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A huge thank you to Cop Wind and Tom who became paid subscribers over the last week and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.13.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.13.2.

Quite a few small things to mention this week, but one of them has made a big difference to my workflow.

I used to managed my tasks in a separate window in the web version of Evernote. I have dual monitors when I’m working in my office and on the left screen was the Evernote app and the right screen had the web version of Evernote open with my tasks on view. I kept this open all the time.

In the screen shot above, tasks are open in the web on the left and a daily note is on the right. I don’t use this workflow anymore.

When the note tabs feature arrived a few weeks ago, I started keeping the task window open all the time in a tab to the far left of the note bar and this changed my workflow completely.

For a start I don’t have to open Evernote in the web every morning. Secondly I can get to my tasks and daily note very quickly no matter what I’m working on in Evernote.

I don’t use a daily note every day, but when I do, I have this open in a tab to the right of my tasks.

My tab bar in Evernote now looks like this. Tasks on the left, a daily note and then the notes I’m working on.

Which brings me onto another new thing...

Pinned tabs arrive in Evernote

This has made my new workflow perfect. Being able to pin my Evernote tasks to the top left as a pinned tab gets them out of the way but easy to access.

To pin a tab, just right click it.

Just like in your browser, it moves over to the far left of the tab bar.

Right click the pinned tab to unpin it.

This workflow change is for the better.

I’ve been testing pinned tabs for a few weeks now and it’s made its way into my muscle memory very quickly, probably because it behaves like a browser tab.

If I’m working on a project, I’ll pin a couple of notes that I need to use over and over again, my daily note is pinned if I’m using it and my main training jobs note is usually pinned next to my tasks as I look at this note multiple times a day.

Everything seems to be working a lot smoother.

Are you using tabs much? Are pinned tabs useful? Leave me a comment.

Wrap text around images

Another little something that folks have been shouting ages for.

We can now wrap text around our images so it appears to the left or the right.

A little bit like this.

The way to get this working is to insert an image, resize it so it’s smaller by clicking on the image and dragging one of the corners to alter the size.

You then hover over the image, click the alignment icon and you can select wrapping text to the left or the right of the image.

It works well and gives us another formatting option.

Will you find this useful? Let me know in the comments.

And finally...

Another Markdown shortcut arrives, which will please a bunch of folks.

You can now type

**hello**

Hit space and it turns to bold.

There’s quite a selection of Markdown shortcuts available in the editor. Here’s the full list.

Most of the time, you just need to type the short cut, hit space and you get what you want.

Do you use the Markdown keyboard shortcuts? Let me know in the comments.

That’s it. Let me know if you’ve made many changes to your workflow now tabbed notes have been out for a while.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you Ivan who became a paid subscriber over the last week and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.12.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.12.1.

We have some new things to play with on Evernote mobile and it’s going to please a lot of folk.

Evernote mobile gets slash commands

Slash (/) commands have been around for quite a while on the desktop apps and I use them every day. They are really useful for adding various items to a note quickly without leaving your keyboard.

We now have them on mobile!

Make sure you’re on the latest version (11.12.1), app store updates can take 5 - 7 days to get through to everyone. Keep mashing the update button.

Open a note, bring up the keyboard and enter a / and you should see this.

You can use your finger to scroll up and down the slash command list and just tap the item you want.

The full list of commands available is huge and includes all formatting options like headers, font colours and all the items you can add like audio recording, images, tables, etc.

Because the list is long, you can start typing what you want and the list shrinks like this.

Mobile slash commands also support aliases, which are other words you can use to find a command.

For example you can type /todo to find New task or Checklist. You can use /meet to find the Event or Record command.

Here’s a full list of all the slash command aliases on a shared Evernote note.

Are you happy to see slash commands on mobile? Let me know in the comments.

Easier note links on mobile with @ commands

Adding internal note links on mobile has always been a bit of a fuss, so this new addition will make a huge difference.

We can now use @ commands on mobile.

We’ve been able to use these on desktop for ages and it’s the main way I add internal links.

Open up a note on your phone and type the @ command and then start typing the name of a note and you see it appear. You can scroll up and down the list to find what you want.

This instantly makes internal linking an awful lot easier and quicker.

You can also set a default view for internal links on mobile to display them as Mention, Text, Title or Preview.

Head to Settings → Notes → Links and attachments → Evernote links.

My default for internal links is Preview which looks like this.

Are you happy to see @ commands arrive in mobile? Will you find them useful? Leave me a comment.

New text formatting bar in Evernote mobile

Another new thing on mobile is a brand new formatting bar, which to be honest makes a lot more sense.

When you edit a note, you can now see a sliding format bar that goes right and then left again so you can scroll to see all the different options. When you tap an option, the changes you can make appear just above it.

This is what it looks like when you want to change the font.

I’ve found this new toolbar a lot easier to work with than the old one, much quicker and more intuitive.

Do you like it? Have you used it? Let me know in the comments.

And finally...

This is best viewed on desktop and I’m not sure how old it is, it may have been released ages ago, but I only found it last week!

You can see all of your Evernote usage in one place including your how many MBs you use.

In the desktop app go to Settings → Personal info → Go to your profile.

It’ll open up a page in your web browser and you may need to login.

You’ll end up on an Account Summary page and scroll down to the bottom where you can see all your usage.

The Notes number includes anything in the trash. The storage number is in MBs and you can convert to GBs by dividing by 1024 so my storage is 16.07GB.

What do your numbers look like? I KNOW there will be some scary numbers posted in the comments! Share yours.

That’s it

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks to Jan who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.11.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.11.2.

Over the last few days I’ve been playing around with the Evernote AI Assistant (AIA) trying to understand a few new use cases and I found out it can see inside a CSV file.

I presume this is because a CSV file is basically a text file that holds spreadsheet data.

Right now the AIA can’t see inside Excel spreadsheets, but you can always export an Excel as a CSV.

So, what I did was get ChatGPT to create a sample CSV file for me, some survey data for an online store. I tried to think up a real life use case where it would be hard work to look through 100’s or 1000’s of lines of data.

The data looks a little like this.

I then used the following prompt:

It looked at the data and gave me a fairly comprehensive sentiment analysis.

From the data in the survey it told me what customers cared most about.

It then went on to give me a list of pain points and positives.

I could also ask it for actual numbers.

This was the response.

Being able to analyse large amounts of data inside a CSV file is incredibly useful.

In pre AI days we’d of been trawling through this data and writing spreadsheet functions. We can now ask questions in natural language and get an answer.

Would you find this useful? Do you keep much spreadsheet data inside Evernote? Let me know in the comments.

Add note reminders using the AI Assistant

Something new. Make sure you’re on the latest version.

You can now add/edit/remove note reminders using the AIA.

First thing I’ll ask. Do you use note reminders? I’ve pretty much stopped using them since tasks came out. I’d love to hear from folk who still use them and what they use them for. Leave me a comment.

If you do use reminders try an AI prompt like something like this.

This was the response I got.

And the reminder was set in the note.

This worked for changing the reminder.

You can also add reminders to notes that are not open by mentioning them using the ‘@’ symbol.

This note wasn’t open and was in a different notebook but it added the reminder just fine.

A simple prompt removed the reminder.

I think the key to all of the AI prompting is to make sure you tell the AIA what note to work with, don’t assume it knows. I’ve managed to get much better results this way.

Will you use the AI to set reminders in notes? Let me know in the comments.

Duplicate a close note tabs using right click

Another quick new thing. If you right click a tab you can now duplicate it and also close it.

I would still love to see a mouse wheel click for closing the tab very much the same as I have in my browser. I hope this comes.

Are you using tabs much? Let me know in the comments.

That’s it.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.10.1. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.10.1.

A couple of new things to report on today and the first one is a little feature that folks have wanted for years.

Grab yourself the latest version of the Mac and PC app, open up a note with some headings in it and you may see some little lines on the right side of the screen.

Yes, we now have a scrollable and clickable, floating table of contents.

Hover your mouse over the lines and a pop up appears with a list of all your note headings.

This is what it looks like for my reading list.

As you scroll down the page and reach each heading it changes colour in the pop up.

When you click on any of the heading links in the pop up you’ll jump straight to the heading in the note.

This is going to make navigating long notes so much easier.

No matter where you are in a note you can instantly move somewhere else.

I’ve found this little addition very useful and I’ve already started adding more headings to some of my long notes just to improve navigation. It’s almost built into my muscle memory now.

If you would prefer the table of contents on the left of the page or disable it then we have a new setting.

Head to Settings -> Preferences -> Notes -> Floating table of contents.

Choose the option you want and away you go.

If you’re on the latest version of Evernote and can’t see this then try a log out and back in again or hang on another few days and you should get it.

I like this. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Add tasks using the AI Assistant

There’s also been an improvement to the AI Assistant. We can now create tasks.

Here’s the conversation I just had when testing.

I first asked the AIA to “Create a task in the open note for “Write the report” with due date of 1st May“.

I then ask it to “Set the time at 11am and flag it.“.

Everything worked fine.

I’ve heard a few folk wanting this. I don’t think I’ll be using it myself a lot as I find it just as quick to create the task manually and with the introduction of tabbed notes last week I can have multiple task notes open.

Pretty sure a lot of folk will be happy. What do you think? Will you use the AIA to create tasks?

Paid subscriber private chat for April

I’ve just added April’s private chat thread for paid subscribers. Access it directly here.

Don’t panic if you’re a free subscriber. You can still access the normal Taming the Trunk chat feature here. Anyone can post.

The chat is somewhere you can ask questions about using Evernote or organisation in general.

All subscribers are welcome.

And finally...

The official Evernote March update video is out in the wild. All the new things they’ve added during last month. Always worth a watch.

That’s it.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Going right back to the beginnings of Evernote, the goal has always been to remember everything. The biggest issue with this has been the human element. Unless we physically capture something into Evernote its not going to be remembered.

Not any more.

The research team at Evernote are working on an embedded neural chip called EVE (Event Vector Encoder) that will automatically record all events that happen during your day and record them in Evernote.

As you go through the motions of your day all the events that happen will automatically be transmitted to your phone and stored in Evernote.

The second stage is where it gets clever.

A custom built AI algorithm called EVE-MIND (Event Vector Multimodal Interpretation & Narrative Decoder) turn the vectors into your life story.

I spoke to Dr. Penelope Trunkman, Chief Research Officer at Evernote who told me “For the first time, human experience is natively machine-readable. With EVE capturing life as structured event vectors and our AI interpretation stack turning that signal into coherent narrative memory, we’ve essentially replaced ‘I think I remember’ with ‘I can retrieve.’ It’s not just note-taking, it’s a firmware upgrade for the concept of never forgetting.“

Imagine all of your day to day interactions being recorded automatically, all meetings, even the quick chat at the coffee shop. Everything will be in Evernote for you to retrieve later.

For those worried about privacy, a simple voice command of “EVE pause” will stop the recording. Just saying “EVE continue” will kick off the vector recording again.

Dr Penelope told me “Right now, we’re at the stage of embedding the chips in mice and it’s only caused a few strokes. We hope to start human trials later this year”

This technology sounds amazing and I’m thinking of putting my name down for the trials. If Evernote can make the process a simple injection of the EVE chip into the brain and then the phone app does all the recording, we could be on to a winner.

I did ask Dr Penelope what EVE-MIND made of the memories of the mice that survived and she told me their thoughts were mainly about cheese and how to avoid Tom.

What do you think of this revolutionary tech? Leave me a comment.

I think the best advice I could give anyone right now is to check the date.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to woyb10051 who became a paid subscriber over the last week and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.9.1. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.9.2.

Sing from the rooftops. Evernote has brought back tabbed notes. We’ve not seen this since 2020.

The story goes that in the old version of Evernote, before 2020, folks who used Macs had tabbed notes. You could open multiple notes as tabs, just like web pages in your browser.

The issue was that folks who used Windows never knew they existed as it was a Mac only feature. I was one of those people. Someone mentioned tabs to me once and I kind of said, “what now”.

Zoom forward almost 6 years and Evernote have bought back this much loved feature and its available on Mac and Windows. We all get the feel the love of tabs.

Open Evernote notes in a tab

So what you can now do is open multiple notes in tabs across the top of Evernote.

Just right click any note from the note list, sidebar or three dot menu and select Open in New Tab.

You’ll then have a new tab open with that note.

There’s also a plus button to the right of all your tabs.

When you click this, a new tab is opened to your default in Settings -> Preferences -> Application -> When opening a new tab.

You can set this to start on the home page, all notes or all notebooks.

When you click on a new tab, the note is opened on its own or with its note list.

If the note opens on its own in a window and you want to see the note list for the notebook it’s in then just click the notebook name in the breadcrumbs at the top of the note.

I know a lot of folk who have multiple notes open in separate windows, so this will be a great improvement and a slightly easier workflow.

If you end up opening lots of tabs, because I know you will, the size of the tab will shrink so you won’t be able to see the name of the note. Just hover over the tab and a tooltip gives you the name.

Reorder your tabs by dragging

You’ll probably find that as the day goes by and you open more and more tabs, they won’t be in the order you want them, so grab hold of them with your mouse and drag to reorder.

I’ve found this really useful. Just kind of changing priority of the notes by reordering.

When I’m working on a specific project, I now open all the notes I may need and reorder them by priority or usefulness.

Open other Evernote sections in a tab

We’re not just restricted to notes.

We can open the following views in a tab:

• Tasks

• Home Page

• All notes

• Calendar

• Templates Notebook

• Notebooks

The only one missing from the list is Spaces. I’d love the chance to open a space in a tab.

Being able to open Tasks in a new tab has been very helpful. During the day, I have Tasks on the far left of my tab bar so I can switch to it really quickly. I then open and close other tabs when I need to.

