Notebook Stacks allow you to nest your notebooks under more general ones (for example: Trip to Japan under Travel, or Website Redesign under Work Projects). This feature is useful for breaking a large work project into into smaller buckets, organizing your work notes under different focus areas, and compartmentalizing your life and work-focused notes so you can easily jump between them. Think of Notebook Stacks as digital dividers for your cloud-based filing system.

This post is part of a series we’re calling ‘Working with Evernote.’

• In-app and email Alarms
• Quick note based to-do lists
• Pinning notes to the top of your note list

The Reminders feature is currently available on Evernote for Mac, iOS and Evernote Web.

How Reminders Work

Reminders are incredibly easy to use. You can add a Reminder to a note by simply tapping on the alarm clock icon located at the top of the note on Mac and Web, and at the bottom of the note on iPhone and iPad. If you like, set a date and time for when this note must be completed.

You’ll get an in-app alarm and, optionally, an email the day that a Reminder is due. Once set, you’ll see the note title appear in the new Reminder section at the top of the note list. You can change the order of Reminders simply by dragging them around. When you complete your task, tap on the check or, on iOS, swipe to remove the Reminder from the list.

Like most things in Evernote, Reminders sync across all versions of the app that support the new feature.

Reminders and Notebooks

To keep your Reminders nicely organized, we’ve made them notebook-based. Whenever you add a Reminder to a note, it will appear in the Reminder section within that notebook. This is a perfect way to keep various projects separated. Of course, if you want to see them all in one place, simply go to the All Notes view.

Shared Reminders
By associating Reminders with notebooks, we’re able to do some really cool stuff. First, since Reminders show up at the top of a given notebook, they can be used as a handy way to highlight the most important notes in that notebook—it’s like creating a quick table of contents for your visitors. In addition, anyone who has access to your notebook is able to subscribe to be notified when notes come due. This way the entire team will stay informed about group projects and tasks.

Great for Business
All of these features are also available to our Evernote Business users, so that you’re not just sharing your team’s knowledge, but also moving your projects forward.

4 Ways to Use Reminders Right Now

We’ve been testing Reminders for a few weeks now. Here are some of the great things to try.

Birthday gifts
Evernote has always been a great way to clip gift ideas. Create a notebook called Gift ideas, and add notes containing gifts for your friends and family. Add a Reminder to each note set to a week before the person’s birthday. Now you’ll know what to get and when to get it.

Project planning
At Evernote, we use Reminders to plan all of our video projects. We’ve set up a shared notebook with the team called Video Projects. In it, we have a running list of all ongoing projects and their completion dates. If something needs to be reprioritized, we drag it to the top of the list. Once a project is completed, it’s marked as done and we’re on to the next one.

Packing right
You’ll never forget your toothbrush again. Create your packing list note and set a Reminder to go off a few hours before the trip. Because Reminders are associated with notes, you’ll not only be notified to check your packing list, but you’ll also see the entire thing. If you have everything you need, mark the note as done.

Doctors orders
Before heading off to the doctor’s office for a checkup, create a note with questions that you want to be sure to cover. Set a Reminder for the time of the appointment and you won’t miss a thing. Repeat this the next time you have an appointment so that you have a running history of past questions and answers.

Only The Beginning

It’s not often that we get to unveil such a highly-requested, powerful feature, which is why we’re so excited to hear your reaction. We’re far from finished. We have big plans to expand the functionality, and to bring it to more platforms in the very (very) near future. Go on, create some reminders and let us know what you think.

Additionally, recipes saved to Evernote as Word documents can now be viewed in Evernote Food, meaning that the app supports every popular format people tend to use for digital recipe collecting: Web Clipping, JPEGs, PDFs, and recipes you manually type and save to a notebook.

Get the latest Evernote Food for iOS »

Tips for Maximizing My Cookbook

Here are some tips for both iOS and Android users to maximize the sync between Evernote and Evernote Food to curate your recipe collection:

• Have a treasured collection of grandma’s 3×5 recipe cards? Snap a photo and save the ones you want to your recipe notebook in Evernote, where they’ll automatically push to Evernote Food.
• Scan or photograph printed recipes into Evernote, then view and cook from them on your phone or tablet using Evernote Food.
• In addition to clipping recipes within the Evernote Food app, you can also use Evernote’s Web Clipper to save recipes in Evernote. Like magic, the recipes you clip will show up immediately in your Evernote Food cookbook.

Other New Features

A few more great updates in Evernote Food 2.2.2 for iOS (both already available to Android users) are the addition of restaurant directions (once you’ve researched a restaurant and booked a table within the app, you can now easily navigate there from the app), as well as an update to My Meals that lets users pinch-to-zoom when viewing photos in gallery view. More new features to come soon; let us know what you think!

Don’t have Evernote Food? Download the current version for iOS and Android here.

