What do I mean?
Well, what if you need a centralized place to keep your notes, schedule your meetings and organize your ideas, project goals, or a customer’s input? Evernote provides that type of environment, and does it across a wide variety of platforms. In fact, everything that you store in Evernote, whether it be a client’s contact info, notes from a meeting or sketch of a design, is synced across every device where your Evernote account is present. Obviously, this makes it extremely easy to access important information wherever you are.
But how can this be an effective tool for engineers? While engineers working in a large company likely have some sort of data management in place, one-to-two-person design firms generally do not. They hustle from client to client, city to city and back and forth between their tablets, phones and workstations. For this class of designers, Evernote’s capabilities make perfect sense.
While CAD software such as Fusion 360, 3DEXPERIENCE and other platforms are beginning to offer this type of organization in their own environment, Evernote’s solutions appear a bit more mature — and sometimes it’s good to take your eyes away from the tedium of the same old CAD UI and use another tool.
Organize for Efficiency, Organize for Better Engineering
There is a free version to get started but I recommend Evernote Premium so you get all of these features:
· Unlimited monthly uploads
· The ability to clip content from anywhere on the web
· The ability to share and discuss notes, posts and other content across the Evernote platform
· The ability to sync across any phone or computer
· The ability to save emails and link them to notes and calendars, and contacts within Evernote
· The ability to search documents and attachments
· The ability to transform your notes into full-blown presentations
· Keep track and get access to previous presentation revisions
· The ability to annotate PDFs
· The ability to scan and digitize business cards
In addition to all of those features, I also found that the app’s ability to take photos of documents or white board brainstorming sessions and automatically crop them and turn them into legible, useable images was really cool. Once captured, those images can be added to notes and later turned into presentations (but that’s only really compelling if you’ve got some awesome sketches somewhere on the whiteboard).
Overall, Evernote is a very useful app for engineers — and everyone else.
Pricing and Availability
Evernote is available as for free in its basic form and $49.99/year for the premium version.