I’ve also found having Calendar open in a new tab useful for when I’m adding lots of meetings in one go, I can switch between notes and calendar really quickly now.

There’s a tab indicator when recording

Another little feature that’s very useful is being able to spot if you’ve got a recording going on and which tab/note it’s in.

When you’re recording yourself or a meeting, there’s a little pulsing record dot to the left of the tab that’s recording.

This is helpful.

For one, it reminds you there’s a recording going on so you don’t forget and if you have multiple tabs open at any one time, you can see which one has the recording.

My new little system for meetings is to now open up all the notes I might need to refer to during the meeting in tabs and then kick off the recording in the main meeting note.

I can browse around the different tabs, take manual notes and whatnot, and the main meeting note just carries on recording.

How would you like to see tabs improve?

I’d love to see pinned tabs.

Maybe coloured tabs?

I also have this wild idea of being able to drag some content from a note up to a tab, have that tab open in a different note and be able to drop the content where I want. Kind of drag and drop between notes.

Have you tried tabs yet? What do you think? Leave me a comment

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.8.1. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.7.1.

A few small improvements that make a difference have just been released, so a busy episode of Taming the Trunk today.

Lets go.

Evernote tasks now work in tables

This is something folks have been wanting for ages and there’s already been a ‘game changer’ message in the Taming the Trunk chat (for subscribers).

Evernote tasks came out around 2020/2021 and gave us a way of adding a proper task with a due date and a flag to a note without having to use a checkbox. You could then pull up tasks in its own view, sort and filter them.

One thing you couldn’t do was put a task inside a table.

A lot of folks wanted this. The ability to create a small table with column headings and tasks underneath is a nice way to categorise tasks within a project.

Update your Evernote to 11.8.1 on desktop and tasks now work inside tables. This also works on mobile.

We can now create a kind of DIY Kanban board.

What I’ve done here is create a 3 x 3 table using the shortcut [][][]x3.

I’ve then added column headings at the top using shortcut ### for heading 3.

I’ve then added a background colour to the headings using the little drop down menu to the right of the table cell.

Then, using the shortcut () I’ve added tasks to the Pending column. You can add flags and due dates as well if you want.

What’s great about a Kanban board is that you can move your tasks from one column to another based on what stage that task is at.

Each column is a stage of the task and you can have as many as you want.

To move a task to another stage, you hover over the task, click the little four dot grab handle and drag the task to another column.

In this screenshot, I’ve dragged a task to the In Progress column and added a due date.

The great thing about this kind of task based Kanban board is that is can be unique to everyone. You can create stages/columns that are important to you and build your own system.

Do you use Kanban boards? Are you happy you can add tasks to tables? Let me know in the comments.

Dictate AI prompts

Something new for the Evernote AI Assistant. We can now dictate a prompt.

Just click the microphone icon in the prompt window and start talking.

What you type appears in the prompt box.

Hit the up arrow icon and you’ll send the prompt to the AI and get the answer.

Will you find this useful? Let me know in the comments.

AI Assistant usage meter icon

We now have a new icon at the top of the prompt window for quickly checking your AI usage.

There are two different limits at play here.

One is for your overall use of the AI Assistant and the other is for the length of each individual conversation.

Using this icon, you can see what your usage is.

This is what it looks like for an active Ai chat.

I’ve used 7% of my overall assistant usage and 51% of my individual chat limit.

We don’t know what the exact limit is as each chat can use a different amount of AI tokens, but at least we know when we’re getting close.

Semantic search separated from main results

So, semantic search is cool. I did a deep dive not long ago and I find it useful but it has slowed down search a little and this improvement will help speed things back up again.

Before, when you typed in a search term and hit enter, semantic and standard search was run at the same time and then the results were shown, but as the semantic search takes longer to work out, it made standard search a lot slower.

What’s changed from version 11.8.1 is semantic and standard are run separately and the difference between the two different types of search are more defined.

With this search for recipes, the semantic search is at the top and called Smart results and the standard notes are below. It’s still a teeny bit slow but from what I understand this will be improved on again, soon.

If you ask a question, the semantic search tries to find an answer.

Let me know what you think? Remember, you can always turn off semantic search in the settings.

We have a new emoji picker

Finally, in this bumper episode of Taming the Trunk, we have a brand new emoji picker.

Type a full colon and then start typing the emoji you want and a picker appears.

The more you type, the more relevant emoji’s you see.

The picker also works inside tasks.

That’s about it.

As always, let me know what you think about all these new things. Leave me a comment below.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to Vincent who became a paid subscriber over the last week and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.7.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.4.3.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reorganising how I collect and store receipts and bills in Evernote.

I think I had kind of outgrown my old system, which was to have a Receipts notebook for every year and then pile all my receipts and bills into it using a naming convention.

I was starting to have a few issues finding and grouping receipts and bills, especially for work. Even the AI Assistant didn’t really help much and I didn’t want to start using tags as that just makes everything more complicated.

Another reason why I’ve changed my system slightly is that when the price and plan changes happened last November, the Advanced plan ended up with unlimited (fair usage) notebooks. Before, we were limited to 2000 on the Professional plan.

With my new system, I could see myself getting close to the 2000 limit at some point, which may then need another change. With unlimited notebooks, I don’t need to worry.

So how’s it working?

I’ve decided to keep my Stack called Receipts but structure the notebooks in a different way.

I still have Receipt notebooks for each year and these hold one-off bills and invoices, just random stuff I want to keep.

I’ve then created notebooks for the important areas, which are mainly bills, invoices and receipts from recurring services or companies.

• Water

• Gas

• Electric

• Phone

• Uber

• Domains and Hosting

• Google

• Zoho

The list of notebooks is much longer than this, you’d be scrolling a lot.

These are the important areas where I may need to collate receipts for my accountant, a lot are home and business expenses.

Another change is that I don’t have a different notebook for each year. All of my Electric Bills go in the Electric notebook.

I also stick to my strict naming convention.

WHO WHAT WHEN

So my notes titles still look the same.

Eon Electric Bill February 2026

The difference is that instead of ending up in a Receipts 2026 notebook, it now goes in the Electric notebook.

I use Uber a lot. I book my train tickets via the app, book taxis a lot and I subscribe to Uber one to get the credits that go towards future travel.

I have a LOT of Uber bills and now they are all in an Uber notebook.

Another example is with my phone.

I have two sims from different companies. One for personal and another for business.

I also buy a few apps, subscribe to Apple News and Music so anything related to my phone now goes in my Phone notebook.

Capturing receipts

Regarding getting bills into Evernote, I still email things in and I’ve been going back as far as 2006 to make sure I have everything. A bit tedious but worth it in the long run.

The other day I emailed in over 150 receipts into Evernote and everyone got there. It works a treat.

For scanning paper receipts and bills, I have changed this a little. I’m using the Scannable app from Evernote instead of the built in scanner.

The main reason is that it creates PDFs of the scan instead of just images. I prefer a PDF.

Scannable is made by Evernote and if you have a paid Evernote plan then you can send your scans directly into a notebook for free.

The app is only available on iPhones, not Android which is a shame. Anyone non-Apple will need to use the built-in scanner, which is pretty good. I used it for years with my Android phone.

Searching for receipts

On the retrieval side of things, I can now direct my searches and the AI Assistant at a specific notebook and find the information I want much easier. Much less noise in search and more accurate AI results.

In this example, I’ve just searched for 2026 in my Phone notebook and I get all my phone bills for this year.

So that’s how I’m doing it.

I’ve still got quite a bit to do re-organising things and it will take a few months to get it all in order, but once it’s sorted, I’ll have a historic collection of important receipts going back 20 years and going forward, finding and collating bills will be much easier.

One other thing to mention is that I’m not a hoarder so not every receipt for everything goes into a notebook, only the important ones. For example the Amazon receipt for a bulk pack of bamboo toilet paper isn’t going into Evernote, I don’t care about that. But the receipt for my ear buds would just in case they go wrong.

How do you manage receipts? Do you change your system from time to time? Mix things up a bit? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

This week on Ask Me Anything about Evernote we have a question from Allie.

If you have a question you’d love an answer to then leave it in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list.

Allie asks

New Evernote user here. I’ve heard you can email notes into Evernote but I can’t find anything in settings. Can you help?

Yes, I can and welcome to the herd!

So, you need to find your Evernote email address and you then send or forward emails to this address and they end up in the app.

I must admit it’s not 100% intuitive on where to find the email address. Its not in settings.

If you’re in the desktop app, the quickest way to find it is to go to Tools -> Account Info in the top menu bar.

This opens up a web page and scroll down a little and you’ll see the email address you use for emailing in notes.

Copy this email address and add it to your email software’s contact list.

If you’re using the web version of Evernote head to Settings -> Personal Info -> Go to your profile.

This will open up the new designed account pages and you can find the email address near the bottom.

If you’re on mobile, then tap your avatar at the top left of the screen and head to Settings -> More Settings -> More Settings and a page will open up in your web browser that has the email address near the bottom.

As I said, not 100% intuitive. It would be nice to just have it displayed in settings.

Now you’ve got this email address you can send or forward emails into Evernote and they arrive in your default notebook.

But, you can change the location.

If you add @notebook-name to the end of the subject line then it will go into whatever notebook you want.

If your add #tag-name at the end of the subject then the note will be tagged when it arrives in Evernote.

If you add !YYYY/MM/DD at the end of the subject then a reminder is created for that day.

You can combine any or all of these into the email subject line like this.

Electric Bill !2026/04/01 @Bills #Pending

The body of the email becomes the body of the note including any attachments like PDFs.

This subject line would create a note with the title Electric Bill with a reminder on 1st April 2026 in the notebook called Bills with the tag Pending.

Another cool feature is the ability to append an email to an existing note.

Just use an existing note title in the subject line and add the + symbol at the end.

This will add the body of the email to the bottom of the note.

Quick note. If that particular note is currently open in Evernote it may not work as the note would be locked, you’d need to flip to another note.

I email into Evernote loads. I’ve setup my CRM and Invoice software to auto email things into Evernote and I have some quick actions setup in my Email client to forward emails into specific notebooks.

I use EM Client as my email package and I can setup quick actions.

I just select one of these and it forwards the email into the correct notebook or space.

Thanks for the question Allie. I hope this helps and welcome to Evernote.

If you have a question that you want answering, leave it in the comments.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.4.4. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.4.3.

One of the most basic things we all do in Evernote is make lists. Everyone loves a list.

It could be a to-do list for work, a shopping list, a family/kids type of list... lists everywhere.

Something I’ve found myself doing many times is sitting and starring at a list trying to work out if I’ve missed something off it. Especially with my backpacking list, if I forget my stove I go hungry, or end up at a pub. I should forget my stove more often!

Recently I’ve been using the Evernote AI Assistant to help me put lists together so I don’t forget things.

Here’s a few examples of how I’ve used it.

Finding missing items from a packing list

I do a bit of backpacking and camping in the Spring and Summer and have quite an extensive packing list, but even with the list, I usually forget something.

I told the AI Assistant to look at the list and find missing items.

This was the prompt I used.

Take a look at this backpacking list and see what I might of missed. I’m going on a three day hike.

It did a pretty good job and found quite a few things that were missing.

The assistant told me to pack a compass, I have the OS Maps app on my phone but phones can die, so I really should take my compass with me.

It also mentioned ear plugs and an eye mask, which is something I usually pack, but it’s not on the list.

It came up with about twenty things. A lot of them weren’t relevant to me. I don’t need water purification tablets as there’s a pub or tea rooms every 100 feet in the UK so I’ll never have an issue with water.

It was useful. It did a bit of thinking for me and I’ve added a few items to the list.

I just need it to stop pouring with rain so I can head out.

Finding missing books from a reading list

I have a simple reading list. It’s a bunch of authors that I read on a regular basis with checkboxes of their books underneath their names.

A nice table of contents at the top that helps me jump down to an author as the list is quite long.

I have no idea if I have books missing from the list. I’d need to go through the author’s Wikipedia page checking the list against their bibliography, which would take a lot of time.

So, I asked the AI Assistant to find what books are missing.

Here’s the prompt.

The open note is a reading list where a heading is an author and the checkboxes are names of books.

Take a look at the Stephen King books in the note and then search the web to find any Stephen King books that are missing from the list.

I always over-explain things just so it knows exactly what I want. Hopefully less errors that way.

It did a good job.

I wasn’t missing much at all. I had all the novels on the list, but it did find a bunch of short stories I was missing, which I’ve now added.

So, not too bad, but it did take a bit of prompting.

The assistant was really good at finding items missing from my backpacking list.

It was OK at finding the books missing, but I did need to rewrite the prompt a couple of times as it was just giving me a list of all Stephen King books. Still took less time than Googling.

I also tried to get the assistant to look in my Music Collection notebook and find Genesis albums that were missing.

I used this prompt.

Take a look at this notebook @Music Collection

Its a collection of my music. Each note is a different album.

Look for all the Genesis albums in the notebook, these are the ones I own. Then search the web and tell me which albums are missing from my collection. Only give me the missing albums.

It didn’t do a great job. I tried a few different variations of the prompt and all it would give me was a list of all Genesis albums, so I’d have to do the organising myself.

I’ve mentioned this to Evernote as I think the AI should be able to do this.

Let me know if you’ve been using the assistant to help with lists. Leave me a comment below.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.4.4. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.4.3.

The Evernote AI Meeting Notes feature has been out a while now and from talking to folks here on Taming the Trunk it’s probably the most useful feature added to Evernote in years.

However, one grumble has been that the summary generated by the AI transcription is a little short with not a lot of information.

So, this week I’ve put together an ultimate meeting analysis prompt using my eBILDE prompt framework that you can use with the Evernote AI Assistant to analyse your meeting in a lot more detail.

The first thing to do is record your meeting using the remote or in-person recorder.

If you’ve not used the AI Meeting Note feature before, check out my deep dive.

When you’ve got your meeting transcribed, open up the AI Assistant using the round button at the bottom right of the interface. We’re now ready to prompt.

You’ll need to make sure your meeting transcription note is open when you’re entering the prompt.

The ultimate AI Assistant meeting analysis prompt

This is a long prompt and based on my eBILDE prompt framework so I’m going to go through the different stages and explain what they do.

BASE

This tells the AI exactly what to look at in your note and I’ve told it to read it carefully!

Look at the entire transcript in the open note. This meeting transcript is created by Evernote AI Meeting Notes. Read it carefully from start to finish.

INSTRUCT

This is where you tell the AI Assistant exactly what you want it to do. No messing, treat it like a 5 year old and explain everything.

Act as an advanced meeting analyst and produce an output that includes:

- Main topic: Identify the single main topic of the meeting (one short line).

- Summary: Summarise the important information and outcomes from the meeting. Keep it concise and avoid over-explaining.

- Agreed items: Extract key points that were agreed or decided.

- Tasks & actions: List all tasks/actions that need completing.

- Where possible, assign a task to a responsible person’s name exactly as written in the transcript.

- If no owner is stated, write “Owner: Not stated” (do not guess).

- If a due date/timeframe is stated, include it. If not, write “Due: Not stated”.

Formatting rules (must follow):

- Use bullet points and short, clear phrases.

- Use neutral language.

- Avoid buzzwords.

- Do not speculate and do not offer opinions.

- If something is unclear in the transcript, label it “Unclear” rather than guessing.

I’ve made sure to ask it for a clear topic title for the meeting and a clear and concise summary without any over-explaining. I don’t want the AI to waffe on.

I’ve also aked it to extract what was agreed or decided and create a list of tasks or actions assigned with the name of a person.

Regarding the formatting of the analysis, I’ve asked it to use bullet points, neutral language that avoids buzzwords and the most important part is I’ve asked it not to speculate or make things up.

LIFT

This step could be optional or you could use it in the BASE element of the prompt but for now I’ve slotted this here.

LIFT is there to instruct the AI to look at the web and ‘lift’ the note contents. In this scenario I want to make sure it doesn’t search the web.

Do not use web search. Rely only on the transcript in the open note.

I only want the AI Assistant to look at the note contents.

DEVELOP

This part of the prompt tells the AI what you want to happen when the main task is completed.

After the bullets above, add a final section:

- Open questions / follow-ups: Brief bullet list of questions the team should answer next, or areas worth exploring further (keep this short).

The final prompt

Here you go. Open up one of your meeting transcripts and the AI Assistant and paste this into the prompt box, see what happens.

This is the full prompt.

Look at the entire transcript in the open note. This meeting transcript is created by Evernote AI Meeting Notes. Read it carefully from start to finish.

Act as an advanced meeting analyst and produce an output that includes:

- Main topic: Identify the single main topic of the meeting (one short line).

- Summary: Summarise the important information and outcomes from the meeting. Keep it concise and avoid over-explaining.

- Agreed items: Extract key points that were agreed or decided.

- Tasks & actions: List all tasks/actions that need completing.

- Where possible, assign a task to a responsible person’s name exactly as written in the transcript.

- If no owner is stated, write “Owner: Not stated” (do not guess).

- If a due date/timeframe is stated, include it. If not, write “Due: Not stated”.

Formatting rules (must follow):

- Use bullet points and short, clear phrases.

- Use neutral language.

- Avoid buzzwords.

- Do not speculate and do not offer opinions.

- If something is unclear in the transcript, label it “Unclear” rather than guessing.

Do not use web search. Rely only on the transcript in the open note.

After the bullets above, add a final section:

- Open questions / follow-ups: Brief bullet list of questions the team should answer next, or areas worth exploring further (keep this short).

Quick self-check before finalising: confirm you have not invented owners, dates, or decisions. If any tasks lack an owner or due date, ensure they are marked Not stated.

Feel free to edit and change this as you want. Change the formatting or ask for different information.

It works really well. I can’t post the full response I got to my meeting as it’s quite long but here’s a few snippets from what the AI Assistant gave me when I used it on a real meeting.

When you get the reply, the AI Assistant should ask you if you want to insert the reply into the existing meeting note or create a brand new note.

This was the summary and agreed items it gave me from an hour and half meeting.

This is what the tasks looked like. The AI managed to pull everything I needed.

This is what it came up with for follow up questions and thoughts.

It did well because the prompt was very specific in what it was asking for. The more precise you are with the prompt the better the result.

I also checked the AI usage in the settings and running this prompt on an hour and a half meeting used up just 1%, so not a lot at all.

Grab it, save it in a note, edit it and just copy and paste it into the AI Assistant whenever you have a meeting.

Let me know what you think? Would you add anything to this prompt? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

This week on Ask Me Anything about Evernote we have a question from Des.

If you have a question you’d love an answer to then leave it in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list.

Des asks

I work with a lot of Word documents and want to import the contents of the document instead of just attaching the file. How do I do this?

Thanks for the question, Des and this is totally possible, but you need to use the import function in the settings.

Just drag your Word doc into the big box in the middle and the contents of the Word document will appear as a new note in your default notebook.

This is what my Word doc looks like.

This is what the note in Evernote looks like after the import.

This is the only way to get the contents of the Word document into a note.

If you’ve been dragging a Word document into a note or using the File -> Import function, then this just imports the file as an attachment and both of these options work slightly differently.

If you drag any file into a note, it just appears as an attachment.

If you use File -> Import then you can import multiple files at once and they can be different files so you can mix ‘n’ match documents and images.

What happens is Evernote created a new notebook with the prefix (Imported) and each file appears as an attachment in a separate note.

You can then organise things how you want them.

Thanks for the question Des and I hope this helps.

If you have a question, then leave it in the comments below.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to Jonaz and Eric who became paid subscribers over the last week and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.4.3. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.4.2.

I was speaking to someone the other day who told me they were fully digital, no pen or paper at all and it got me thinking about the way I use paper and digital together and I discovered I use them for very different things.

I’ve tried to go fully digital a few times but found it really difficult or I needed to take multiple devices with me so I have lots of screens.

An example of this is during the training sessions I run. I take notes on paper because my screen is running a presentation. I could use my phone for notes but maybe I’m a little old fashioned, it seems rude to be starring at a screen typing when other folk are talking to me and those folk have paid me for the training session.

So I use paper.

This week my trusty Filofax Clipbook broke after many years, the ring binder thingy just went weird and stopped closing properly so I bought a new one.

In denim!

Very cool!

I’ve used Filofax Clipbooks for years and they are cheap to buy, you fill them with the inserts you want and remove pages when it gets a bit full.

I only use this as a work notebook and I scan pages into Evernote if I need to and transcribe them. I don’t have any contact inserts, daily planners or a map of the world. I use Google maps!

This book sits on my desk, it goes to training sessions with me and I take notes and write stuff down that I don’t want to forget.

I also use it for in person meetings and then scan into Evernote but I don’t use it for online meetings, I record and transcribe these just using Evernote.

I have my Clipbook split into sections. At the front are pages for my training sessions, then comes my day-2-day notes and finally some spare pages. That’s it.

A typical daily note looks a little bit like this (mock-up), complete with coffee stain which unfortunately penetrates many, many pages!

I have some big tick boxes that refer to client work I have to do that day. Just the main tasks. All my regular recurring tasks are still in Evernote.

I then have a section at the bottom of the page for basic notes. I use this to remember numbers, line numbers of code and little temporary things I don’t want to forget. Any proper notes that need to be remembered for a while go in Evernote.

I can scan and transcribe this page into Evernote.

If I’m honest, most of the time I don’t transcribe these notes, maybe for the training sessions but not for the day-2-day notes.

For me, this really is a notebook for remembering short-term things.

Regarding pens, I’m not a big pen person. I like the Uniball Jetstream 0.7mm and also the chunky Uniball Power Tank 1mm. Nice grips.

I must admit I am a big fan of Filofax and I’ve owned many over the years. A good Scottish company, there’s a ton of different inserts available and you can even buy a hole punch and make your own inserts.

I have a small pocket one that I carry around with me on a daily basis and acts as my wallet.

So, do you still use pen and paper?

What notebook do you use?

What’s your favourite pen?

And how do you use it with Evernote?

Let me know in the comments.

AI Assistant Usage appears in settings

Something new in settings has appeared.

Head over to Settings -> AI Features -> AI Assistant Usage and you’ll see how much assistant usage you have left for the month.

Now comes the complicated bit, we don’t know what the limit is, just that you’re creeping closer to it.

I asked the question to the Evernote team and the reason for not showing a limit is that different types of query use different amounts of your limit.

Each Evernote plan has a certain number of AI tokens available to it and we don’t know what this number is. Different types of conversations can use different amounts of tokens.

For example, I had a conversation the other day querying a meeting transcription, which was quite long. I had three or four questions and got answers, this used 1% of my limit.

I also did a bunch of research on my future Mac Mini purchase. I got Evernote to search the web, summarise information it got from the web, turn other information into tables, do some comparisons and I probably asked around 4 or 5 different questions.

This conversation used 2% of my limit, I presume more because of the web searches.

I would also imagine the more note data that’s sent to the AI might use more of the limit. Try to limit how many notes the assistant looks at by specifying years or months.

For example, only look at notes from 2018 or only look at notes in a specific notebook. I think this will help preserve tokens.

You’ll need the latest version to see the limit. Let me know in the comments what you’re at and what you think.

That’s it.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

This week on Ask Me Anything about Evernote we have a question from Mike.

If you have a question you’d love an answer to then leave it in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list.

Mike asks

What AI version does Evernote use for the assistant?

Great question.

So, when the Evernote Assistant launched it was using version 4.1 of ChatGPT.

Anyone new to the assistant should take a look at my Deep Dive from a few weeks ago.

There have been a few changes to the assistant since it launched and one of them was to up the version of ChatGPT to 5.2 so right now this is the version being used.

I asked the AI Assistant to summarise the main differences between versions 4.1 and 5.2 and the parts that relate to the Evernote Assistant are:

• Enhanced multi-step reasoning and structured responses

• Faster response times, especially for complex exchanges

• Smoother, more personalized conversational flow

• Better real-time and web-informed responses

I’ve personally found version 5.2 of ChatGPT to be more verbose. You get much more of an answer from it and it tends to throw out more sources that version 4.1, especially when doing a web search.

It sometimes tries to digress and ask you if you want information on other related topics and this can be useful or not depending on what you’re asking. All in all, I do like the offers of further research.

The change to version 5.2 is very recent, I believe over the last few days so let me know if you spot anything different about the responses you’re getting. Leave me a comment.

Thanks for the question Mike. Don’t forget if you have a question about Evernote, leave it in the comments below.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.3.5. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.3.5.

Linking in Evernote has evolved quite a bit over the last couple of years and we have more options than ever for ways to create and display links.

This deep dive looks at both internal note links and external links.

Most of this article refers to PC and Mac, but internal linking does work on the mobile apps.

Internal linking in Evernote

Internal links refer to note links, linking a note to another note and there’s lots of ways to create one of these links in Evernote.

The first way is to use the ‘@’ command and just start typing the name of the note.

I’ve typed ‘deep dive’ after the ‘@’ symbol and it brings up all the notes with ‘deep dive’ in the title and I can click one of then and the internal link is automatically created.

You can also use the Insert menu at the top left of the note editor to add a note link and it works the same as the ‘@’ command.

Another way is to choose Link to note from the slash (‘/’) command menu. Again, it works the same as ‘@’.

The final way to create a link to another note is to go to that note and use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Alt + Shift + C for PC or ^ + ⌥ + ⌘ + C on Mac. You can edit these shortcuts in settings as they are a bit of a finger-twist.

This copies the direct internal link to your clipboard and you can paste it anywhere you want.

On mobile for Android or iPhone, tap the + button and select Link to Note, then choose your note.

One cool thing to mention is that when you link to another note, that note gets a little link box at the top to show you which notes link to it. Very cool for understanding how your notes link together.

I’ve just linked to another note and that note now shows a little box for backlinks.

View internal note links in different ways

When you create a link to another note, you can change the way it displays and we get four options.

• Mention

• Text

• Title

• Preview

This is what Mention looks like.

You get most of the title of the note appear and a little note icon on the far left to show it’s a note.

When you hover over this type of link, a little preview appears that looks like this.

Towards the top right of the preview, you can copy the link or go to the three-dot menu and change the view of the link or delete it.

This is what a text link looks like.

You get the full title of the note and when you hover over it, a little pop up appears with options to copy the link and get to the three-dot menu.

The little edit icon lets you edit the link, change the text, or even the link itself. The little link symbol that’s crossed out will remove the link but leave the text in place.

This is what the Title view looks like

You get a single line block appear which you can click on to go to the note.

When you hover over this link, you can copy the link and access the three-dot menu for more options.

This is what the preview link looks like

Its my favourite and the type of link I use the most.

This includes the full title of the note and a preview together with a thumbnail.

You can also see some location breadcrumbs at the bottom of the preview that show you where that note is located.

When you hover this view, you can copy the link and access the three-dot menu.

Changing the view for an internal link

You can change the view for an internal link at any time.

Just go into the three-dot menu and choose one of the other views.

You can also set global defaults for your link views and I’ll talk more about this later on in the article.

External links in Evernote

These are basically web links. Links to websites that are external from your Evernote notes and we can display these in different ways as well.

Adding an external link is simple. Just copy a web link and paste it into a note.

Depending on how you have your default view set (more later), the link will appear in any of these three views.

• Mention

• Text

• Preview

This is what Mention looks like.

You get a little icon on the left and most of the title of the page. Hover over the link and you’ll see a preview.

Like with the internal mention link you can see icons for copying the link and also accessing the three-dot menu.

