I’m a huge fan of Evernote. It makes my life easier. The more I explore Evernote, though, the more I realise I’m not using it to its full potential. Unbelievably, it can make my life even easier!
I’ve recently blogged about why I love Evernote and why I think it’s great tool for both players and GMs.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with five features I only recently discovered. At first glance some of them might seem rather simple, but I’m a huge fan of simple. The simplest solution – for me – is normally the best and easiest. I like solutions that disappear into the background to enable me to concentrate on what I’m trying to achieve.
- Translate to Text: With the translate to text feature you can use Evernote as a dictaphone. What’s really cool, though, is that Evernote then transcribes your words into texts and dumps them into a note for you. That’s tremendously handy if you are on the go and have a great idea for an adventure, location, NPC or whatever. The downside for translate to text is you have to be online.
- Create Audio Notes: If you just want to create an audio note, and not have Evernote translate your words into text you can do that as well! Just start a new note and hit the microphone button in the toolbar. Evernote will save your speech as an audio file. It’s quick and simple and means you won’t forget that brilliant idea.
- Email to Evernote: If you have an Evernote account, you’ve got an Evernote email address. You can find this address in your account settings. Anything sent to that email address gets automatically sent to Evernote and turned into a note which then magically appears in Evernote. Make it even easier for yourself by adding your Evernote email address into your contact details.
- Clip with Evernote: If you find a cool map (or whatever) on the net and want to use it in your campaign, use Evernote web clipper to dump it into a new note. You can choose the entire webpage or just a section of it. Use a tag like “Inspiration” or “web” (which Evernote can automatically apply) and you’ll never lose these important finds.
- Merge Notes: Sometimes it’s handy to merge some notes together. Instead of laboriously cutting and pasting all the infomation into a new note Evernote can automatically combine them. Simply select the notes you want to combine and a menu with a range of options pops up. Simple.
Help Fellow Gamers
Do you use Evernote? Have you used any of the features I list above? Do you have any other hints or tips? If you do, leave them in the comments below and help your fellow gamers get more out of Evernote today!
Alright, I’m convinced. I’ve installed Evernote on my computer and phone. Now I’ll try it for a while, and if it seems worth the effort I will begin the slow transition from Google Drive. Thanks, Creighton.
I hope it works for you! I’ve found it a tremendous help in pretty much every facet of my life.
I use Microsoft’s OneNote for all of the same reasons you listed above. The two apps do pretty much the same things so it’s just a matter of preference which you choose. The ability to record quick audio notes on my phone when I’m out and about, then have those synced to my OneDrive, which in turn houses all of my Word docs, is a godsend. Makes game prep much more streamlined. Glad that Evernote is doing the same thing for you!
I’ve also used OneNote it’s not stable enough for me I’ve realized as Evernote is. copying and pasting large amounts of information in OneNote doesn’t handle this very well I am slowly painstakingly switching all of my information from OneNote to Evernote.
Good luck with the move. I hope it goes without any major problems.
I didn’t know about the merge notes thing – thanks! Just starting sending emails to Evernote and find that very useful.
I’m a recent convert to Evernote myself, just started using it to hold my RPG notes in addition to fiction, I’ve adapted a novel template for use with RPGs that I’ve found very useful:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k33D5ngkVzy61yQrqhnGjjUmqNLNeAJM