Evernote is a great tool to take notes in the field. The Evernote Plugin for Act! allows you to export your activities to Evernote so that you can close them directly in Evernote (ie. choose an activity result, enter details in the history and add files).
Export to Evernote
To do this, you simply go to an Activities tab or to your Task List in Act!, select one or more activities and click the Export button. Activities are then exporting to Evernote. To make sure they are easily accessible by date, the plugin puts them in notebooks created as needed using this naming convention: Activities yyyy-mm-dd. If you export an activity several time, it will not create multiple notes in Evernote but will automatically overwrite the existing one.
IMPORTANT NOTE: As explained in previous topics, every time the Evernote Plugin for Act! creates a note in Evernote, it attaches a file to identify the record the data is originating from in Act!. This file is named ActLink.dat. DO NOT DELETE IT. In this case, the file allows the plugin to identify the activity in Act!. If you delete it, the activity note in Evernote loses its connection with Act!.
Add data in Evernote
In Evernote, type your activity notes in between the 2 ReturnNote placeholders. Then check one of the activity result boxes. The result options are identical to the ones offered by Act!. Make sure you check one of the boxes, otherwise the Evernote Plugin for Act! will not import nor close the activity in Act! when you try to import it back.
Import back into Act!
To import activity notes cleared in Evernote into Act!, click the Import button in the Task List window. The Import Closed Activities from Evernote window pops up listing all activity notebooks containing notes in Evernote. Double-click the notebook of your choice and the activity notes will be imported:
- The activity will be cleared based on the result you selected in Evernote.
- Any text inserted between the return note placeholders will be added to the Details of the history record.
- If you have attached a file to the note in Evernote, the file will be attached to the history record (since you can only attach one file to a history record in Act!, only the first file will be attached if you attach multiple files in Evernote). Please note that the data file added by the plugin to identify the Act! record is not counted as a file when importing.
- Activity notes will be deleted in Evernote after successful import if you chose this option. If the activity notebook ends up empty, it will be deleted as well.
In the example used here, we only cleared one activity out of the 2. We therefore get this message.
If you do not delete the note in Evernote and try to reimport it again, the Evernote Plugin for Act! will skip the activity note and display the following message: