Evernote Premium Has Changed My Life!

My relationship with Evernote has been a tumultuous one.

I first started using it about 5 or so years ago.  I HATED IT.  I found it a little hard to use and didn’t really see an advantage of using it, so I stopped.

Later, I saw a few webinars about using it for genealogy and once I saw some examples, I decided to give it another try and I quite liked it.  I had a free account but it served my needs just fine.  I even did a presentation about how great Evernote was at one of my local genealogy discussion groups!

Then Evernote changed the rules for a free account.  I could no longer use Evernote on my 2 laptops, a desktop, a phone and a tablet at one time.  Now I was limited to 2 devices.  Booooo Evernote.  I was NOT going to pay pretty much for the ability to use more devices, especially when I had another option.

I subscribe to Microsoft Office 365, so I have a TB of space to use with OneNote.  So I figured I would just switch to OneNote.  One of the advantages of OneNote (besides being able to use it on 5 devices) was the ability to use my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro directly in OneNote to write notes on my uploaded PDF files from meetings or seminars.  With Evernote, I had to use another app outside of Evernote (I used Penultimate) to add those handwritten notes.

So, I exported all my notes from Evernote, imported them into OneNote and tried for about 6 months to use OneNote.  It was OK, but I just didn’t like OneNote as much. I really did like Evernote better.  I liked Evernote’s tagging, the ability to easily create a table of contents note without a 3rd party app and just the overall organization.  There weren’t huge differences between the two but the differences were enough to make me go back to Evernote.

I reinstalled Evernote and used the free version again.  Ultimately I decided that I would bite the bullet and pay for Evernote.  I chose Premium for the ability to search and annotate PDFs.

Now that I had a larger monthly upload limit I decided to upload all of the newsletters and quarterly publications from the various societies I belong to into Evernote.  I previously had them in Google Drive.

WOW!  Now that I have them in Evernote I can search all of those publications quickly.  I have found 4 articles so far that pertain to branches of my family that I would have eventually found, probably by looking at indexes at the various societies, if I took the time to do so.  (P.S. – I don’t think I am smart enough to search in Google Drive correctly because I can never seem to find anything using the search.)

The Evernote searching capability within my PDFs makes it well worth the subscription price for me!