Evernote helps you to become paperless, to pool all important stuff at one digital place and to work easily with every kind of documents. But probably there is still a lot of paperwork you have to handle. To handle it, scan it! And archive those documents in Evernote. One great benefit, you can search now for them without exactly knowing where to find them. But there is a small pitfall, the date of creation in Evernote. Of course the date will be the day, when you created the note in Evernote. But the note creation date is then maybe months or even years away from the document creation time. Nicer would be, to have the documents creation date also as note creation date in Evernote.

Filterize has a solution! All you need is ONE filter to extract a new creation date for your Evernote note out of documents. Of course we prepared a ready-to-use workflow for you, but this time you probably have to personalize it a little bit at your console after the import. That’s why we will have a closer look at its configuration details.

To configure this automation you need a filter with one or maybe two conditions to identify the notes, that will be processed. An easy way is the “title contains” condition. Mostly scanned documents get a title like “SCAN 2017-10-14” or “DOC 2018-12345”. So “SCAN” or “DOC” or something similar is always part of your notes title. That’s why the conditions are:

title contains: SCAN (case-sensitive)
or
title contains: DOC (case-sensitive)

Please personalize them! Delete the condition(s) you don’t need and insert at “title contains” the term, that identifies your documents! Just to prevent processing errors.

Now we need actions, to indicate what our automation shall do in Evernote.
Use the action “extract create time”. There you have to set date formats, like %m/%d/%y and %m/%d/%Y. In this specific case Filterize is searching for all dates like 03/24/18 (month/day/year) and 03/24/2018 (month/day/year). Have a look at the our article about note fields. There is a complete overview of all possible time format operators.

A little tricky this time is, every country has different date formats. Therefore we use for our ready-to-use workflow three different common formats. But you can change them after the import at your console.

Our automation covers those six date types:

03/24/18 – month/day/year
03/24/2018

Feb 24, 2018
February 24, 2018

24.03.18 – day.month.year
24.03.2018

This is how our filter is look like:

There is one thing now to keep in mind. For all notes with attachments, like notes containing scanned documents, Evernote uses a two steps processing. At first the document is stored in Evernote in its raw version. Now it’s in Evernote, but not searchable. As second step Evernote did a OCR (transform the picture into text) and the document becomes searchable. That’s why Filterize cannot process the content of that notes instantly. For date extractions out of your documents Filterize has to wait until Evernote did the OCR. Therefore it’s not useful to combine the extraction workflow with any other actions or workflows, like changing the title, because those would run during Evernote’s first step. Wait until the extraction is done and do a next step manually. Like adding a tag, that triggers a new automation, e.g. to move them into another notebook.

And of course you are still able to modify the date manually after Filterize had extract one, without disabling the whole automation. Therefor change the note title by deleting SCAN or DOC or whatever your scanner is using. This way our condition is no longer fulfilled and the automation won’t run a second time.
Another idea is to have some kind of inbox notebook to collect all your new documents and to do the extraction only in here. Therefor you have to add the “in notebook” condition: in notebook: scan_inbox. Now the execution of this automation is limited to this specific notebook. But this also means, you can move a note to another notebook and then change the creation date manually.

Check out the prepared workflow and try out this new automation idea ?

Yours,
Sandra.

Filterize is a cloud service that acts as your personal Evernote assistant. Tell the software how you organize your notes or just let its Artificial Intelligence learn how to do it automatically. Filterize will then manage your notes in the background, eliminating repetitive tasks, avoiding errors and saving you time.