I’m working my way, slowly, through a backlog of questions via email. Here’s one that I wanted to think about a bit before replying.

I was asked the following:

What if one day you decide to switch to Linux or Mac and 5000 notes and other information that you have collected with EverNote is stuck on windows.

EverNote is nice and has many features, but what are you going to do if one day you will need all your info on a different system where EverNote is not designed for?

The author also comments on the fact that he prefers dealing with mostly text files, maybe with some html, since it is eminently portable. Not only is is software agnostic, but operating system/platform as well.

Excellent question to ask. I’ve never migrated to a completely different operating system, but I have migrated my notes from one software program to another. Here is my experience in the matter.

First, any time you decide to make use of an application that stores data in some format, you have to weigh the benefits and risks. When I first started using a word processor, it was a WordPerfect version, with the blue screen. (Actually, my first word processor was whatever the Commodore 64 offered; I did my first year of university on a 64, but that’s another story.) Then, at work, we upgraded from WordPerfect to WordPerfect, until I was an expert in it. When it came time to migrate to Office, I was extremely reluctant. I actually dragged my feet for over a year. And, really, there weren’t even any compatibility issues - everything I had ever written in WordPerfect was readable in Word. No, I just didn’t want to learn a new application.

Switching Gears to Data/Information Management

I’ve always been a bit of a pack rat when it comes to keeping digital information. I remember a decade ago or so, I decided that the best way to keep track of everything that was crossing my desk was to create an Access database. So I did. It even had a front end on it; items were categories with a primary and secondary category, start date, due date, etc. I could search along several dimensions, print out what was relevant to a project, etc. It was extremely useful at the time. When I went back to school I investigated using it still, but the note taking for research is much different from the day to day of an administrative job.

So, I scrapped the database. I scouted around, and found TreePad. It was an amazing program in my mind, especially 5 years ago - I had never seen anything like it. I used it diligently until just over a year ago. At that point, I had almost 60MB in my most current database, with various other or archive databases littered about. Last summer though, I decided that TreePad was a bit too static for me. It seemed that I kept putting information in, but not getting anything out of it. To find something, I had to navigate through my category hierarchy, or search for specific terms. And the search was actually quite slow. So, I started looking around.

Enter EverNote (and OneNote)

I discovered both EverNote and OneNote at about the same time. I really liked the look and feel of OneNote, but EverNote won me over with its flexibility. Automatic categories. Multiple categories per note. Hierarchy as big as I want, even if I couldn’t search the category list itself. Easy clipping from the web.

Along the way, I also dabbled with other possible solutions, namely NetSnippets, Onfolio, etc. Only EN and ON have managed to stay in my stable. OneNote is where I keep things that, if they were on paper, I would put into a binder. For example, afghan patterns, recipes, latex code snippets, etc. Things that I don’t need to search very often, but when I want to see them, I just go to a notebook and flip through, looking for what I want. EverNote is where almost everything else goes. (Don’t tell anyone, but I also make great use of my RSS feed reader, GreatNews, to keep track of interesting posts.)

What’s the Point?

What’s the point of this long ramble? Well, last summer, I switched completely, cold turkey, from my TreePad database to a new EverNote one. I had to think about this decision. Theoretically, I could have copied every single note in my TreePad file into a new one in EN, but did I really need to? No. At that point in time, I was kind of in the middle of big projects for my research, so I wasn’t actually going to be splitting up my research material too badly. There were a few things I wanted to keep access too (e.g., list of warranty dates, passwords, etc.) The rest, I could just leave in TreePad format, and if I found a need, I would start it up and dig out what I needed. Now, some 15 months later, I recall only having to do that a handful of times. Of course, I’ll keep the database around, but to be honest, it’s sitting on another machine, in a backup folder. I’ve completely switched over to EN.

What about the Future?

This email made me contemplate the future with respect to EN. What if I decided I didn’t like the program anymore, or found something even better? What if the program was discontinued? What if I changed operating systems? Well, the last question is not much of a fear for me. If I do every move to a mac, I’m going to have bigger issues than dealing with my data - I’ll have a whole new paradigm to figure out.

Okay, what about if the program is discontinued? Well, I just keep my current copy of the software. I figure the operating system would have to drastically change (a la DOS to Win 3.1 kind of change) before the application wouldn’t run for me anymore. That may be pretty far in the future. And I’ll probably have to buy a new kind of media player (over DVD) before that happens.

The most likely drastic event would be me finding something new. I won’t say that I deliberately look around for new stuff, but I’m not actively searching, that’s for sure. There are a few things that I would like to see improved in EN, but not enough to make me switch to anything else. Besides, you just can’t beat the flexibility.

