@DiggingDogFarm replied to @Bernie
So true.
There's a myriad of things whizzing by in this thread, so I would like to add these points:
- When I got started with Evernote I used a sheetfed scanner which automatically does optical character recognition (OCR) and saves files in .pdf format. OCR means that those notes in Evernote are SEARCHABLE. So, it helps to learn a little about SEARCH (which will further assist your interactions with Mr. Google). Scanners can be had for a couple hundred bucks. Using a sheetfed scanner you put in a stack of pages and it feeds them automatically. I did several thousands of pages of documents in a couple of weeks.
- A weblink for a favourite recipe is useless if the page is deleted from the website. Evernote has a web clipper which will copy the data on the webpage. Once in Evernote it is fully searchable. Evernote will remember where it copied the recipe from.
- One drawback of being able to search for words in any note (originally document or website) is that if, for example, you're looking for how long to sous vide eggs to get them perfectly soft-boiled, searching for any presence of "egg" will return many, many results. Enter "tags" which can be attached to any note. The hardest part of my scanning documents adventure was figuring out my structure for classification.
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In Evernote there are tags which are an advantage when searching for
"Eggs Boiled Soft" which is performed using " tag:egg* " (without quotes)
which won't produce results for every dern recipe with eggs in them - One of the interesting things about tags is that one no longer needs a "top down" structure of classification. For example, you could have a tag for "grill" and an unrelated tag for "eggplant" which happens to be a sub-tag of "vegetables". Fortunately, the structure can be modified anytime, so you can figure it out as you go.
If anyone is interested, I will ask Chris if we can have a thread for discussion of using Evernote for recipe management. Say so if you want to explore this further.
What this method doesn't solve is searching through one's printed cookbooks (as mentioned previously). I also keep my Diaries on paper (in binders) e.g. Sous Vide, Instant Pot, etc.
