12 Apps of Christmas, Day 6: Evernote

Some TechRepublic editors and bloggers highlight their favorite app in this 12 Apps of Christmas series. The sixth app, recommended by Will Kelly, is Evernote. 

 

The 6th app of Christmas Will Kelly gave to you is the champion app called Evernote.

In the spirit of the holidays, we thought we’d create a smartphone series based on a popular Christmas song. The 12 Days of Christmas starts on Christmas Day, but our 12 Apps of Christmas begins today, and we'll continue to post one app per day, leading all the way up to the holiday. However you celebrate this season, and whatever device you own (or platform that it runs on), we hope that you find some gems over the next 12 days -- as these are the apps that the TechRepublic’s editorial staff and bloggers actually use and feel passionate enough to write about. Here's what Will Kelly had to say about one of his favorite apps called Evernote.

Evernote is a very popular app that's available for Android, the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. They offer both a free version and a Premium product that costs $5.00 a month/$45.00 a year. I’ve been using Evernote since the early days, and I've watched it transform from just a note-taking app into a product line tailored to help people collect and remember information. 

Since getting my first PC, I’ve always been better organized electronically than with hardcopy, so I truly fit the Evernote user demographic. Evernote is where I keep ideas, notes, and research for my TechRepublic posts, corporate client work, and my personal projects. 

The Evernote Web Clipper and Clearly make it easy for me to capture articles and blog posts for later reference. I especially like being able to drag-and-drop Word documents and Adobe PDF files (Figure A) into Evernote.

Figure A

A PDF saved in Evernote for later reference.

Because I’m a Premium user, I can search inside PDFs, Word documents, and even screen images I save in Evernote. Another bonus is being able to create offline notebooks so I can refer to information on my iPhone or iPad on the rare times I’m not on Wi-Fi.

Evernote lets you set up notebooks to better organize your notes. I use synchronized notebooks for client work, so I can access the information in the cloud and across my devices. I create notebooks to organize notes for particular projects. I then use notebook stacks (an Evernote feature for grouping notebooks) across various parts of my professional and personal life.

Recently, I’ve been relying more on tagging to organize the content I capture and my notes (Figure B), because I found myself creating too many notebooks over time. 

Figure B

Tags in Evernote.

The Evernote app is running on all of my Macs, PCs, iPhone, iPads, and Android tablets to ensure that my notes and research are always accessible. I regularly take notes using Evernote on the Mac during client meetings. My preference is to keep the formatting in my notes simple. However, Evernote lets me format notes using bold, italics, and other options you’d expect to find in a word processor. Using Evernote on my iPhone lets me take pictures of white board drawings and save them directly into Evernote for later reference. Evernote has allowed me be a paperless note taker after years of jotting down meeting and interview notes on yellow legal pads.

I highly recommend Evernote if you have project notes spread out across folders, cloud accounts, and apps, and you want to centralize all of your note-taking for sanity sake and easy reference.

Do you use Evernote, or are you partial to another note-taking app? Share your opinion in the discussion thread below.