Gaming Advice: 4 Reasons Evernote is a Great Gamer Tool

I love Evernote. I’ve been using it for about a year and it has become an indispensable part of my life. I spend a lot of time thinking about, writing and playing games. I like being organised, and Evernote is a crucial part of my organisational strategy.

Evernote High Res

 

I was a huge fan of moleskin notebooks for keeping track of all my notes, thoughts and to do lists. Moleskin notebooks are great, but they have limitations. (Namely, you have to transfer your note to your computer and they are hard to search). I tried Evernote a year ago and I haven’t looked back since. (I do still keep a moleskin notebook in my bag, though. I use it to sketch out dungeons and to take notes when using a phone or tablet might be inappropriate).

What Is Evernote?

Evernote is the best known digital notebook app available. But, it’s so much more than a mere notebook app. Evernote enables you to add almost anything to your notebook: typed-in notes, photos, webpages, files and more. It can take them all.

Why is Evernote so Great for Gamers?

As a gamer I’ve embraced Evernote for three main reasons:

  1. Evernote is free. You can download it and experiment without any cost. If you really like it, you can purchase various add-ons or a premium subscription, which gives you more features.
  2. Evernote works on everything. Whether you use iOS, Windows or Andriod (or a mix of operating systems) you can use Evernote. In fact, it’s cross-plaform compatible so even if you work on a mix of devices you’ve still got your stuff. This means you can run it on your desktop machine, phone and tablet.
  3. Evernote enables you to take your stuff everywhere. When you install Evernote on your devices it syncs your information automatically. If you are working on a note on your desktop machine, the changes update onto your phone, tablet and kitchen sink (ok, not the last one.) If you are working on a character, encounter, monster or whatever you can tinker away wherever you are. It also means that if you turn up to a game without your character (or whatever) as long as it’s stored in Evernote you can still play.  (I now back up my character on Evernote just to be safe after a friend forgot his character sheet and derailed our session somewhat).
  4. Evernote is easy to search and organise. With tagging and the ability to set up multiple notebooks, it is easy to find what you are looking for in Evernote. Evernote also has an excellent search function which enables you to search both the title and contents of your notes. It’s a real challenge to loose something in Evernote.

Evernote’s One Downside

Evernote has one downside. With the free version, all your notes and information are stored in the cloud. Nothing is stored on your device. So, if you don’t have internet access, you don’t have your notes. If this is a problem for you, consider upgrading to Premium Evernote. With the premium version, you can store all your stuff on your device so you have it absolutely everywhere. (It also has other cool features including the ability to recover previous versions of your notes in case of disaster).

Yet More Evernote Goodness

For such a simple piece of software, you can do a surprising amount with Evernote. In subsequent articles I’ll talk a little bit more about how I use Evernote as a player and GM. When they go live, I’ll post the links to those articles here.

Help Fellow Gamers

Do you use Evernote? Got any hints or tips? If you do, leave them in the comments below and help your fellow gamers get more out of Evernote today!

 

Published by

Creighton

Creighton is the publisher at Raging Swan Press and the designer of the award winning adventure Madness at Gardmore Abbey. He has designed many critically acclaimed modules such as Retribution and Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands and worked with Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, Expeditious Retreat Press, Rite Publishing and Kobold Press.

11 thoughts on “Gaming Advice: 4 Reasons Evernote is a Great Gamer Tool”

  1. I love Evernote – the tagging and ability to have several different campaign notebooks on the go are great. I still use a Moleskine too (well, a Leuchturm notebook – the paper is better) but I can take a picture of my notebook pages and import them into Evernote. And if I write legibly, the software can recognise words and make them searchable

  2. Did you ever end up writing about how you use Evernote? You can gain a lot of insight from seeing how others use something, and this one area I’d love to expand upon.

    1. Is there anything you’d particularly like me to cover in such an article? I assume screen shots of various documents and suchlike I use as well as an overview of the tags I use would be of use?

  3. Both my wife and I did use Evernote. However, after repeatedly running into problems where Evernote did not allow her to undo some copy and paste errors, and she lost a lot of work she had done, both of us are done with Evernote. Not only that, but we have had problems printing stuff off from Evernote that has not been formatted properly. If I need notes at the game table, I put it into Google Docs and save to the Google Drive folder that I have all the other game and campaign information stored in. I don’t think I’ll be using Evernote … ever again.

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