Great way to store and retrieve information

This site is a gold mine of information. Sometimes I will remember reading a post, and weeks or months later, try to search for the post and find it difficult to wade through all the hits. I heard about Evernote from efficientmd.blogspot.com and I think it may be a great answer to how to "clip" pieces of information from the web and store it on the web server or on your hard drive.

Evernote lets you search by any term or groups of terms, and will give hits based on tags, text, or even text within images. Even hand written notes get searched for the search term. For those with a camera on their cell, you can email yourself the pic to be archived on evernote.

In case anyone wants to check out their video on the website, it is www.evernote.com

Eric

My prefered software for writing/storing/organizing notes and informations is Microsoft Office OneNote. It turned out extremely helpful for me.
You can also paste content of the web page there.

I believe it is bundled in some Office suites but I don´t use MS Office so I bought it as standalone product.

I did research on similar programs but amazingly no other software of this category come even close to the OneNote (at least on Windows platform). I never thought that MS can do so excellent and though out software. ( http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/FX100487701033.aspx )

However for a very quick recording of text informations from the web page that I am just reading I use this method in Opera (which is my web browser):
I select the text which I am interested in and want to store, right click > Copy to note (Ctrl+Shift+c).
It will be later accesible in the Notes section of the Opera, I can easily find it via search in Notes, I can organize notes to categories for bettter orientation and if I double click the note, it will open the web page from where the note was recorded.
So this is sometimes much more useful than creating a bookmark - you have got specific text recorded (searchable and within a category) and the url of the webpage is stored along with it.
Good thing is that Notes can be backed up for they are located as a file in Opera profile folder. Opera now also offers backup/synchronization of it´s elements (including Notes) via Opera Link. Video showing the quick creation of a note - http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/flash/notes/

Maybe other browsers possess similar function if you don´t use Opera.

Another interesting solution for storing informations could be PersonalBrain but it has quite different approach to it that may not suit everyone. ( http://www.thebrain.com/ )

You can also print the topic to PDF.

That's my preferred method and Mac OS X makes it as simple as printing to paper. I like it because PDF files are a standard, cross platform format.

Even in Windoze it's as easy as printing to paper. Simply select the PDF spooler instead of your regular printer. You can max out on the expensive Adobe pay for apps, or you can find a number of good FOSS.

Hmmm, I use Windows at work and have never seen that capability. Is it new with Vista? We still use XP.

Best of my knowledge nothing like this is standard with Windows, whatever version. You will have to get the software from somewhere.

If you have access to Adobe Acrobat, you can install Adobe Distiller (not sure if thats what its still call now) but it acts like a print driver. Just print to it and it creates the pdf for you.

But there are tonnes of other apps you can get, most for free. Just google something like "windows xp print to pdf" or something similiar and you'll get a big list.

Good luck!

Right, you need to install the software from a 3rd party, but after that it's easy as sin.
Here at work I have PDFCreator installed. I'm not advocating for that particular package - it's just the first free software I came across.

Ah, okay, I thought you meant it was built into Windows like it is in Mac OS. I'm not allowed to install software on the work computer so that puts that baby to rest.

Well, can't help ya out there...

Use Wordpad & save it to a .rtf file. Any formatting like bold or underline will be preserved in a file most word processors can open. I've started using it as my default format for anything that doesn't include graphics.

Printing to PDF files should be easy with online apps as mentioned by some one else. The nicer thing about Evernote (which is also free) is that you can search text within images, handwriting etc. I really got hooked on it by the ability to email yourself pics and thus have it archived as a "photo" that is easy to search for. I guess GoogleSearch for the desktop should do the same, but not sure.

Eric