How to create tag clouds for Evernote

Evernote’s current clients cannot create tag clouds, i.e. a visual representation of your data. Here are three simple steps to generate a tag cloud:

  1. Select all notes in Evernote for which you want to generate a tag cloud and export the data via File|Export|Export as a file in ENEX format to a folder on your hard drive, say c:\temp\Evernote.enex. Depending on your number of notes that file may be huge.
  2. Convert the exported file to something that only contains the tags.
    1. Convert the file with a command line utility from Microsoft (or any other XSL processor). Download msxsl.exe and save it to c:\temp.
    2. Download the XSL file which sets the conversion format and save it to c:\temp.
    3. Open a command window, go to c:\temp and use

      msxsl.exe Evernote.enex tagcloud-xsl.txt > tagcloud.txt

  3. Upload or copy/paste tagcloud.txt to a service that generates tag clouds.
  4. Your’re done.

In a future post  I will explain how to analyze your tag and possibly other meta data with Excel.

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