Common problems with Evernote on Zapier

Can I trigger a Zap from a shared notebook?

It's not currently possible to trigger a Zap from a shared notebook.

Creating something from new notes

Commonly, you'll want to create a contact, calendar event or something from a note, but such a pattern isn't very intuitive because Evernote doesn't have fields that map cleanly: they only have title and content and the other record might have first name, last name and email.

One workaround is to place the name or email into the Note title, and some other field in the content. This way you can cleanly map the fields. At this time Zapier doesn't have the ability to intelligently "extract" values from a large body of text. You could also use something like named variables to manually mark data to be extracted.

HTML or formatted notes

Because Evernote uses a unique type of HTML called ENML, we're not always able to format it exactly as you might expect. Instead, we do our best to strip down the content into plain text, and then place that plain text into the Note. This is a common issue with services like RSS, Gmail, IMAP or other email triggers which often have very unique HTML formatting. If you really want to add formatting to your note, double-check that it abides by ENML guidelines.

Edits after creation

We will do our best to wait until you are done editing a note in Evernote before we trigger off of it. We do this by waiting until the last time updated stops changing, so you might see a slight delay on triggering as we need to see a note twice with no updates before we trigger it.

Reminders are not triggering

Right now, we can only trigger on reminders if they are assigned due dates when they are created.

My Evernote trigger is triggering slowly

In order to ensure that we only trigger on new items that have complete information, your zap will make sure that a new item shows up with the same info in consecutive checks for new data. This can result in zaps triggering on new items more slowly. This is what we're referring to under Edits After Creation above.

My link opens the Evernote web app but I want it to open the desktop app

You can make an in-app link (classic link) by typing the following and inserting the following fields:

evernote:///view/[userId]/[shardId]/[noteGuid]/[noteGuid]/

Please note that the note GUID is listed at the end of the link twice, sequentially.

guid

Scanned business cards/contacts aren't working

Unfortunately, the business card scanner from Evernote doesn't work super well with Zapier. The issue is that all that information about the person's email/name etc is actually all in the body of a note, but with Evernote's markup language being used to make it appear pretty in the note. In order for you to be able to grab that data and move it to the action, we'd need discrete fields for each piece of information (name, email, etc), which Evernote doesn't provide.

You could try a service like Full Contact instead, which would work well with Zapier.

Evernote Error #2: The format of the request data was incorrect.

This error can indicate a variety of problems in your Evernote Zap. The most common causes of this error are:

  • The title of your note is too long: Evernote titles can only be 255 characters or less, so if you're pulling title data from your trigger, consider using a different field to populate your title.
  • Trying to append to a note that doesn't exist: Make sure that the title of the note you're trying to append exactly matches the title of the note in your Evernote account: 
  • Invalid attachments: When creating a note with an attachment, you must use either a file object or a direct download URL to a file –– other types of fields will not work: 
  • Trying to write to a notebook that doesn't exist: If you've selected "use a custom value" from the Notebook Name, you'll need to have the Notebook's GUID, which will look something like this: 

    Because this GUID is not likely to be provided by your trigger, using a custom value for your Notebook is not a common use case.
  • Trying to add tags with the incorrect format: Tags must be added in a comma-delimited format. If you add them any other way, it will cause an error.
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