Three small Evernote updates that deliver a big impact

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 10.107.3. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 10.107.0. If you find this article useful and have it in your pocket to support my efforts, you can tip me a coffee here.

If you download the latest 10.107+ version for Mac and PC there are three small but very useful little improvements that could enhance your workflow.

Customise your Evernote sidebar

Fed up with seeing stuff in the sidebar that you don't use? You can now hide many of the sections and tidy things up a little.

Head over to settings behind your avatar and go to Preferences -> Sidebar.

Using the little eye icon on the right-hand side of the menu items, you can hide various sections from the sidebar.

Don't use tasks or calendar... hide them.

Don't use tags... hide them!

You get the idea.

You can also hide the Task and Event button in the sidebar as well.

There's also an option to group the hidden items under a More link that appears at the bottom of the sidebar. When you click on it you see all the hidden items.

How are you going to customise yours? What will you be hiding?

I've hidden Tags, Files and the Task & Event creation button so my sidebar looks like this.

One thing to point out, hiding these items won't disable them so if you hide tags, you'll still be able to add tags to notes and search for tags. It just controls the layout of the sidebar.

One thing I would love to see come along is the ability to reorder all these items, including individual stacks and notebooks. I would be moving notebooks to the top of the sidebar based on current priorities and projects I'm working on. I hope this arrives at some point.

What improvements would you like to see?

New Evernote startup options

Our second little big thing is more options to control what happens when you open Evernote each day.

We now have the option to start Evernote on the Notes or Notebook screen.

You'll find this option in settings Preferences -> Application.

Before the update we could only have Evernote open where we left off or on the home screen. Now when you open Evernote each day you can ask it to open in Notes or Notebooks view.

I use resume where I left off. What will you be using?

Open links in a new window

Our third little big improvement is the ability to open internal links in a new window.

If you create a link to a note using the '@' or '/' commands, there's an option to open the link in a new window directly from the link.

You can also use some shortcuts to open the links but it’s a little inconsistent right now.

If you display the link as text, then CTRL+CLICK / CMD+CLICK will open the link in a new window.

If you display the link title or preview, then you'll need to do SHIFT+DOUBLE CLICK to open in a new window.

It would be nice to have it one way or the other.

How are you going to be using these new features? Leave me a comment.

…and finally

The product lead from Evernote, Federico has appeared on an episode of The Vergecast podcast titled ‘The great Evernote reboot”.

It’s worth a listen. One comment that stood out for me was that customer retention has never been higher so it’s looking good for the green elephant.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon