I’m a big Google fan. In an ideal world I wouldn’t use any app or service other than a Google one. If I need to do something, or need some new app to help me, I immediately check to see if Google has something that can help before I turn to other providers.
So for years I’ve been really wanting to move away from Evernote and move to Google Keep. It has it’s flaws, and certainly it has its strengths. But for me it’s just about cutting down on the number of logons and services I need to keep up with and having a tool that easily integrates with the rest of my digital life – which is in Google. Google Keep has been the logical alternative but it’s lacking in a few basic features (it’s lacking in a massive number of features if we are honest but a few ones that stop me moving over to it).
- There are no organisational features in Keep at all. Nothing. Even basic categorization is missing, let alone more useful tagging and grouping. I appreciate that this is, perhaps, by design – Google don’t want to take on Evernote and Keep is pitched as a quick and easy note taking tool and not a productivity or GTD style app – but even some basic organisation would be good. The search feature is great but I’d like to see grouping of notes in the same way you can group icons in Android and being able to tag notes.
- It’s impossible to find in Google Apps. It has no icon in the Google app drawer in Google Apps. You can access it via the URL keep.google.com but I’ve never been sure why it’s not part of the main Google Apps suite.
Google Keep…where are you?
- It doesn’t integrate with Google Tasks. Given that Google Keep is a note and checklist app, the fact that it doesn’t in someway integrate with Google Tasks seems odd to me. Tasks is far from perfect, frankly it’s long overdue for an overhaul and most users don’t even know it exists, and the option to integrate your checklists with Tasks would be useful given that Google don’t have an official Tasks app. The lack of features in Tasks is one of the features that Outlook users always complain about post-migration and both services would benefit from being brought together and given more features.
- You can’t assign or share notes with other users in your organisation, or in any other organisation come to that. This is perhaps more a moan about Tasks and it’s missing features, but as Keep seems to be getting more attention from Google here goes. If I create a note with a checklist it would be good to be able to assign that note to another user to be able to carry on working on it. Or perhaps be able to share that note with a user in the same way you can share a doc in Google Drive.
- There’s no management of Keep from within Google Apps. It would be useful to enable or disable Keep or be able to archive Keep data, and otherwise manage Keep from within the Google Apps management interface.
Will we see a more business and productivity focused Keep in the coming years? I certainly hope so. In the meantime you can try Evernote.
You can share Google Notes with other Google users as of today (November 17, 2014) by clicking on the “share” button on each note.
You can also add Google Keep to your Google app drawer by clicking on “More” and selecting Google Keep under the Home & Office heading.
Thanks for the comment Sarah. Who would have thought that Google would update the app the very next day 🙂 One step closer to Keep becoming my go-to note taking app.
I don’t think you can add the Keep icon to the app drawer unless you are using ChromeOS or Windows 8 mode. If you are running Windows 7 or 8 desktop mode or OSX then you can only add icons from the “More” section of the app drawer and not the “Even More” section. At least that’s what I see here.