Sunday, June 05, 2011

Evernote adds Note Links for a Wiki-Like Experience

My favorite desktop, web, and mobile app of all time, Evernote has slipped in a feature that allows you to copy the link to another note so you can embed it on the one you want. The result of this feature is that it creates a wiki-like experience within Evernote. I've tested the links on all three clients successfully.

Evernote already gives you a great search function. In addition, you can organize information with tags, notebooks, and stacks. These are great with the exception that they don't organize information in a linear manner and require you to be a stickler for organizing the information or remember key words to be able to find the information again. Furthermore, creating a notebook for every single little project can result in a huge, unwieldy list of notebooks and stacks.

The update that allows you to link to specific posts means that you can create a main project page with links to supporting notes, in a wiki-like fashion. Prior to the update, you could not link related notes other than to merge them into one. Merging notes is a bit of a destructive process in that it creates a third note and deletes the previous two. The note meta data dies with the deleted notes.

Linking notes also somewhat eliminates the need to create notebooks for every project. You can simply create a broad notebook category and use it for all your projects notes. You can create a notebook or tag for your index pages that contain links to all your notes. Therefore, you can search for your project indexes and then link to related notes from there.

I tested links after moving a note from one notebook to another and changing title and content. The links seem to work after the alterations. After linking a private note to a public note, Evernote allowed me to paste the link after notifying me that public users would not be able to view the private note. Changing the title of a note does not change the title of the link.

It would be good practice to cross-link notes, if you have time to do that. It just makes it easier to navigate between notes.

This is one of the more exciting additions to Evernote since the option to create notebook stacks. My brain salivates at the possibilities.


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1 comment:

How to get the most out of Evernote < Shaine Mata said...

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