116 replies to this topic

[peterfmartin]

I'm afraid I phrased my questions badly and got a bunch of you saying things that you've said before and which didn't need to be repeated here, at least not for my sake. As Owyn said, "Bit like preaching to the choir. Or, arguing about dogma at the seminary." That said, I really appreciate what you've shared, and I actually do have a little better handle on what I was wondering about earlier.

But to answer your questions (I hope), when I started with Evernote, I'd tag emails from my manager. Later, I realized this was redundant b/c he has a fairly unique name. I do still put work emails in a separate notebook. But I just go to that notebook & search on his last name & I get all emails from him. (As well as one that are cc'd to him.)

That makes sense to me, and it's something I should probably internalize. For example, I have a number of tags for people I know. Most of them, of course, have names (at least full names) that are not going to end up in unrelated notes, so that's probably a waste. That said, I guess I stick with it for two reasons:

• Jbenson's Obama example: searching Obama will turn up a lot more than just clips about the president. Similarly, if I want to search for a friend named Tom Johnson, searching "Tom" won't give me what I want (because of false positives), and searching "Tom Johnson" may cut out a note I made in which I didn't use his last name. So I keep tags to be fool-proof—though I guess I could just make sure to be more consistent about keywords in note bodies.
• Since I use lots of tags to pull together topics I'm interested in, I've gotten used to scrolling through my tag list to look back into topics I haven't thought about recently but which I have tagged notes about. I don't have "Eagle" or "Animals," but I do have "Agriculture," "Cities," "Demographics," "Energy," "Immigration," "Photography," "Transportation," and a few hundred more of these general topic tags. Since I'm in the habit of using those to keep things organized, I keep it going even when I don't need to, thanks to unique keywords (such as with people's names).

Another example of overtagging is the first post in this thread. Using folders on a hard drive, I'd have a "cars" folder. But using tags, I have a "cars" parent tag but (normally) only use the specific car (IE Car A) tag. And the Cox bill example I included above...no need to tag it as "cox" or "cable" or "internet", "telephone", etc. Just the notebook "Bills" and the accurate title suffice. Since I include the date of the bill in the title, no year tag is needed.

Hope this makes sense...

Yep, that makes total sense and I, like maybe a lot of Evernoters, have done less of that with time. Again, thanks to all of you for your help and clarifications.

Unrelated note: Jbenson, are you trying to plan your next vacation so you "happen to run into" the first lady?

[jbenson2]

Unrelated note: Jbenson, are you trying to plan your next vacation so you "happen to run into" the first lady?

I'd love that to happen, especially if she and her husband are put into early retirement.
Unfortunately, I don't think I could afford the places she frequents.

[peterfmartin]

All I can say is I really hope you're not supporting your hometown candidate. Ok, better shut up and get off politics now...

[jbenson2]

All I can say is I really hope you're not supporting your hometown candidate. Ok, better shut up and get off politics now...

I support her for Congress, but not for the Presidency.

I lived most of my life in Massachusetts, so I cringed when she said:
"You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.” while she was .....in New Hampshire.

[idoc]

Here's an example where notebook organization is more important than tags. I have a notebook called "Contacts" which is simply an export of all my contacts from my Outook. Therefore, if I do a search for "Larry" in that specific notebook I will get contacts only (every one I know called Larry). However, when I do a global search for Larry I get a bewildering series of notes all of which have a mention of Larry. I would have to weed through 50 of them to find the contact that I need. On the other hand, I am going on a cruise to the Caribbean and have tagged all cruise related notes as "cruise 2012". However, when I want to add information about a specific port I add a specific tag" Cozumel" or "Caymans". In this way I can use tags to bore down to as detailed info as I need.

[jefito]

Sure, but you can skin that poor, flayed cat with tags as well. E.g., you could use a tag named, say, "Contact", and then use a search like: "tag:Contact Larry". I'm not saying that this is a better solution for you, but in this case, notebooks don't provide much more expressiveness than tags, if any.

