I’ve been putting all kinds of information into Evernote for 5 years now and i’ve stumbled upon some pretty great/easy ways to grab information and easily get it into Evernote, and i’m gonna share those tricks with you.

I’m going to divide this post into 2 parts: how to get information into Evernote from a desktop (Mac or PC) and how to get information into Evernote from an ios device (iPhone or iPad). Sorry, i do not have an Android device. If you do, it is likely that many of the ios methods will be transferable to Android.

Desktop

I work mostly on my iPad Air. However, there are a few things i do on my desktop pc and the way i usually add information from my desktop is by using an add-on/extension for my browser called Evernote Clearly. Evernote Clearly is a free Evernote product and there is a version for Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. It does two things: it gives you a clean reading version of almost any web page, minus advertisements, banners, etc. and it has a side panel that lets you highlight and then post the page directly into Evernote. It will even learn your posting habits and post directly into the appropriate Evernote notebook you usually use for a given type of information. You also can print your highlighted reading version of the page. Here is an example of a page before and after Clearly.

As you can see, Clearly has removed all the cruft  and left a clean and readable page. This cleaned up page can then be highlighted and directly posted into Evernote by clicking on the side panel on the right (not showing in this screen shot).

IOS (iPhone/iPad)

I do most of my information capturing using my iPad.  There are two ways i use most often for getting information into Evernote, and several other ways i use less often. I’ll focus on the two i use daily.

Using the Reader View

When using the Safari browser on an IOS device, in the upper left of the center section there is a four bar (usually used for menus) icon. In this case, the button is not used for a menu, but instead to toggle the safari view from a web view to a reader view. This is a very powerful and underutilized function. Here’s how it works.

Now, press the Reader view button and all the cruft is removed, very much like what Evernote Clearly does in a desktop browser.

The next step is to click on the Share button to bring up the options.

Now select the mail button, and the IOS device places the Reader View version of the web page into an email. Now for the cool part! You’ve already set up your Evernote email address in Contacts (right?) so you just type the first few letters of Evernote into the To: box and it will autocomplete and your email is all ready to send directly into Evernote, formatted in an easy to read view. I use this process every single day at least 4 or 5 times to save web information i come across.

Using the Drafts App

Drafts is one of the most powerful apps available in the IOS app store, along with Evernote and an app called Workflow (topic for a future blog post). For now we are going to look at using Drafts to move information from Safari into both Evernote and Facebook (it can also be used for tweeting and sending information to other apps).

First, highlight something in Safari and tap Copy. For this example i’m using a quote i found.

Now, go to the Drafts App. It opens to a blank screen just waiting to be written on. In this case, instead of writing, we are going to paste the quotation we just copied from Safari.

You will notice below that when it pasted the quotation into Drafts, it removed all the formatting. Drafts is all about text. Yes, you can use markup language in Drafts if you want, but it really shines at stripping all the junk away and leaving you just the text.

Now for the cool part! Tapping on the little square box in the upper right brings up the Drafts menu. You can now send this text to any or all of these options. The menu is user configurable and there are actually hundreds of possibilities you can add. Many of you will select your twitter feed to add to this menu. My norm with quotations is to Post to Facebook, then Save to Evernote, and then Delete. Done!

Summary

Remember from our previous post that getting information into Evernote is just so that we can have access to it wherever and whenever we need it by using Evernote’s search function. The key is to get everything you will need to have into Evernote after installing Evernote on every device you use. Then the fun starts and you can keep adding stuff and adding stuff knowing it will be there wherever and whenever you need it.

Here’s a link back to the first Evernote post: Why Use Evernote?