New feature time: Introducing backlinks!

Newsletter Housekeeping: Happy New Year! I hope you had a good break. A big hello to all the new subscribers, lots of them. I have some cool newsletter features planned for the new year so keep watching!

Before I dig into the latest new feature update, it’s been announced that the acquisition of Evernote by Bending Spoons as gone through and here’s a little message from the new owners. Lets see what happens over the next few months.

Backlinks baby!

This new feature is hot off the press, it landed yesterday in version 10.51.7 for Mac & Windows and version 10.46 on iOS and Android.

If you’ve not got the latest desktop version yet head over to the Evernote download page. For mobile keep mashing the update button until you get it!

So what are backlinks?

They are a list of notes that link to the note you are viewing. The new feature appears at the top right of all apps.

This is how it looks in the desktop app.

This is how it looks on the desktop apps when you also have tasks in your note.

This is how it looks on the mobile apps.

Another way to explain this is if Note A links to Note B then Note B will automatically have a link back to Note A.

If lots of notes link to Note B then all those notes will be displayed.

This is huge!

It gives us the opportunity to start turning Evernote into more of a knowledge base or Wiki where the relationship between different notes is preserved and we have the ability to move between notes very easily.

When you use backlinks in conjunction with the new internal linking feature from a few weeks ago, then note taking becomes much more fluid.

We can very quickly find notes and link to them with the backlink automatically appearing. This is much more productive than having to link and backlink manually.

Use cases that come to mind would be large project documentation when there’s a lot of note relationships.

Lawyers could use this new feature to improve documentation navigation.

Personal projects like buying a house or researching a new car could benefit from better internal two-way linking.

For me personally, the final piece of the puzzle would be better options for sharing notebooks. I run a lot of digital marketing courses and have documentation that I pass onto trainees. Being able to create well linked training manuals and share them easily would be amazing.

I’d love to hear how you’re going to be using backlinks. If you have any cool ideas then drop them off in the comments.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

Best wishes,

Jon