Spaces are coming to all Evernote users

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 10.119.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 10.118.0.

Many thanks to Gene, dbaxter and CalgaryMark 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.

This is huge! I've been saying that a lot recently.

The Spaces feature that was only available to teams and business users of Evernote is coming very soon to all users!

Make sure you're on the latest version and when it’s rolled out, you'll see it appear in the sidebar.

Right now, Spaces is only available to a few new users on personal and professional plans and the Evernote Expert community but as far as I know it will roll out to everyone over the next few weeks.

I'll do a full deep dive on Spaces once it's fully rolled out and all the functionality is set in stone as right now things may change.

This article is kind of a teaser, an introduction on how you could be using Spaces when they come.

What are Evernote Spaces?

Think of them as another organisation layer.

It’s a way to be able to focus on a certain project or topic.

For Evernote business users the idea is that entire teams can have their own area within a "company" Evernote. For example, the Marketing team can have access to the Marketing Space.

For individual users Spaces gives us the chance to be able to split certain projects, clients or aspects of your life in to distinct areas.

What can you use Spaces for?

• Create a space for a client or project

• Create a space for your personal life

• Create a space for managing your kids

• Create a space for a class or subject at university

I have a space for Taming the Trunk.

This is the space I'm working in right now writing this article.

There's an area for the latest notes which is called "What's new".

There's an area where you can pin important notes. This is very useful when your running large projects.

Finally, there's an area for notebooks and notes.

You can import/move notebooks into a space and move them out again whenever you want and even when a notebook is in a space it will still exist in the main sidebar and be a normal notebook. You kind of add what notebooks you want into a space.

I'll go into a load of detail when I do my deep dive once spaces fully rolls out.

I've also created spaces for some of my larger clients and projects so I can focus on just those notes when I'm working. I also have a space for all the training work I do.

Notes and notebooks within spaces work exactly the way as all other notes and notebooks.

I think another way to explain spaces is that it’s a way to collect related notebooks and view them in one place.

If you have a lot of notebooks its really easy to get lost in the sidebar. Spaces helps to organise things better.

I’ll also add that I’ve found spaces very useful on mobile. The pinned notes in the space can be navigated to pretty quickly. EG. I needed a door code for a training job I did the other day and I found it quickly as it’s a pinned note in my training space. I wouldn’t want this note always in shortcuts or pinned to the top of a notebook as I don’t use it very often, but pinned to a space gave it a kind of “secondary” importance, if that makes sense.

Hopefully spaces will be rolling out to everyone over the next few weeks so keep an eye on the release updates.

How will you use Spaces? Leave me a comment.

Email a copy of a note being removed

Note: I’ve seen some confusion about this on socials. This refers to emailing notes OUT of Evernote. Emailing notes INTO Evernote has not changed.

If I'm honest I don't think I've ever used this feature and over the last few days I've only spoken to three people who have. The folks at Evernote who I've spoken to told me it had very low usage.

What it did was let you email a copy of your note to one or more people and the feature was being used by some folk for phishing and email scams.

Here's the Evernote statement (x.com).

📨We’ve removed Evernote’s ‘Email a copy’ for maximum platform security

Within Evernote, there are many ways to share a note externally. Previously, one such option was to email a copy of the note to a select list of email addresses directly from Evernote.

As of yesterday, we removed the 'email a copy' functionality after observing that it was being misused by bad actors for malicious activities, like phishing and email scams.

This, along with the fact that there are other more robust sharing options available within Evernote, led us to our decision to remove this feature outright.

Here are some easy and secure ways to share your notes externally:

• 🔗 Publish the note and share it using our new Lite editor. Set your permissions and share the link via email, WhatsApp, Slack, or any other collaboration platform you use. With this option, your note is dynamic (it updates in real time even after your send the link) and you have the option to let others collaborate, even if they don’t have their own Evernote account.

• 📩Export the note as a PDF and share it via your preferred channels. This best recreates the ‘email a copy’ feature, as it sends a static snapshot of the note at the time you export it.

We apologize for any inconvenience this change might cause! We believe it's important to put the security of our platform and customers first, and we look forward to making collaboration in Evernote even more powerful in the future.

Now that the whole Evernote sharing system has been rebuilt and improved it's probably best to use this to share notes with individuals and groups. Folks who you share with don't need an Evernote account to view or edit the note.

One positive is that its slightly reduced the length of the giant three dots note menu!

Did you use email a copy? Let me know in the comments.

And finally…

The latest official Evernote recap video for November is out. Catch up on a lot of the new features and updates.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon