Send Documents to Evernote Quickly
August 5, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
I’ve been using Evernote more and more lately to try and keep my blogging life and other business objectives straight. Working with it today I was kind of came across a new functionality that’s existed before but I tweaked it a bit to work more with how I process information.
Basic Evernote functionality provides the ability to import files into your notebooks for easy management. By default Evernote will import PDF’s, images, text files and audio files. You can import folders or files as needed or have Evernote monitor a specific folder and automatically import files from that folder.
I decided to combine an earlier tip on customizing your right-click “Send To” function with this Evernote import function and see how it works. I created a folder in “My Documents” called “My Evernote“. I then used the Evernote import wizard to setup Evernote to regularly check this folder and pull in any files that it can into my specified, default notebook.
All I need to do to send a file into Evernote now is to right-click on a file that Evernote will read and use my customized send-to routine to in essence send it directly to Evernote. So far it’s worked fairly well with the PDF’s I’ve tried. I really wish I could send any file, specifically Microsoft Office files, but we’ll see how this goes. Using CutePDF, it’s easy enough to save any document to a PDF file.
Excellent tip – for an added bit of customization you can even change the icon in the Right Click menu to Evernote’s icon. While in your SendTo folder, right click on the Evernote shortcut, choose Properties, click on the Shortcut tab, click the Change Icon… button, then hit the Browse… button to navigate to your Evernote program (usually installed in %ProgramFiles%\Evernote\Evernote3\) and bring up Evernote’s custom icons.
Very cool!
Brent that is a good tip. I’ve made that modification to my change. You wouldn’t think it would be much, but being able to right-click and immediately see Evernote’s green elephant icon makes it just that much quicker to move through files and manage them into Evernote. Thanks for the mod tip!
It seems that you could send any kind of file if you became a paying Evernote user which would remove the filetype restriction (http://www.evernote.com/about/premium/)
LeMel, oh that’s awesome! Except for the fact that I’ve got to stop finding all these services that I love who have “Premium” services that are very enticing! I’m going to end up having an online services bill of $100/mnth with everything I use.
I set up with your instructions and it works great. However, I found that I prefer to do it this way:
1. Evernote Windows opens when I start my computer, and I leave it open in the bottom bar, but minimized.
2. When I’m at a file name in Windows Explorer, I can drag it down to the tab in the bottom bar, holding it and waiting a second, and Evernote maximizes, allowing me to continue to drag it to the notebook where I want it.
3. The key is to continue to hold down on the click until Enote maximizes, then drag up to the notebook.
This saves me the trouble of sorting things out later, and moving things into notebooks after they go to Evernote.
Nice tip and adjustment to the functionality. Thanks for sharing.