But what if I decided that EN was no longer for me. And I’ve already got something like 80MB invested in a database. And really, it’s not like it’s that exportable. Sure, you can export notes to HTML, or even text, but a lot of the beauty of my database is the categories, and the ability to autocategorize, etc. Even if I exported every single note as a text note, and imported them into the next great application, I would still be missing a key component of the information - categories, tags, relationships between items. It would be extremely expensive, time-wise, to recapture all of that. So, I guess, if I do move on, I’m going to have to do when I switched from Access to TreePad and from TreePad to EverNote - go cold turkey. Scary thought. But, it’s doable, as I’ve already proved to myself.

Text Fetish Alternative

Now, the person who wrote me the original email suggested that the best way to go is to just use text and maybe html to keep everything. I agree that this is a very versatile, albeit clunky solution. Sure, I could keep all of my information in text files: contact lists, calendar (I do love Remind), to do lists (my text fetish Perl thingy), shopping lists, Christmas lists, etc. etc. I could even keep research information in text files, say notes for a particular article in one file, with the article in the same directory, etc. etc. However, there are a couple of downsides to that:

1. Visual recognition. Text is all fine and dandy, but sometimes you want to clip something from the web, and you want to see it in your notes as it looked online. I believe that we remember things by how they look, not just by what they say. For example, if I’m skimming through a text book, or looking through notes, I tend to remember sort of what it looked like, e.g., font size, colour, shape of the text, etc. You lose all of this information when you paste to straight text.
2. Images. I’m a big fan of clipping images: screen shots in particular. Can’t do that in text. I guess I could create an html file with a link to the image, but then I’m storing two separate documents, and it’s a pain to do that, when I could just be pasting away.
3. Searching. One you break things up into a gazillion smaller files, you need either a great organization system, or a great search program, or both. I could probably do this, just using Copernic Desktop Search (and I do love it), but that’s a little heavy maybe. I also like knowing that everything important is in one or two files, instead of one or two thousand.
4. Relationships between data. One of the great things about EN, or TreePad, or OneNote, is the ability to group like things together. All notes on passwords can be in the same category, or in the same subtree, or in the same section of a notebook. The only way to categorize on your hard drive is with directories/folders. I’ve heard something about Mac people being able to add keywords to files, and maybe it’s also possible in Windows, but that, at the very least, would involve right-clicking on each and every file, and selecting properties, and clicking somewhere, and typing something, etc. etc. Much pain. Plus, EN (and even ON), offer the ability to ‘tag’ things. For example, I use a @next tag for any note in EN that has work that I have to do. ON offers flags that can do the same thing. In text files, I guess you could go with the same @next as a text addition to your file, and then use your desktop search program to find it, but still, clunky.

Conclusion

The moral of the story is that before you get involved in inputting any large amount of data into a software program, you need to be sure that this is the program for you, and that you’ll be happy with it for the foreseeable future. Just be aware of the fact that one day, you might be switching.

If you find that you are leery of committing yourself to one application, and deal mostly with text (no images, pen-writing software, etc.), then you could seriously consider going the text file way. In that case, spend some time thinking about how you want to organize things (e.g., directory structure, adding specific keywords to files in order to group them) and invest in a very good desktop search program.

Either way, remember that it’s the information that you’re collecting that’s really important, not the way you’re collecting it :)

I received an email the other day from a fellow grad student, wanting to know about how I used EverNote for my research. Specifically, about how I used it as a bibliographic database, could it be used for keeping article information, notes, research thoughts, etc. organized. And how.

I spent a few hours writing up a reply, including a lovely screenshot of part of my actual database. I think it’s just a bit too big to turn into a blog post, so I turned it into an essay. If you’re interested in EN at all, check it out. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole thing, I’ll just include my summary here:

I think the beauty of EN is that you have so much flexibility with it. If you combine automatic keywords, the keyword intersection panel, and shortcut categories, you can make a very complex interweaving of all of your notes, writing, references, and thought. It’s definitely changed how I keep track of my research now. I’m no longer worried about losing track of information. In my old system, I found that I was never referring to my old notes because I didn’t know what was there. Now, I can write notes in the now, adding keywords as I go, and be comfortable with the fact that the next time I want to think about #analysis#, I can just find all of my notes on #analysis# and have nothing missing. I don’t have to remember that some arcane article that I read a year ago had something useful in it.

A plethora of note-taking ideas, templates, tools…Check it out.