Family tech:Remember everything with Evernote

What's the VIN of the cars? What class is my son in first thing tomorrow? Where is the manual for my mower and my camera? Where are the receipts I'll need for taxes? What prescriptions am I taking, and in what dosages? Where's that bookmark for that great Web site I saw yesterday?

All that information, and 6,661 other tidbits of my life, is available to me in seconds in a program called Evernote.

If you read Family Tech two weeks ago, I mentioned Evernote as a program useful to students. Evernote's motto is simply "Remember Everything." And it's not just students who need to remember everything.

At its core, Evernote is an application for your Windows PC or a Mac. You can type in notes to it, or copy Adobe PDF, WAV audio files or images into it.

You categorize the individual "notes" into notebooks, and you can assign one or more tags to each note. Then you can search the text in the title, the note itself or as one of the tags.

All that would be useful by itself, but Evernote goes a lot further. It automatically indexes the words in your searchable PDF file. And if your photo has words in it, it does a pretty good job of figuring out the words and letting you search for them too. On a recent outing to look at refrigerators, I'd take a photo with my phone of the price tag for each fridge we were interested in. After loading them into Evernote, I tagged them "refrigerator." When I searched for "refrigerator and Samsung," I got the price information for all the Samsung refrigerators we'd seen.

Of course, for Evernote to be useful in finding information, you first have to get the information into it. They make it pretty simple. You can import all the files you have, simply by pointing at a folder. I did this for my years of scanned documents. Evernote also comes with bookmarklets for most Web browsers, so when you see something on the Web your want to remember, you can capture either the link, or the entire Web page.

Evernote comes with its own e-mail address, so you can forward e-mails to it. And you can connect it to your Twitter account and save Tweets from it.

As they say in infomercials, "but wait there's more." Evernote synchronizes the information you put into it to Evernote's servers. You can have things in local notebooks if you want, but synchronization has huge advantages. If you have more then one computer, a home PC and a work laptop, you can have Evernote on both. If you enter a note on one PC, it appears on the other. Synchronization also is automatic backup. If your PC dies, your Evernote information can be re-synchronized when you get a new computer, and you can get to the information now on the Web from another computer.

There are also clients for many phones: iPhone, Palm PC, some Blackberrys and soon, Android phones. And if you don't have one of those phones, you can access it via the mobile Web site on your phone's browser. That's what I did one day at Costco. I looked up a prescription we had to pay outside of insurance and found that Costco could provide it for a lot less then where we were getting it.

You can choose to share a notebook either with the public or people you invite. The links page for this column is an Evernote shared folder. Another one of my shared folders is a large collection of bookmarks on items that appear often in my blog. This week's links link to it.

And the beauty is, Evernote is free.

There is a Premium option. For $5 a month, or $45 a year, you can synchronize up to 500 megabytes of information a month. The free service is 40 megabytes. So far, I've never needed to exceed my 40 meg a month.

Premium also lets you store any type of file, like Office files, so you can keep various versions of important documents. It also searches PDF files that were not created as searchable. And Premium shared folders can be edited by those you've invited to use your shared folder. And Premium does away with the small ad that appears on your client in basic service.

On my blog this week is a very detailed post "Getting Started with Evernote." I also have a post on the many uses of Evernote. Check them out if you want to start having Evernote remember everything for you too.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech Mark's blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his e-mail address is markstout@gmail.com.