Evernote Hello lets you capture information about the people you meet: name, email address, picture, etc., in three unique ways, including very fast business-card scanning. Evernote Hello stores contacts in Evernote, lets you push information to your address books and it can, with a single tap, send the person you’ve just met your own information back, closing the social loop.

Hello Connect lets you share contact details with people you meet. (Android version shown.)

But for Evernote watchers, there’s more to Hello than its utility. There are several features that we’re experimenting with for possible inclusion in Evernote or in our other apps. As Evernote Hello product manager Martin Cheng said when I grilled him on this strategy, “Evernote Hello was always thought of as an experimental platform. It’s where we try new interactions and ideas.” Here are some of them.

#1: Hello Connect

One of the coolest things about the current version of Evernote Hello is Connect, a feature that lets people quickly, and rather magically, exchange contact info. It works one-on-one, or in a local grouping with people (like, sitting around a table). When you all fire up the Connect feature in Hello, one of the devices will send out a series of audio tones, and the devices nearby that hear those tones are then assumed to be in the local group. Once the grouping is established, everyone’s name shows up in everyone else’s app, and each user can import all (or some) of the contacts they’re looking at.

The feature could be used for more than just sharing contact info. We’re already thinking about using Connect in Evernote Food (sharing recipes with friends) and even in Evernote (for quickly sharing notes, say around a conference table).

We’re still tweaking the technology, privacy controls, and interaction model, but we think Connect is a great tool for making data social on demand. This is going to develop quickly.

(As a side note, Hello Connect has evolved significantly from its first early days in the product. Originally it was based on having users share PIN codes. As Cheng says, “It is the perfect example of trying things out in a smaller product before thinking about putting them in Evernote.”)

#2: Structured scanning

You can add contacts into Evernote Hello by scanning business cards. The scanning is quite accurate, especially considering how hard it can be to get a good image from a hand-held smartphone camera.

But just scanning text accurately isn’t enough to be useful in this context. With business cards, you also have to process the data and put it in the right places. You need to the know the difference between a name, an email, a company name, and so on. Evernote Hello does a good job of this, too, and this technology, is already being rolled in to some other Evernote apps.

Hello records the people you meet, and the notes you take about them. (iPhone version.)

Evernote Food, for example, knows a recipe when it sees one, so it can tell which notes stored in Evernote are recipes that should be displayed in Food. We are also looking at adding structured document scanning to Evernote, for processing other document types that users tend to store.

Just because Evernote appears to store everything in mostly-unstructured notes, it doesn’t mean that the service has to stay unaware of what those notes actually are. When the app knows that, it can do more for users.

#3: Automatic grouping

Evernote Hello knows that if you meet a bunch of people at close to the same time and at about the same place, they’re probably all connected somehow for you. Evernote uses that context to help users make connections later: When they’re looking at a person’s contact information, other people met at the event will show up in Related Notes.

Our other apps may also start doing this kind of loose grouping. It’s not hard to create a bucket for a bunch of notes that are related in time or space, even if you used multiple devices or apps to create the notes. For example, if I record a meeting with a person on my iPhone in Hello, and a few minutes later create a note in my laptop or my Sky pen, Evernote might well assume those two records are related, and link them together.

Automatic grouping gets really interesting when you’re working with other people in Shared Notebooks or in Evernote Business notebooks. Automatically creating storyboards or briefing books from numerous shared notes created by co-workers could help people uncover a collective meeting intelligence that, so far, remains elusive. We’re looking into this.

#4: The data type of “Person”

Evernote stores notes about anything. Evernote Hello stores notes about people. The idea of the person as high-level entity in Hello is obvious since that’s what the app is about, but the “person” data type might find its way into Evernote as well.

We have ideas of making Evernote more adept at helping users rediscover not just stored notes and memories that can be useful to them, but to the people connected to those notes as well.

#5: Integration with other data sources

In Evernote Hello, you can enter just the email of a person you meet, and the app will look into your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts (if you’ve given it access) to fill out the rest of a profile for you. We believe that our tools should illuminate the content you’re capturing, not just record it. There is context all around us, and our technology should be smart enough to see it, know it, and work with it for us.

Evernote apps already integrate with your calendar and your location. We are looking to future integrations that make sense, from social data sources, commerce sites, sensor platforms, business services, and more.

Parts of Hello are already in Evernote

Features from Evernote Hello have already made their ways into Evernote. When you create a new note and it automatically titles it based on what’s in your calendar or what your location is, you’re using a feature pioneered in Hello. We also pioneered the Page Scanner function, which de-skews (flattens) a photo of a notebook page so it’s easier to read, in Hello. The app uses the function to de-skew pictures of business cards before scanning them.

