exclude notebook from search

[lisec 283]

It isn't a new idea, but it is a wishlist item.

Please allow us to exclude a notebook from our search with a -notebook type search term. And if that is impossible, then provide a way to tag notes automatically with the notebook name.

I need to exclude a notebook from a search. I most always do, multiple times/day. Since I can't do that, all the notes within those notebooks have a tag with the notebook name. I can't type -notebook recipes when searching for an article that appeared in The Onion, but I can sure type -tag:recipes to filter out 2,000 notes.

It takes some housekeeping to ensure that all notes within a notebook also includes the notebook tag.  Not all notebooks require it, but I have at least 4 that do; that is 4 notebooks that interfere too much with most searches such that I have to tag all the notes within them:  recipes, woodworking, work and film. And yes, I need these notebooks because they are shared. I got rid of all my notebooks except for 4 shared ones and 2 that I use daily. I prefer to use tags. But I don't like having to do two things to so many notes (move them to the notebook and tag them with the notebook name).

 

 

[icoco_de 33]

Yes, exclude notebooks by using "-notebook:" search would be great.

I wonder why "-tag:" is possible, while "-notebook:" isn't.

[TK0047 422]

On 4/15/2017 at 6:24 AM, icoco_de said:

I wonder why "-tag:" is possible, while "-notebook:" isn't.

I use -tag: a lot and -notebook: would be awesome. I was wondering the same thing too, it just feels natural in line with all the other searches. There must be a good technical reason for it. But hopefully, -notebook: search option will be coming soon.

[jemostrom 5]

I agree (this was the first search I was going to save ... and it was kind of disappointment that it wasn't possible to do)

[Cucumbercutter 3]

Actually, I would suggest that the Evernote Team just implemented a solution so one could right-click on the notebook and then select "exclude content from search". See, that would be great! 

[lisec 283]

Cucumbercutter, that might be a nice feature, as long as we could also type it. I find it much quicker to type Rosemary -notebook:film -notebook:recipes than to go around right-clicking on multiple notebooks. I'm old school that way I guess.

[newterritories 3]

Just want to second this -- really wish this was an option. 

[ezfine 0]

+1

[BFAC687A-DCCA-4316-AC09-50 1]

Hi there,

How can I exclude a notebook from a search, or from a Saved Search, more specifically?

I searched around and found ways to exclude notes that are tagged, but this doesn't work for me, because I have notebooks that are shared with me, and I can't add tags to those notes, because I'm not the creator or owner of those notebooks.  The notebooks that are shared with me contain sensitive information that I do not want anyone to see, so  I do not want content from these shared notebooks showing up in my searches.

There are a lot of times I open Evernote on a computer that is presenting to a room full of people during a meeting, and when I'm trying to find something and I don't remember what notebook it is in, I click on All Notes, but then everyone in the meeting can see sensitive notes in plain site...  very frustrating.  I want to create an "All Notes 2" that contains all notes, except for those that are in specific notebooks.

 

[jefito 5,589]

There is no way to do this using the Evernote search language. You could possibly create one stack of notebooks that contain sensitive notes and one that contains non-sensitive notes, then rather than clicking on "All Notes" click on the stack of non-sensitive notes (or use a saved search to implement the same thing).

I can move this to a feature request forum, if you wish.

[BFAC687A-DCCA-4316-AC09-50 1]

Thanks for the feedback.  Many of these notebooks are already in a stack, and you can't nest stacks, so that's not going to work either.  Sure, please go ahead and move it to the feature request forum.

Thank you!

[trenchantly 15]

Cannot believe still not possible. I can't see how this is difficult to code.

[jefito 5,589]

21 hours ago, trenchantly said:

Cannot believe still not possible. I can't see how this is difficult to code.

It may or may not be difficult to code (you tell me), however, coding difficulty is not always the sole consideration: a bubble sort is easy to code, too, but you'd never want to actually use it since it's really inefficient at scale. And searches need to be implemented across the range of contexts used by Evernote notes: web, mobile, desktop, and server. Moreover, adding this feature probably doesn't go far enough. First, if you have a non-trivial number of notebooks, you're probably going to want to want to specify multiple notebooks to exclude, and since you can't specify more than one notebook to search at a time, that functionality would need to be added as well. Oh, and you're going to want to throw stacks into the mix as well, so now -stack would need to be added, and multiple stacks supported.

[JohnSteill 1]

+1. My workaround is two have multiple accounts (only one of which is premium) and keep the private notes out of the notebooks I share with my work (non-premium) acct. 

[BFAC687A-DCCA-4316-AC09-50 1]

John, thanks for sharing your approach with me.  I'm not interested in having multiple accounts to achieve this.  I've been a paying customer for years and prefer the feature get added.  There appear to be quite a few other people wanting to achieve the same thing.  It already supports filtering, so it would just be a change to that.