This is what Text looks like

Just a plain link. You can hover over the link and copy, edit, or remove the link.

This is what Preview looks like

This is my favourite view. You get the full title of the page and a summary. Hover again to copy the link or access the menu.

Changing the view of an external link works the same as with internal links, just go into the three-dot menu and select the view you want.

Adding links to existing text

I’ve found the easiest way to add a link to existing text is to copy the link to your clipboard, select the text you want linked and then use the following keyboard shortcuts.

For PC use CTRL+V and for Mac use CMD+V.

This will instantly turn the text into a link without having to mess around with any pop-ups. Simple.

Setting global defaults for internal & external links in Evernote

With all these different views and styles for links, there’s a way for you to set your preferred default in the settings.

Head over to Settings -> Preferences -> Notes -> Links and attachments.

You’ll see an option for Evernote links and Web links. Just change the drop down box to the style you prefer.

You can also access these settings in the mobile apps. Head to Settings -> Notes -> Links and attachments.

One thing to mention. This setting doesn’t change any existing links, they all stay in the same format.

The setting only works with new links that you create.

This is to stop the change messing up any notes you already have.

That’s it. I hope its been useful.

What are your favourite link views? Do you use a mixture or tend to stick to one style? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

This week on Ask Me Anything about Evernote we have a question from Des.

If you have a question you’d love an answer to then leave it in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list.

Des asks

I read on X that note tabs are coming to Evernote? Do you know when?

Hey Des. You are correct.

Federico the product lead at Evernote posted this on X last week.

OK, so what we’re talking about is tabbed notes, very much how to have tabbed web pages in your browser. Each tab is a different note.

Tabs have a bit of a history with Evernote.

Back in 2020 when version 10 of Evernote came out tabs were removed and I kind of said, what tabs? I was on Windows.

Tabbed notes on the old Evernote app pre 2020 only worked for Macs so a lot of folk didn’t miss then at all but the Mac folk really did miss them. It’s been one of Evernote’s most requested features for a while now.

Tabs are going to give us the ability to open our notes in different tabs and go back and forth with them, much easier than fiddling around with notes in open windows.

Being able to refer to other notes really quickly when you’re working is a huge workflow and productivity increase.

I’m testing it now and this is what it looks like with four notes open.

As for when it’s coming out. Not too sure. It only landed in the beta version this week, so it may be a little while before it arrives in the wild, but I don’t think it will be too long.

Will tabs make a difference for you? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to Anne who became a paid subscriber over the last week and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.2.1. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.1.1.

Big news for transcription fans. The limit for transcribing has been increased to 2 hours.

You’ll need to be on the latest version for Mac and PC which is 11.2.1.

The old limit of one hour was one of the biggest pains of the transcription feature. A lot of meetings are one hour long and a lot of them overrun.

I had a meeting a few days ago which ended up as 1 hour 5 minutes and I couldn’t transcribe it.

I can now!

The 2 hour limit is retrospective, so if you have any old meetings over an hour, you can go back and fully transcribe and summarise them.

There’s also been a change to the file size for the audio you can transcribe. It’s now the note limit, which is 200MB. It basically means that you don’t need to worry about being over a file size limit anymore.

Another nice little touch is the introduction of “Estimated time” to transcribe information in the transcription window. You can see it in the screenshot above. This will give you an idea of how long you have to wait.

Are you happy with the improvements? Let me know in the comments.

Using the Evernote Assistant as a replacement for Google

Well, not for every Google search, but a lot of them.

When you open the AI Assistant (AIA) window, at the top is a little clock icon which shows you the history of your chats.

You can go back to old chats and pick up where you left off, which I’ve found really useful.

The other day I found myself looking through my old chats and discovered I’ve been using the AIA instead of Google. A lot of my chats were things I would previously done as a Google search.

I did this search.

It turns out the quality is pretty good but not as good as the Made in England range, but you need to remortgage for those!

Here’s another one.

I would probably have done this search in Google and then gone to websites looking for the information. This saved so much time.

Another one.

Something else I’ve found myself doing is opening up the AIA into full screen mode using the left arrow icon at the top left of the assistant sidebar.

Now one important thing to mention is that none of these searches used any of my note content and I haven’t created a note after performing the search.

With the book search above, I just went to the source links, read a bit more and ordered a couple of books. No notes were created.

One other important thing to mention is that you need to tell the AIA to do a web search.

Click the + icon to the left of the prompt window and you’ll see web search.

When the search is activated you’ll see a little blue world icon appear.

Now you just type in your search and the AIA will use the knowledge of ChatGPT and also go out to the internet in general and find answers for you.

Here’s one final search I did which helped me find out how to add images to the IA Writer app.

Now, I understand this is not going to completely replace Google. It doesn’t do real time searches like currency conversions or find the latest news articles about something, but it is very helpful.

There’s always the choice to make a note out of the answers as well.

Don’t forget the AIA can act as a bit of a dictionary, can answer simple questions like what’s the capital of Spain or this one.

Are you using the AI Assistant for general searches? Do you still go to the ChatGPT app or Google for simple searches? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee . Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.1.2. You can grab it from the download page . Latest mobile version is 11.1.1.

The first thing to mention this week is a new and very useful addition to the AI Assistant prompt window.

We now have an ‘@’ symbol next to the plus which lets you select exactly what note, notebook, stack, space or tag you want to refer to in your prompt.

You’ve always been able to use the ‘@’ symbol when typing it but it makes it more obvious how to refer to specific items in Evernote.

If you missed last weeks article it talks about creating a prompt using the eBILDE framework.

I’ve recently been using the AI Assistant to research information and compile what it finds and let me add that info to my notes.

I wanted to share a couple of real life use cases which may give you a few more ideas on how to use the Evernote AI.

I’m thinking about buying a Mac Mini

I’ve been pondering this for a while, have being doing a bit of research and have a note inside Evernote with all the information I need about buying a Mac Mini.

I have web clippings, copy/paste info from a couple of websites, a list of the specs I want and I’ve been using the AI Assistant to help me come to a decision.

One key prompt I used was to ask the assistant to search the web for reviews and compile them into a list so I could add them to a note.

It did a really good job and went out to the web, searched a lot of reviews and review sites and then compiled a list for me which I could copy and paste into my note.

At the bottom of the reply the assistant gave me all the sources it looked at and a copy button for the info.

This all happened within a minute or two so way faster than me having to trawl all the review sites one by one and copy information. It really saved me a lot of time.

Whatever type of product you’re looking to buy, if you’re doing research on it ask Evernote AI to look for pain points, challenges, positives and reviews.

It’s great a doing this.

I’m building out my vinyl collection notes

Long time readers will now I’m a bit of a vinyl record collector and I have a notebook in Evernote that holds all the information about the collection.

Each vinyl has its own note with the album cover, how much I paid and how much it’s worth which is usually less than I paid!

What I’ve always wanted to do is include full track listings, producer and engineer info and maybe a little bit of history about each LP.

But its always seems like a big job. Lots of searching and copy/pasting for many notes.

The AI Assistant has really helped. I can get it to do the searching, compile the information and then I add it to the note.

This is how I’ve been doing it.

It found the name of the album in the note which is “Dream Theater’s Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory” and it found the track listings.

Next I wanted the production team information so I asked:

It gave me a full list of the production team including photography and album cover design which was useful.

Finally I asked for a brief history of the album.

It did a pretty good job on the history and included topics for origins and background, recording and production, concept and storyline, release, touring and critical reception.

It did well and I’ve copy pasted all this info into my note which is helping me expand the information about my collection.

So there’s a couple of different ways I’ve been using the AI Assistant to save me time, do the searching and research for me so I can expand the information in my notes.

I hope this is useful and it gives you a few ideas on how to use the assistant.

Let me know how you’ve been using it in the comments.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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This week on Ask Me Anything about Evernote we have a question from Tom.

If you have a question you’d love an answer to then leave it in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list.

Tom asks

How do I automate filing and tagging using the AI Assistant? I thought I’d be able to get Evernote to automatically move and tag notes for me.

Thanks for the question Tom and the simple answer is you can’t. It not what its been designed to do.

Over the last couple of months and with the AI Assistant being teased quite a bit, there’s been a few expectations of what the assistant can do and some have been a little further ahead of where we are right now.

The Assistant has been designed for finding, expanding and chatting with your notes with the added benefit of bringing in information from the web.

It wasn’t designed to automate tasks.

For example, if you have a 100 page PDF in Evernote and you want one quote from it or need to summarise a certain section you can do this.

You can also search the web for information and add this to your existing notes to expand them.

What you can’t get the Assistant to do is noticed changes to your notes and automatically move or tag them.

To be honest, I’m not sure if AI would be useful in this. A simple rules based filter system would work.

A system similar to how email filtering works where you have a trigger like, “a note is created with Invoice in the title” and an action happens like “the note is moved to the invoice folder”.

Maybe semantic search could play apart where words like receipt or bill could be used within that trigger.

Ages ago I wrote about how I’d like to see an automation system working in Evernote.

I hope that kind of helps. We can’t automate, but we can question and expand our notes.

Have a good rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to Jean who became a paid subscriber over the last week and many thanks to Anon who who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.0.4 (finally!). You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.0.3.

So, version 11 is out and our robot elephant AI Assistant, who I still call EVE is in the wild. Have you had a play yet?

I’ve had a bunch of questions over the last couple of weeks about how to best prompt the AI Assistant and get the most out of it, which got me thinking about creating a framework for building a prompt.

So, I came up with something.

Say hello to the eBILDE Framework.

Please, if any other publications use this framework, credit Taming the Trunk.

One of the issues myself and others have had is structuring the prompt so that the assistant can understand what you want.

A lot of the time, I’ve been too vague or assumed it knows what I’m talking about.

What I’ve learned is that you need to be specific. Very much like when you prompt any AI tool.

So here’s the breakdown of the framework.

The little e is for Evernote.

The rest is as follows.

B - Base

This is where you start. Tell Evernote where to look. It needs to know.

Do you want Evernote to look at a specific note or notes that are tagged something?

Do you want Evernote to look in a notebook, stack or space?

Tell the AI Assistant where to look by using the @ symbol to mention the area of Evernote you want to focus on.

You can also select text or other items and say things like “Look at the selected text” or “Look at the selected table”.

This tells the AI Assistant (AIA) to look inside my Taming the Trunk Space.

Its blue, which means I’ve selected it from the drop down list that appears when you use the @ symbol.

I - Instruct

This is the action step.

You give clear instructions such as find, summarise, extract information, draft an update or structure ideas.

Make sure you are very specific about what you want the AIA to do.

Notice with this prompt, it produces a lot of notes and they are paginated at the bottom as 1 to 4 pages. You can page through them all.

The Instruct part of the framework can be in multiple stages, so I could now add another instruction like this.

The AIA gives me a summary of the note that I mentioned.

L - Lift (optional)

This is where you can lift your note to another level by searching the web and adding to your note.

You can click the plus icon in the prompt box to activate a web search or just ask the assistant to search the web.

The assistant understands everything inside the conversation you’re having, so you can search the web multiple times during your conversation and refer back to the information it found.

D - Develop

This is what you want to happen next once the main task is done?

Develop your conversation in more detail, give the AIA more instructions, tell it to summarise certain information, combine information from web searches and your Evernote notes.

Keep asking questions, keep telling the AIA to do what you want.

I’m now going to add another Instruction and ask Evernote to create a note with the information from the summary.

It doesn’t actually create the note, but it provides you with copy & paste information to put into a new note yourself.

E - Expand (optional)

Do you want to expand the conversation even more?

Start questioning and challenging the AIA. Ask it to explain choices, explore alternatives or respond to feedback.

How confident are you of the answers you’ve given?

Check the sources again for the release date to make sure it’s correct.

Make sure you get what you want and the information is correct and in the format you want.

Tell me if I’ve missed anything that could be important.

Lets look at some real world examples on how to use eBUILDE.

Plan a trip to Wales

Base: Look in my notes related to trips to Wales including places, walks, food and accommodation.

Instruct: Organise these notes into a clear summary with sections for highlights, favourite places and things I might want to do differently next time.

Lift: Add brief background context from the web for notable locations such as national parks or coastal towns, only where it adds helpful context.

Develop: Suggest one follow-up note I could create to help plan a future trip to Wales.

Expand: I’ll tell which part of previous trips I enjoyed most, then refine the summary to emphasise that theme. Also question whether anything important is missing.

The Design Project Meetings

Base: Look at the meeting notes related to the “Design Project”.

Instruct: Turn these notes into a clear summary showing decisions made, open questions and agreed next steps.

Lift: None - I’m only going to rely on information in my notes.

Develop: Draft a short internal update based on this summary.

Expand: Challenge any unclear decisions, ask where ownership is missing and suggest follow-up questions I should raise in the next meeting.

Buying some Doc Martens boots (yes I am!)

Base: Look at this note (@ it) and search the Doc Martens website about some new mens Doc Martens, including style preferences, budget and any past notes mentioning Doc Martens or similar brands.

Instruct: Help me decide which men’s Doc Martens boots would suit me best. Compare suitable styles based on comfort, durability and how versatile they are for everyday wear.

Lift: Collect up-to-date review information from the web about current men’s Doc Martens boot models. Give me a list of issues and the positives.

Develop: Recommend one or two specific boot styles that best match my needs with a short explanation of why each is a good fit. Include guidance on sizing.

Expand: Ask a couple of follow-up questions to refine the recommendation. Ask the AI to challenge its own recommendation and if another style might suit me better based on my answers.

That’s it.

Remember this framework is not strict, you can repeat sections and miss other sections out if you want.

The idea is to give yourself some sort of structure to start with so you’ll be able to write a more specific prompt and make the most out of EVE.

Let me know what you think. Let me know how you’ve been using the assistant. Leave a comment below.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon