every time I want to add new information in the note.

• When working on new business, I send all pertinent emails to Evernote. I review those and all relevant notes. When trying to understand next steps, everything is in one central location. [Learn how to email to Evernote]
• Note Links help keep me on track when I’m running around meetings. I think Note Links are the key to success in Evernote! I use them everywhere I can.  For example, when I’m traveling for work, I create a master note with my travel itinerary. In that master note, I include all of the times of where I need to be and when. My airline confirmation is a Note Link in this master note. On my last trip, I had a meeting with a law firm, where I hyperlinked the lawyer’s name to the agenda I created in Evernote for that lawyer, which talked about three things I wanted to accomplish in that meeting. Within that agenda was a Note Link to another note that embedded a video of a client testimonial I saved in Evernote that I wanted to show him. Because I’m a Premium user, I had saved the notes in an offline folder. When it came time to meet, I brought only my iPad, and only had to access that one note to know exactly what we would talk about. I didn’t have to go fiddling around folders, notebooks, or my work laptop. I had it all there in my iPad and all I had to do was click on that Note Link. It was “magical” and the client was really impressed with my organization and professionalism! [Learn how to use Note Links]
• I use Shared Notebooks with my team. This is where I can send other members of my team to benefit from finding existing information, rather than having to spend hours doing repetitive work. For example, I’m working on travel plans with a colleague. I’ve already done the research we need and put it into a Shared Notebook, along with our itinerary. Similarly, while I prepped for a presentation on electronic discovery for a law firm’s litigation team, I did research on LexisNexis to learn more about new case law and about the law firm, created the presentation based on what I found, and then put it all into a Shared Notebook, which I shared with the marketing and branding teams, as well as other colleagues. [Learn more about sharing from Evernote]

• I scan all of my expenses while I travel, to save time later. When I’m at a hotel, I’ll scan all of my receipts for the day. It makes my life so much easier at the end of the week, when I’m back from my trip and don’t have to worry about scanning.

Evernote for Managing Family Life, and Learning

I’ve found Evernote to be an invaluable tool to not only help manage my family trips, recipes, kids’ artwork, and progress reports, but to actually help my son learn.

How I use Peek to Help my Son with Math

My son’s school gives him these 25 question speed drills in math. I wanted to create a fun and engaging way to help him learn the answers to questions, so I decided to give Peek a try. I created a new notebook called ‘Jacob’s math questions’ and took 75 of his math questions and created 75 notes in that notebook. I opened the notebook up in Peek and Jacob has been loving it. It’s so engaging for him and fun to watch him. He gets so excited to lift the cover and see he got the answer right. Evernote has basically helped Jacob turn his math speed drills into something fun!

Get Evernote Peek

Audio Notes for Demonstrating Learning Progress

My son had a reading tutor over the summer and I wanted to track his progress. I turned to the audio note feature in Evernote to record him at the beginning of the summer reading his book. At the end of the summer, I recorded him reading the same exact book. It was not only amazing for me as a parent to hear the difference before and after, but even more amazing for Jacob! Now, Jacob even asks for me to record him in Evernote.

Evernote for Everything Else

I use Evernote for everything related to organizing my family and capturing sentimental things that I might want to recall in the future. For example, I have a ScanSnap scanner which goes with me on all my travels. At home, I use it to scan in my kids’ artwork. To date, I have about 250 notes with artwork tagged with my kids’ names. They know their creations live in Evernote.

I’ve also tried to go paperless, so I scan in documents related to landscaping, pest control, everything for my dog, my kids’ progress reports, and more. [Visit our Paperless discussion]

Another great example of how I use Note Links is for planning family vacations. I was recently planning a family trip with my parents and they wanted to know where we were staying, what we’d be doing, and have directions to all of the places we’d be going. I pulled together all of the information that my wife had planned into an Evernote notebook and sent it off to them. I made it so much easier for my parents! The alternative is sending an email with multiple attachments or sending multiple emails, which can get totally overwhelming. My mom was blown away. [Learn more about sharing from Evernote]

Join the Parenting discussion and read about how our Parenting Ambassador, Carley, uses Evernote for Parenting.

Are you a father or an attorney? Share how you’re using Evernote in the comments.

Bio

Jason Frasca & Steve McDonald are expert private investigators at Davis Investigations, Inc., a company that specializes in video surveillance and investigations related to insurance, medical malpractice, personal injury fraud, and divorce. The company has turned Evernote into their case manager. Read on to see how they used Evernote’s open data format to build additional functionality to help them manage 600 legacy cases and 200 open cases.

We use Evernote, Everywhere:

Employees are often out in the field with their mobile devices. In the office, they primarily use Macs and some log into their Evernote accounts from home, on their PCs.

• Mac
• iPad
• Android Tablet
• Android phone
• Windows

We use Evernote for…

Our whole company uses Evernote. We all have Premium accounts and sharing is absolutely critical for our work. We primarily use Evernote as our centralized case management system. We have 2408 notes in the system. Imagine how many manilla folders it would take to house our entire case file, which lives virtually.

When we first started using Evernote as a company, we realized that we could customize it to our unique needs (much like the way 3rd party developers have done with a breadth of integrated Trunk applications). We used Evernote’s open data format to create our own custom interface for the .enex format, allowing us to work with Evernote even MORE efficiently.

Using the Evernote data format to customize Evernote to our liking

When we realized that Evernote notes can be exported as .enex files, we saw an opportunity to use a text editor to make changes across multiple notes at once. From there, we went on to build a full featured application that can manipulate a blank case template file and generate all of the notes necessary to open a new case with much of the information already filled in. This templated approach to creating new case files has saved us an immeasurable amount of time in the document-generation process.

Evernote for case file management

Every person in the company has a Premium account and we use Shared Notebooks when we capture information, create new cases, and need to access information related to any given case. Transitioning from our old case management system was easy; we used the Evernote Web Clipper to move all of our case files into Evernote. Here’s a look at how we keep our case files organized in Evernote:

• Universal Index for every case. We have one Shared Notebook that serves as a universal index of every case. We use Note Links to navigate to the head note of each individual case. [Learn more about sharing in Evernote]
• Shared Notebooks for all cases. We have another Shared Notebook that contains all of the cases. There are 12 notes per case and the bulk of our case files live in this second, shared notebook.
• Tagging cases. We tag each case with the year, client, and file number. Each case has 2-6 tags. The title of each note has a an associated file number as well.
• Notes to remember people. Every case we open includes a note on the person we are investigating. This includes their physical description, location, car, etc.
• Client correspondence. Client correspondence is also saved in Evernote, so we always have a record of it. We have one tag that keeps it all together in one neat pile.
• File storage. We store documents in Evernote, too. It’s easy to attach them to any note and always be able to access them when we need them.
• Video storage. Since we do video surveillance, we have a lot of video saved in Evernote. Videos are saved to notes associated with each individual file.

At this point, 80-85% of our office work is done in Evernote. If we wanted to see all of the files from a certain client, we’d just have to start typing in their name (we wouldn’t even need to know their case number) and all of the notes associated with that case would pop up. Now, we can search back to 2005. That’s incredible.

Evernote in the field

A big part of our job involves being out in the field conducting and capturing video surveillance. When you’re in the field and it’s 5 a.m and you’re looking at your Android phone screen, you want to look in a specific area, get the details you need and then focus on the task at hand. You don’t want to be wandering around, searching for information. Here are a few other ways Evernote helps us in the field:

1. For capturing information on the go. Clients call all the time to give us new cases, but we’re not always at the computer to process a case. The other day, Jason was out in the field and he had a pen and paper on hand. He was able to jot down information the client shared, take a photo of it and send it to Steve. Back at the office, Steve was able to open the case. Now, not only do we have the formal case, but the original piece of paper saved in Evernote, too.
2. For collaboration. We always have two private investigators working on every case and Evernote allows everyone to be on the same page. If an update is made by one person, the other investigator is able to access it. It’s critical to be able to access notes as they’re being made.
3. For having access to thousands of notes on your mobile device. When you’re out in the field, you don’t have your computer with you, but you need to have immediate access to information. Having access to our entire case file and having it be completely searchable — in seconds — is invaluable.

User Tip

The Offline Notebook is a killer feature for mobile devices. When we’re on surveillance, we’re not always in an area where we have connectivity. We travel in a 150 mile radius on a daily basis and there’s not always a cell phone connection. With Offline Notebooks, we can access the case we’re working on, even if we’re ‘out of range.’

Evernote offers us a really fantastic tool that is super efficient and gives us everything we need to organize our entire company incredibly well. It’s also helping us move towards a paperless and incredibly mobile environment. Evernote has cut the time it takes us to open a new case in half.

*Names and places in screenshots have all been changed.

Creating a Note Link

You can create Note Links on any desktop version of Evernote and access Note Links from Evernote anywhere (including mobile versions). Creating a Note Link is easy: right click on a note and choose the Copy Note Link option, or choose it from the Note Menu. The link will be placed into your clipboard. From there, you can paste the link anywhere — a calendar event, a Post It on your desktop, another note, another application that you use, etc. Note Links are meant for you to access your own notes more quickly. Clicking on the Note Link in any location will pop up the note associated with that link.

Note Links are a super powerful way to bring organization, structure, and connectivity to all of your notes in Evernote.

Create Note Links on Your Desktop, Access them Everywhere

Once you start using Note Links, you probably won’t go back. Here are some great reasons to give them a try:

1. Create a table of contents for a selection of notes. Whether you’re working on a study guide or planning your wedding, you can use Note Links to get ahead of the game. Create a new note and add Note Links for things like Notes: October, Notes: December, etc. or “Guest List,” “Flowers,” “Vendor Numbers.” Do this for a Shared Notebook to help collaborators see your organization structure at first glance.
2. Add more context to your calendar.* Have a meeting scheduled and want to remember all of the goals you jotted down in Evernote? Place a Note Link associated with your Goals note straight into the calendar invite by pasting the link into the notes section of your calendar. Pull up your note straight from your calendar by clicking on the link.
3. Associate notes with a big presentation. Keep the research you’ve saved in Evernote handy right inside a working presentation: drop Note Links into slides or comments for quick reference.
4. Access your frequently-used notes, fast. Have a handful of notes that you’re always referring to (a piece of code for your blog, instructions for cleaning your pool, or important numbers related to your kids activities), link them all to a ‘Most Used Notes.’ You’ll barely have to search again.
5. Create a calendar reminder.* Wish your notes could remind you of to-dos? They can. Create a checklist or to-do list in your Evernote account. Paste a Note Link into notes section of your calendar event like ‘To-do’ deadlines and use your calendar with Evernote to stay on top of whatever you have to get done. When you click a Note Link from the Web, or your calendar, it opens Evernote on your desktop (if you have it installed) and highlights the note.
6. Add Note Links to Shared Notebooks. If you put Note Links into a note and drop that note into a Shared Notebook, the people you’ve shared that notebook with will be able to use them, too. This particular use case is super helpful if you’re working on a project that might require a table of contents, for example, to give added structure to a Shared Notebook.

*If supported by your program, Note Links open Evernote when clicked. In some cases (for example, when using Google Calendar) you may need to add HTML code to make the Note Link clickable. In all cases,  notes you link are only visible to you and will not work if you do not have Evernote installed on your desktop or mobile device.

These are just a few ideas for how you can use Note Links. How are you using Note Links?

Bio

Ryan Kessler is a student from Southern California who will be starting college in the Fall. Evernote helped Ryan get organized his senior year of high school and raise his GPA from a 2.9 to a 4.4 (if you’re unfamiliar with these numbers, that’s really great!). Read on to find out how he did it.

I use Evernote, Everywhere:

• Android (phone and Tablet)
• Windows
• Web Clipper (Chrome)

I love…

• The Droidscan app for scanning all of my docs using my phone
• Nozbe for giving calendar context to my Evernote notes
• tarpipe for publishing content to my various social streams with one single action

I use Evernote for…

My senior year of high school, I took 5 high school courses, 4 college classes and worked part-time, so I needed to find a tool that would help me stay organized and focused on whatever task I needed to complete. Evernote completely changed my workflow.

1. Evernote for staying focused

A big part of being a high school student is being able to switch modes extremely quickly. Within a few hours, you have to go from physics to history. Evernote lets me do this seamlessly.

I have a Notebook Stack of notebooks for various activities, including school and work. When I’m at work, I open my Work Notebook Stack and know that I won’t have any distractions because I wouldn’t see all of my extra-curricular stuff mixed into work stuff. [An introduction to Notebook Stacks]

2. Evernote for getting organized

My freshman and sophomore year, I was very disorganized. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t managing my time well, it was that I couldn’t find the things I wanted when I needed them. I used to spend hours just sorting through my schoolwork to find one assignment. Once I started using Evernote, life became a lot more organized:

• I got into a routine of sorting everything into Evernote as soon as I got it so I could instantly access it when I needed it. I attribute my GPA boost largely to my new-found ability to find everything quickly, from any device I was working on.
• Once I get stuff in Evernote, I organize it. I have a tagging system to separate out tasks and projects.
• I scan paper documents using Droidscan, which is a fantastic app I found in the Evernote Trunk.
• I draft reports right in Evernote, where my research is close at hand.

3. Evernote for lightening my load and connecting all of my devices

I started using Evernote so much, I stopped thinking about it. I even started scanning textbook sections I needed that day in class so I’d have them on my phone. It got to the point where I would go to school with only my journal and my phone.

A lot of students bring their laptops to class because they think they need to carry around their files. With Evernote, I never had to lug around my laptop. Our school would rent out laptops from the library, so if I needed to print anything, I’d just stick it into Evernote in the morning, pop by the library at the end of the day, pull up Evernote on the Web and use the school printer. I never think of having a thumb drive anymore.

With Evernote, I can see everything I have to do, want to do, and already done. I never have to think ‘Oh, shoot, I left something in my locker!’ Maybe I forgot my phone in my locker, but because everything in Evernote syncs across every device I own (not to mention the Web), I know it’s still there and I could access it from my desktop at home, the school laptop in the library, or my tablet.

4. Evernote for group projects and class discussions

When you’re working with a group, you tend to get a lot of information passed back and forth via email. I started using Evernote to keep track of all of my group projects by giving group members my Evernote email. Everything related to the project would get sent to my Evernote account, where I could organize it accordingly and stay on top of the latest versions and conversations. [Emailing to Evernote]

We’d often have class discussions via a thread on a forum that my school subscribes to. Threads would get long and tedious and require you to login to keep track of the conversation. I would just clip it to my Evernote account and pull it up whenever I needed it.

5. Evernote for crunch time

Creating a study guide before a big test was so easy with Evernote. I would compile all of my notes from a certain time period and put them into a separate notebook. From there, I could reference only the materials I needed to study.

6. Evernote for learning a foreign language

I love Evernote’s Audio Note function to help me remember stuff, but it’s also a killer way to help you learn a language. I use audio notes to record myself pronouncing words, then play back the recording to see if my pronunciation matched my teacher’s pronunciation. When you’re learning a language, you need some way of hearing yourself to perfect your accent.

7. Evernote for building my future

I’m starting college in the Fall and will be studying entrepreneurship and design. I attended the Evernote Trunk Conference and saw Kyle Koch’s presentation about using Evernote for industrial design and was blown away. Evernote is crazy powerful for design and I’m excited to see how it fits into my ongoing studies and professional career. [Read Kyle Koch's story]

User Tip: Note Links for Creating a Study Guide in a Single Note

Note Links are an awesome way to associate two notes incredibly quickly. I use Note Links to create a study guide in a single note. I often snap a photo of the whiteboard in class and then take notes as well. With Note Links, I can link my notes to the whiteboard image, giving additional context. [Learn how to link your notes]

Join the discussion about Evernote for Schools on our forum. Learn from educators and share your own experiences, best practices and tips.