Evernote Hello is not just a product. It’s a live test platform. Several Evernote features have started in Hello, and more future Evernote features are being tested in it now. If you want hints on future Evernote capabilities, spend some time with Hello.

Read more about Evernote Hello. Or better yet, just download it and give it a spin. It’s awesome.

Rafe Needleman is Evernote’s Platform Advocate, and author of Evernote’s Opportunity Notes blog about startups.

Above: goals list captured in the Evernote Smart Notebook, added to Evernote using the Page Camera feature on iOS. Learn more here.

Evernote NYC Event: Work Smarter with Evernote

Wednesday, May 29th

Join Evernote CEO Phil Libin and a few special Evernote guests including Small Business Ambassador Lindsey Holmes for a conversation and workshop on how to use Evernote to work smarter. You’ll have an opportunity to meet and share ideas with members of the Evernote team and fellow Evernote users. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

Register ($10/ticket): http://worksmarternyc.eventbrite.com

Evernote Bay Area Workshop: Work Smarter with Evernote

Tuesday, June 18th

Join the Evernote team at our headquarters in Redwood City, CA for a live panel discussion and workshop featuring Evernote Productivity Ambassador Joshua Zerkel. You’ll also have an opportunity to meet and share ideas with members of the Evernote team and fellow Evernote users. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

Register (Free!): http://worksmarterworkshop.eventbrite.com

We hope to see you there!

Check out how others use Evernote for work:

Evernote World: How Award-winning Architect Russell Curtis Uses Evernote Business
How to Run a Magazine with Evernote: Janine Vangool of UPPERCASE
How to Live the Freelance Life with Evernote: Tips from Joelle Alcaidinho

Today, we’ll show you how a designer uses the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine for sketching and brainstorming designs.

Michelle Regenbogen is the owner of Macchiatto, a boutique branding and packaging design firm in San Francisco. You can watch a short interview we did with her, in which she discusses how she tags successful concepts with Smart Stickers, then saves the sketches in Evernote to refine and share with her colleagues.

Capturing ideas on paper, saving them digitally

As a visual designer, Michelle relies on sketching to capture what inspires her and iterate through projects. She keeps her Evernote Smart Notebook handy wherever she goes so she can capture ideas as they come.

Below are a few concepts she worked on for Macchiatto’s Spring promotion, which she can easily share with clients right from Evernote on her desktop or phone.

From flower sketches to sample card designs, Michelle can quickly narrow down her favorites by attaching Smart Stickers directly to the page, ensuring that those designs will automatically be saved to Evernote. Michelle has set the stickers to create specific tags in Evernote, such as Share, Final, and Future ideas. She can later search through her Evernote account and find exactly what she’s looking for.

Saving Hand-Drawn Designs to Evernote with the Page Camera

To save sketches into Evernote, Michelle snaps a photo with Page Camera. This mode is designed to enhance the quality of the image, and recognize any Smart Stickers. Once snapped, the images show up in Evernote with tags included.

For more details and tips on how to use the Page Camera, check out our Getting Started Guide.

Don’t have an Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine notebook? Get it here. And don’t forget to redeem the 3-month Premium code that is included with your purchase. With Evernote Premium, you’ll enjoy larger monthly uploads, bigger note sizes, offline access on mobile, and more powerful search.

Win an Original Letterpressed Card Set Created by Michelle Regenbogen

Michelle recently turned her original sketches into beautifully-designed letterpress cards, and we’re giving away a set. Leave a comment here before May 31, 2013 about what kind of sketches you would save to Evernote, and we’ll randomly choose a winner to receive a set.

Learn more about KustomNote in the Evernote Trunk!

Check out more Evernote Picks.

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!

Our current implementation focuses on two actions. First, you’ll be able to quickly capture a photo or short video and send it to your Evernote account from the Google Glass sharing menu. Second, you can choose a note from Evernote Web and send it directly into the Glass Timeline so that you have it available right in your field of view when you need it.

The Future

We believe that wearables are the next frontier in consumer technology and we’re hard at work building the Evernote for our wearable technology future. Today, you’re getting a glimpse of simple and useful ways that Evernote can be used with Google Glass. This is only the beginning.

Evernote and Yinxiang Biji are separate services that are developed in parallel and share much of the same code-base and features (you can read more about that here). Yinxiang Biji Business will offer the same great speed and quality of service that users have come to expect from Yinxiang Biji.

Evernote Business: Already 5,000 Strong, And Growing

Since we launched Evernote Business in December of last year, it has grown to nearly 5,000 businesses worldwide and is now available in 77 countries. We’re excited to see more individuals benefiting from Evernote in the workplace to discover knowledge, help their teams be more productive, and empower employees to work together.

If you live in China and want to sign up for Yinxiang Biji Business, then please go to http://www.yinxiang.com/business. Users outside of China can sign up for Evernote Business: http://evernote.com/business/