Remember EVERYTHING? Eh, maybe.

This weekend I embarked on an ambitious project, convincing the OldWindbag (OW) that he should join me in EVERNOTE - wonder of the OCD world. Here is some context. OW is a paragon of organization. He is awesome when it comes to finding tidbits of info that one (of his daughters) may have forgotten. AND he does this despite being an OCD nut and absolutely refusing to keep practically anything! Really. Alas for years he has being using an archaic system of Microsoft Word documents to keep his personal notes - everything from his will (which covers how my sister, Natalya, and I will split up our inheritance of 1960's and 1970's vintage albums) to driving directions. And this method works. Certainly, when he started using Word it was the only game in town. But it has a huge flaw, a lack of searchability. Say OW needs to know the exact name of his anti-farting prescription medicine. With his current system, OW must remember which .doc he wrote and saved it in. Was it filed under "OW visits the Quack 2009" or "OW visits the Quack 2011"? Certainly you can search for a filename easy enough. But if you can't remember what document you saved that info into, well expect to spend some time crawling through old data. SO this weekend, I attempted to wean OW off of Word as a note-taker. Word was designed with document creation in mind and it does a fine job for that. But OW is really keeping notes, not documents. And he needed an intervention. And in steps the BIG HERO - EVERNOTE. I was a fairly early adopter of this little app. Frankly, I just fell in love with the green elephant symbol. I used it sporadically at first but, like other relationships in my life, we really hit it off once gadgets join in. More on that in another post... no, not about THAT. About EVERNOTE and gadgets! EVERNOTE (skip if you are a believer already) is a free service/application that let's you take and make audio, photographic, textual notes and keeps them updated across all your devices (iPad, iPhone, computer, Android). You can clip webpages to EVERNOTE and you can send emails straight to your EVERNOTE account. Within the app are personalized Notebooks which can be kept private or shared with others. There are many many many developer add ons that help make EVERNOTE even more productive, all found in the Trunk. For instance, Skitch lets you draw and annotate photos. Scalar performs calculations, which can be saved into a Notebook. Hello creates a facebook (little 'f') in your account, complete with snapshots of your contact's business cards. So you are sold, right? I sure was. But OW was a hard sell. See the man had wanted THIS product back when computers where brand spanking new. He knew that carrying around paper was an old man's folly. But since it wasn't available, he invented a complex system of computer hard drives, floppy disks, zip drives (remember those?), and now thumb drives that he meticulously updated on a regular schedule, backing each and every copy each and every time. Now that one simple program could do ALL the backing up automatically, it scared the pants off him. To trust or not to trust? To ease him into it, I carefully copied and pasted each and every note from his travel thumb into his brand new EVERNOTE account. What I mean is I opened each document, selected all the text and then copied/pasted it into a new note. It was time consuming. OW was hoping he could just keep on with updating his .doc and then save those into EVERNOTE. While I was willing to let him have a little bit of both for a while, I was pushing to get him switched over so that he could see how easy it could be. He wasn't easily convinced. In fact, I wasn't sure he would do anyting more than erase the whole mess once he got away from me until this afternoon when I got a tech support request. OW wanted to know if EVERNOTE could password protect his individual notes. Not exactly EVERNOTE will let you look at any Note if you are logged in. But you can Encrypt certain text within a note, which is essentially the same result. That's when OW grudgingly admitted that already EVERNOTE had come in handy. He had been trying to remember when a particular script had been first prescribed (anti-farting, perhaps?) and had tried, on a whim, to search EVERNOTE. Since we had imported all the Word Documents, including the meticulous notes OW keeps on family members with medication conditions, he found it in a snap. EVERNOTE will search through not just the Note names but also the text content, including the text content of web pages. Indeed, EVERNOTE, in conjunction with my favorite gadget ever - a scanner - will search the OCR'd text of anything you have ever uploaded. Just a few minutes ago, I needed my checking account routing number so I searched for my bank name and low and behold, EVERNOTE found me a photo (A PHOTO!) I had taken of our checkbook! So OW is a tentative convert. For the moment. He is going to LOVE this, eventually. It helps that doing this just cost us an afternoon and nary a penny. EVERNOTE offers a generous free account that so far has been adequate for the kids and Eric. But once you try it, you'll find yourself wanting to change your life by going paperless. At 45$ a year, the Premium account allows many more uploads and offers more bells and whistles. After purchasing a recommended scanner, I was able to take 5 feet of file cabinet paper to the shredder, not to mention the stack of school work and art that I scanned and saved (and was able to justify letting go!) So EVERNOTE is our friend. Mine more than OW's but he is catching on. It was a productive day. PS Can I say how proud I am of the OW who is always willing to try new technology out, provided it is free or nearly so?