Importing and pasting Markdown into Evernote

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 10.130.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 10.1303.

Many thanks to Mark, Paul and Jeff who have supported Taming the Trunk over the last week, its much appreciated. If you find this article useful and have it in your pocket to support my efforts you can tip me a coffee here.

Using Markdown in Evernote is sort of there. We can use a few keyboard shortcuts to give us headings, bullets and dividers. Checkout the auto formatting section of the keyboard shortcuts using CTRL + / or Command + /. There’s lots there including my favourite, [][][]x3 for a table!

If you're not sure what Markdown is then think plain text and using symbols to refer to formatting.

A Markdown document is a plain text file, either with a .txt or .md extension and it will open in any text editor.

What Markdown does is let you apply basic formatting to some text, using symbols, which can then be converted to many different document types and the formatting of the text is preserved.

For example, if your markdown document looks like this:

# I'm a title

**I'm some bold text**

> I'm a quote

When you convert this to a Word doc, PDF, HTML file or pretty much anything else the formatting will be applied so it looks something like this.

The idea is that you write using Markdown and export into any file you want.

This all sounds great but to be honest it’s a bit of a fuss and while Markdown is popular, it’s not the most widely used way of formatting documents, I would imagine Microsoft Word still owns that.

However, there is a need to import and paste Markdown documents into Evernote and yes you can, sort of.

Importing Markdown files into Evernote

I write some of my long form content in Markdown, especially stuff that needs to be exported as a Word doc and I sometimes also import it into Evernote.

The markdown editor I use is iA Writer and I use it on my PC, Mac and Android phone with it syncing using Google Drive.

When I'm ready to import a file into Evernote, I save it with a .md file extension and head over to Settings -> Import. A popup like this appears.

You can drag one or more markdown files into the import area or select them using your file explorer.

The import is pretty much instant and Evernote converts most of the markdown formatting into proper formatting and creates a new note for each file in your default notebook.

One thing to mention, not all markdown formatting styles are converted.

From my experiments this is the markdown that Evernote converts:

# Heading one
## Heading two
### Heading three

**bold text**

- bullet one
- bullet two
- bullet three

1. Numbered list
2. Numbered list
3. Numbered list

> A quote block

*Italics*

***strong italics***

[A Link](https://tamingthetrunk.com)

![Image Description](image.jpg)

If your markdown file contains any of this then it converts to the correct format in Evernote.

Pasting Markdown into Evernote

We can also paste markdown into an Evernote note by using Paste and match style in the right click menu.

This means you can copy your markdown content from your markdown editor to your clipboard and paste it into Evernote with the correct formatting applied.

Again, all the markdown styles mentioned above are transformed.

In the future it would be nice if Evernote allowed more markdown to be converted including tables, check lists and highlighted text but right now most is there.

For exporting files from Evernote into Markdown the best way is to export as HTML and then pretty much most markdown editors import and convert HTML.

Do you use Markdown? Have you imported it into Evernote? Let me know in the comments.

Looking for feedback

I'm in the process of setting up a premium version of Taming the Trunk that would include a few extras.

I have lots of ideas for TTT but struggle to find the time so it would be nice at some point in the future to be able to cancel some ‘proper’ work and dedicate one day a week to TTT, but this means replacing income.

The usual free TTT would still be here for everyone which would include the Friday post and Wednesday AMA video but I'm thinking of the following for paid members:

• A monthly live Ask Me Anything / Evernote recap using a Google Meet type thing.

• 4 exclusive interviews per year with folk like Evernote Certified Experts, Productivity folk and hopefully some Evernote staff every now and then.

• A premium chat feature either using the Substack chat function or a Discord server. Tending to lean towards the Substack chat as its much more user friendly that a Discord server but open to anything.

• Possibly in the future (not sure yet) a high-level premium plan that includes 1 hour of Evernote mentoring each month.

I'd love to hear your feedback on this and if you can think of anything else that could be added that would be useful to you.

Let me know in the comments.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon