It works as advertised

I have been using Evernote for five or six years primarily to collect and store information from the Internet. It does that function as well as I can imagine doing it.

As a writer and commentator, I read several newpapters everyday plus a number of informational sites such as the Brookings Institute daily brief and the Pew Institute reports. I can clip and save just about anything I find on the Internet using the Safari browser.

I also read books using either Kindle or iBooks. Capturing highlights and notes made in books cannot be done directly, but that is more an issue with the book readers than with Evernote. I am able in both cases to download highlights and notes and paste them into Evernote, and that’s still easier than the old fashioned way of reading a bound book and transcribing excerpts and notes manually, which I sometimes need to do. I read magazines using Vizio—same issue as with books.

So for clipping and storing information this is a great tool. Syncing between Evernote and both my computers and my iPhone is invisible and pretty much bulletproof, which means I have never been able to screw it up no matter how tired or distracted I get.

Highlighting in regular text clippings works fine, but there is no way to add a freestanding annotation (like an Excel note or a comment in Preview) inline in a stored article or any other kind of note, unless it is a PDF. As for someone’s complaint that you can’t annotate PDF’s in Evernote without paying for Premium, I just use Preview. Double click on the PDF icon in the upper left on a PDF stored in Evernote and it will open in Preview. Use the Preview annotation and commenting features, then Save the document and it gets saved back in Evernote. BTW: If you have a PDF file on your Mac that you you want to put in Evernote, just right click on the file, choose Open With…Evernote and voila, a copy is stored in Evernote.

But I can’t give Evernnote 5 stars because it’s features for indexing and finding stored information are adequate but cumbersome. Clippings can be segregated into notebooks which is handy. Some people have commented on the fact there is just a two level hierarchy for notebooks, but this is not a problem for me, because it’s difficult for me to know in advance how I’m going to want to access my information a year from now so I just have big notebooks for things like Newspaper Clippings or Science Books.

Evernote also provides tags which can be used for non-hierarchical access, but using tags effectively on a large (~10,000) number of stored articles on a wide variety of topics can be a lot of work. I use TheBrain app as an external indexing system because it allows me to create a network of connections between topics and I can add new connections arbitrarily whenever I discover the need for them. I use the Evernote note links to connect the end nodes in TheBrain to the Evernot articles. It’s awkward setting up the links between Evernote and TheBrain, but storing isn’t the real purpose of using Evernote. Getting the information you need when you need it is.

Jack Madomo about Evernote