[DTLow 5,736]

The "exclude notebook" requests/discussions have been merged.

To indicate your support, use the voting buttons at the top left corner of the discussion.

[Simon Plant 0]

I want to solve for confidential and personal content showing up while searching through All Notes. What I would like to see is the ability to set Notebooks as private with a right click in clients, and for them to not show up. For me the search exclude-notebook is a different use case - powering the search behind the UI - so  both are required?

[jefito 5,589]

14 hours ago, Simon Plant said:

I want to solve for confidential and personal content showing up while searching through All Notes. What I would like to see is the ability to set Notebooks as private with a right click in clients, and for them to not show up. For me the search exclude-notebook is a different use case - powering the search behind the UI - so  both are required?

This is not the same thing as the original feature request (exclude a notebook from searches). You should search the forums for requests for private notebooks and add your vote there; you can't find one, then create a new request.

Since you cannot make private, secret, confidential notebooks in Evernote, one way to is to maintain a second account with your personal stuff, and share only the notebooks that you want to with accounts that are shared with someone else. I do this: personal, premium account, plus free work account. I have a couple of my personal notebooks that I need to share with my work account (mainly research related), and that works fine. My work account cannot see my personal stuff.

[DTLow 5,736]

19 hours ago, Simon Plant said:

I want to solve for confidential and personal content showing up while searching through All Notes.

Not a notebook  solution, but you can use a Confidential tag
-tag:Confdential will prevent the content showing up.

[lisec 283]

1 hour ago, jefito said:

This is not the same thing as the original feature request (exclude a notebook from searches). You should search the forums for requests for private notebooks and add your vote there; you can't find one, then create a new request.

but it isn't as far off as you think. If one could exclude a private notebook in a search, then all would be good.

[jefito 5,589]

5 hours ago, lisec said:

If one could exclude a private notebook in a search

But that would mean being able to exclude any notebook, would it not? I mean, if the search language had support for -notebook: terms, multiple notebook: or -notebook: terms, that would solve more problems than adding a private notebook facility.

Not that I'm not saying that the search language couldn't be improved, or at least made more consistent.

Meanwhile, there's still the two-account workaround. Yes, I know that tagging a shared notebook is problematic, but it still give one the flexibility to have private (unseen) notebooks in a shared account situation...

[Ray Sidney-Smith 158]

For those looking for a quick-and-dirty way to exclude a notebook (as I couldn't see that that it is already explained above) from search:

1. Go to the notebook you want to exclude, select all notes (Control/Command + a).
2. Create a new tag for filtering by typing it into the tag field that appears. (I use "x".)
3. I let Evernote synchronize just for good measure.
4. Now, you can create a search using -tag:x to exclude notes in that notebook. And, you can base a Saved Search off of this method.
5. If you plan to do this regularly, just remember to repeat steps 1-3 during regular maintenance of your notes before doing step 4. I do this during my weekly review (in GTD lingo).

If you'd like to do a bit of automation, you can create a free Zapier account (free account allows up to five automations ("zaps") and trigger Zapier to add that "x" tag when a new note is added to that notebook. I have this set up for my "zArchives" notebook which I explicitly don't want to show up in many of my Saved Searches. This works quite well for me.

I've voted for the feature, but I'm not holding my breath for this low-priority feature. Hope this helps!

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, Ray Sidney-Smith said:

If you'd like to do a bit of automation, you can create a free Zapier account (free account allows up to five automations ("zaps") and trigger Zapier to add that "x" tag when a new note is added to that notebook.

This automation is also a feature for third party Filterize

>>I have this set up for my "zArchives" notebook 

Why a notebook? You could just have a zArchives tag

[David Daly 4]

I couldn't figure out why this wasn't working, until I came here. Please add this feature. 

[MarcelR 2]

Yes! The option to exclude notebooks from searching. Because I keep some stuff that I don't like to see in the search results but still want to keep.

Seems like an easy option to make that option?

 

[Veerareddy Pallela 0]

It would be easy if we have global settings which will specify what all notebooks need to be excluded from search

[PinkElephant 8,102]

Try this in the search field:

-notebook:MyPrivateNotebook Searchterm

Searchterm is what you are looking for.

„-notebook:“  is the operator to search in a specific notebook, the „-„ negates this, excluding the notebook

MyPrivateNotebook is the Notebook you want to exclude. Note that there must be no space behind the „:“ .

You can save this search, and change the Searchterm to modify it.

You can exclude several notebooks. The easiest way is to have them all in one stack. Then it would be

-stack:MyPrivateStack Searchterm 

[Andreas Decker 3]

There is another feature request with the same topic and it is already solved.