I started using EverNote back when it was barely out of the womb and for awhile I was a beta-tester.  Since then they have been adding features and leaping on ahead of what I've learned so far, and so fast I can't keep up.  Now they're off on Version 3 (out in beta) where you'll be able to store your notes and clips on the web so you can have access to them anywhere.  On your mobile phone too, if you have one, the database synchronized between all devices and your desktop, with the ability to email your 'notebooks' to whom you please.  Now that they mention it, I can see a few thousand uses for that.

Anyway, I've been using EverNote for so long it leaves me feeling free to say I really don't like what they've done to their color-scheme.  The green and turquoise, the black, the elephant logo.  Not happy at all, being partial to the baby-blue and navy that's been around since the beginning.  The engineers are Russian so maybe it's a Russian color-scheme.  It makes my eyes hurt.  

If you don't have this program yet, just go get it.  New colors aside, it's the best thing since the advent of swiss cheese, and the free version is only missing a few uppity parts.  I'd recommend the desktop Version 2.2 to start.  Version 3 needs to cook some more, but if that's OK with you maybe you can rustle up an invitation.

As with most major software, there's always more than one can ever hope to learn in this lifetime.  So, I just discovered something else about the Universal Clipper button.

There are clipper buttons for IE, Firefox, Thunderbird and Outlook.  You highlight what you want to keep, click the EverNote button and it's yours.  For everything else, there's an icon that sits in the System Tray called the Universal Clipper button.  You can grab clips from anywhere with it and send them over to EverNote.  You can also use it to take screenshots.  


Say you're in a pdf or a word document and you'd like to save a small snippet.  Just highlight your selection, click Win+A and it's gone to EverNote.  If you click Win+Prt Sc, you can take a screenshot instead.  Screenshot options are ubiquitous, but what's so charming about this one is that after you've got your area selected, you can right-click, toggle to Draw mode (D) and squiggle on it.  Of course, if squiggling means handwriting it's easier if you have a graphics tablet.



My mind reels with the possibilities.

I bought the Plus version eons ago for the text recognition and shape-correction, not that I really needed them but this is my favorite software of all time, so at the least I could support the development of it.  The price these days, $50, is half the price of Microsoft's OneNote.  The free version works just fine so try that first and see how it goes.

Awhile back it occured to me that EverNote might be used as a Lazy Man's Genealogy Filing System.  You can scoop up a whole folder by highighting the file names.  Click Win+A and the whole works will go to EverNote.  Whole graphics will go just as they are.  If it's a document, it will send a link to it.  

In the Plus version they use artificial intelligence to index text in images.  This is a search on the word 'name'.   A snippet of one of a dozen notes that showed up.  Not bad.  I'd say that's 20-20 vision.  I need my reading glasses to see it.  Note, though, that even in this small piece it missed two other oppportunities to highlight 'name'.