Evernote, part 5: Wish List
We’ve seen how Evernote can quickly and efficiently store and retrieve large amounts of information for you. It can even find text (typed or hand-written) within images. As good as it is–and I’m highly recommending it, by the way–it’s not without it’s flaws. Here are a few things I’d like to see improved:
- I’ve already mentioned a need to search for text within .pdf documents, and I sincerely hope that that will be a feature in an upcoming release. I get a lot of .pdf files in my line of work, and I can see myself using it quite a bit. As it is, Evernote simply holds on to the file for you, and allows you to open it via Acrobat that you already have on your computer. It’s also possible I’m missing something here, so if any of you can set me straight, by all means comment away.
- Information display and layout is lacking, in my opinion. It’s even impossible (according to their own message boards, anyway) to simply float an image to the left or right within a given note. The blogger in me really misses this feature. When you copy and paste from a web page, though, the software is able to retain tables that way. You just can’t create it from scratch. To be fair, though, Evernote is in the data storage and retrieval business, and they excel at that. I just wouldn’t recommend the software for presentation purposes.
Beyond that, I don’t see much that will prevent me from being a serious user. Any features I see as useless I simply hide or ignore. Currently, I’m not making much use of the tags or the saved searches feature, but others may find them handy. As late as a month ago, I would have also mentioned the relative inefficiency of the web version of Evernote. They’ve incorporated drag-and-drop recently, though, improving it’s interface and usability in the process. Nice job, guys.
I had planned on my next Evernote post as a conclusion to this series. Instead, I think I will keep creating posts as they continue to make changes and improvements to the software. In my next post, we’ll look at account options and compare the free and premium features to see which one is right for you.