[BurgersNFries]

Here's an example where notebook organization is more important than tags. I have a notebook called "Contacts" which is simply an export of all my contacts from my Outook. Therefore, if I do a search for "Larry" in that specific notebook I will get contacts only (every one I know called Larry).

This is also easily done only with tags. Just add a tag "contacts". (shrug)

[May]

This is a good example of using tags but it doesn't cover everything.

You showed how to use tags to organize different notes about different topics and then how to mix tags to see notes which are at intersection of multiple topics, ie related to multiple topics. It's cool. It's useful in a lot of cases.

This doesn't replicate nested folders and subcategories. There are a lot of times when you need to organize notes about a topic into true sub caregories, not simply separate or related categories. And to keep it all and see it all in one place, not in many separate places. When you want to split a certain topic into sub topics which are only related to this topic.

This is not really possible to do elegantly in evernote with multiple tags. First of all there are no subtags on mobile versions and even on the desktop sub tags are more of a interface feature and tags and sub-tags have only hierarchical structure, ie a sub tag can only be a child of a single parent tag instead of non hierarchical structure in which a sub tag would have unlimited parent tags. It's possible to implement and then it would make tags really flexible but it's just not there...

[Owyn]

This doesn't replicate nested folders and subcategories

I use structured Titles to handle this case.

e.g. I have a lot of notes related to Evernote. Most of these notes are in a single notebook. All of these notes have the tag "App_Evernote". The only additional tags I regularly use for these notes are "bug" and "tip".

The titles have the approximate form:
Evernote - <Client>|<Source>[/<Function>] - <Description>

Some recent examples include:
Evernote - Skitch/iOS - Skitch for iPad is Here! « Evernote Blogcast
Evernote - Windows/Sync - Test changed password at service (Sync Failed)
Evernote - Blog - How to Easily Track eStatements with Evernote and Gmail | Cloud Productivity
Evernote - Web/Clipper - Clearly Arrives on Firefox « Evernote Blogcast

The <Description> portion is normally the default title for the clip.

[May]

This doesn't replicate nested folders and subcategories

I use structured Titles to handle this case.

e.g. I have a lot of notes related to Evernote. Most of these notes are in a single notebook. All of these notes have the tag "App_Evernote".

The titles have the approximate form:
Evernote - <Client>|<Source>[/<Function>] - <Description>

Some recent examples include:
Evernote - Skitch/iOS - Skitch for iPad is Here! « Evernote Blogcast
Evernote - Windows/Sync - Test changed password at service (Sync Failed)
Evernote - Blog - How to Easily Track eStatements with Evernote and Gmail | Cloud Productivity
Evernote - Web/Clipper - Clearly Arrives on Firefox « Evernote Blogcast

The <Description> portion is normally the default title for the clip.

This would work but it's not very convenient to maintain, when you want to rename or move things around. Another issue is that this allows only hierarchical structure.

Again as I've said there are currently no elegant solution to do this exactly in evernote only.

What I would do in your example is I would have a single note in evernote which would be called "using evernote" and it would contain a mind map or an outline or something where I would organize everything. This note could also have multiple tags like "evernote", "gtd", if it's related to some project i'm working on then it would also be tagged as the project name. So it's still a non hierachical structure which is very cool.

I wouldn't use it exactly in your certain example though because it doesn't need to be organized as a single topic. I would actually just keep all notes under evernote tag because they are all just related notes and not exactly sub notes.
I would tag Skitch note as "skitch" because it's a separate app.

But it's just an example and certainly what you do could replicate subcategories but just not elegantly, ie too much work. And there is no elegant solution at all.

[Owyn]

I think in terms of major use cases.

In this example the use case is:

Specific to Evernote and requires:
- Managing personal knowledge base
- Tracking bugs
- Providing support to forum users

The single tag "App_Evernote" allows me to select all notes which apply to the use case.
The structure after that is easy for me to apply when I create a new note/clip and contains enough keyword information in the Title to quickly sort or search for needed information.

e.g. I have a "Evernote Bugs (Web)" saved search.
tag:App_Evernote tag:bug intitle:web todo:false

I use other approaches for other user cases.

[May]

I think in terms of major use cases.

In this example the use case is:

Specific to Evernote and requires:
- Managing personal knowledge base
- Tracking bugs
- Providing support to forum users

The single tag "App_Evernote" allows me select all notes which apply to the use case.
The structure after that is easy for me to apply when I create a new note/clip and contains enough keyword information in the Title to quickly sort or search for needed information.

e.g. I have a "Evernote Bugs (Web)" saved search.
tag:App_Evernote tag:bug intitle:web todo:false

I use other approaches for other user cases.

I see. This is a good example

[BurgersNFries]

This is a good example of using tags but it doesn't cover everything.

I started this thread b/c many people new to Evernote seem to think a limitation of EN is the inability to have nested/sub notebooks. That's what this thread is/was about. (Hence the subject line.) I've yet to see any example posted by anyone where nested/sub notebooks worked for storing/finding files & Evernote tags failed.

[May]

This is a good example of using tags but it doesn't cover everything.

I've yet to see any example posted by anyone where nested/sub notebooks worked for storing/finding files &amp; Evernote tags failed.

Sure, that's because notebooks are even more limited than tags
There is nothing you can do with them which isn't possible to do with tags.

[May]

Here is visual example about why you don't exactly replicate nested subtopics with tags and instead only see notes at intersection of different topics/tags. Those are different cases but you merged them into one and overlooked another.



This skitch app on iPad is really useful
A lot less text to get the point across...

Evernote basically has 2 level structure in terms of depth. Tags is the topmost level and notes are the second level and it doesn't go deeper than that. It's flexible but also very limited in terms of depth.

Now whether any more depth is necassary or not is another question.
The fact is that it's just not there at all. I belive that if used reasonably it could be useful.


There is no elegant way to have this structure in evernote because there are no real non hierarchical sub tags/sub notes (doesn't matter how we would call them). I think adding sub notes would make sense because you could still keep tags hierarchical and not add any sub tags at all.

Owyn made a good example of how this could be done by naming notes in a certain way but this is not easy to maintain because when you change parent category name you would also have to rename all its child notes.

[Owyn]

Ummm. Sure it is. Create a unique tag for the items you want to group. Or, add some unique keyword/id to the note title or body.

[May]

Ummm. Sure it is. Create a unique tag for the items you want to group.

You can't really turn a sub topic into a top level topic. When you do it - it's not a SUB topic anymore. It's just a separate topic, you would lose the parent-child relationship.

Or, add some unique keyword/id to the note title or body.

Owyn made a good example of how this could be done by naming notes in a certain way but this is not easy to maintain because when you change parent category name you would also have to rename all its child notes.

[BurgersNFries]

Ummm. Sure it is. Create a unique tag for the items you want to group. Or, add some unique keyword/id to the note title or body.

Exactly.

Evernote basically has 2 level structure in terms of depth. Tags is the topmost level and notes are the second level and it doesn't go deeper than that. It's flexible but also very limited in terms of depth.

I've yet to see any example posted by anyone where nested/sub notebooks worked for storing/finding files & Evernote tags failed.

With tags, you can go as many layers/levels down as you want.

[May]

@burgersnfries, you missed my point!
Yes there are sub tags on the desktop version but they are only hierarchical. Look at the pic - what I've drawn is impossible to do in evernote. It's non hierarchical structure...

There is no reason to have only a single parent tag for each tag. In the same was as there is no reason to use only a single tag for each note.

[jefito]

Arrgh. Was going to write up a response to the latest example, but it's gotten too conceptually confused for me to feel that I could make any hay out of it. Sorry. Good luck.