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I need help with tags!


BryanHasAQuestion

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Hi there! 

I've had Evernote for a couple of years now, but I really need you guys to help me out here!

I'm a French student attending a business school, on a Bachelor's degree and I have had issues organising my notes in Evernote.
From what I've read on the internet, it seems that using tags instead of notebooks is the better way to get organised.
I am currently following a 3 year course, and I am therefore taking classes that have 3 different levels. 

I thought of a system of tags that would go like this:

  • Maths
    • Year1
      • Chapter 
        • Sub-Chapter
    • Year 2
      • Chapter
        • Sub-Chapter
    • Year 3 
      • Chapter 
        • Sub-Chapter

However, Evernote won't allow me to duplicate tags (Year 1, Year 2, Year 3 throughout all the different subject). 

Does anyone have a piece of advice for me? 

Thanks in advance!

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On 2016-11-16 at 6:52 PM, BryanHasAQuestion said:

I thought of a system of tags that would go like this:

  • Maths
    • Year1
      • Chapter 
        • Sub-Chapter
    • Year 2
      • Chapter
        • Sub-Chapter
    • Year 3 
      • Chapter 
        • Sub-Chapter

However, Evernote won't allow me to duplicate tags (Year 1, Year 2, Year 3 throughout all the different subject). 

Does anyone have a piece of advice for me? 

I'd probably use tag Maths during the year,
and at the end of the year rename the tag to Maths-Year1 or use two tags, adding Year1

Does this have to be a hierarchy.
Why not completely independent tags, as in tag:Maths tag:Year1 
- For  example, If I wanted to tag  Cars and Flowers,
   and then the colour Red,
   I would make colour a completely independent tag
- Possibly Year1 should be completely independent, in a hierarchy under Business School

Another idea is to qualify your subtags, as in Maths-Year1

I rarely use the tag hierarchy when tagging; in fact it's not available on the iPad 

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On 19/11/2016 at 8:52 AM, DTLow said:

I'd probably use tag Maths during the year,
and at the end of the year rename the tag to Maths-Year1

Does this have to be a hierarchy.
Why not completely independent tags 
- For  example, If I wanted to tag  Cars and Flowers,
   and then the colour Red,
   I would make colour a completely independent tag

Another idea is to qualify your subtags, as in Maths-Year1

I rarely use the tag hierarchy when tagging; in fact it's not available on the iPad 

First I'd like to thank you for your advices. 

Now that I think of it, using tags like 'Maths - Year 1' is actually pretty clever. I try to stick with tag hierarchy because I find it to be useful when seeing the path from one end to another, but if you see another way of looking at things I'm open to any suggestions. 

Thanks again for your help! Merci mon pote :) 

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I would only create a combination tag like, "Maths - Year 1" if the sub-components didn't make sense on their own - for example, "Maths - advanced" makes sense because "advanced" is perhaps meaningless on its own.  For your case, perhaps "Year 1" should be a separate tag because you can tag a note "Maths" and "Year 1" for 1st year Maths, or "English" and "Year 1" for 1st year English, and so on.  This technique means that it is easy to find all notes from 1st year subjects, simply by searching for notes tagged "Year 1".  Maths notes from all years are found by searching for "Maths", and so on.  I find this a versatile solution for the way my mind works!

Clearly, this still negates your nicely visual tag hierarchy, but I think achieves the same thing in a conceptual sense.

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On 11/16/2016 at 7:52 PM, BryanHasAQuestion said:

However, Evernote won't allow me to duplicate tags (Year 1, Year 2, Year 3 throughout all the different subject). 

Does anyone have a piece of advice for me? 

Yes, I think you can get by very nicely using Year1, Year2, etc. across subjects, assuming you will tag all notes with subject and year (plus chapter and sub-chapter) tags.  You can also use searches like tag:subj tag:year* to get all notes for a subject..  Compound tag searches can be powerful. 

And I would suggest dropping the space in the tag, makes it easier when searching.  If you want a visual hierarchy, create parent tags for subjects and years and put the "real" tags under them.  FWIW.

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5 hours ago, csihilling said:

Yes, I think you can get by very nicely using Year1, Year2, etc. across subjects, assuming you will tag all notes with subject and year (plus chapter and sub-chapter) tags.  You can also use searches like tag:subj tag:year* to get all notes for a subject..  Compound tag searches can be powerful. 

And I would suggest dropping the space in the tag, makes it easier when searching.  If you want a visual hierarchy, create parent tags for subjects and years and put the "real" tags under them.  FWIW.

What you're suggesting here is interesting, but I am not really sure this is what I'm looking for. The thing is, when I first used Evernote I put all my notes in notebooks, stack of notebooks as you would in your computer folders for example. I then noticed notebooks were pretty limited so after doing a little research I read that people are better off nesting tags into hierarchies, which allows them to find their  way to a note easily (and also have a better overview of their organisation).

All that to say this is what I'm after here, because my course has me jump between studies and internship so if I have to study for a test, case or finals I want my searches to be effortless. Someone suggested earlier I use 'Subject - Year' as a tag parent and then nest the chapters and sub-chapters tag into it, and it looks like a solution to my problem. 

Now I may have understood your suggestion wrong (English is not my first language, French is) so feel free to give me your opinion on this. 

Thank you! 

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I think you have a plan that you are comfortable with so I would proceed on.  Tags are an excellent solution to your use case.  My point was that the nesting of tags can be more about organizing your tags than a mechanism for finding notes.  Compound tag search is an easy way to find notes without having to view the tag tree.

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Hi @BryanHasAQuestion, the great thing about EN is that there are usually a number of ways to organise your notes based on your own preferences and, most importantly, how you like to search.  There's no point having hundreds or thousands of notes if you are unable to remember how to find them.  All of our suggestions are simply ideas based on what works for us as individuals and you will eventually find a system that works for your own brain, too!

@csihilling, I forgot to mention that the spaces I used in my tag examples were there for readability only - spaces in tags are not good news, because you always need to use quotation marks to delineate them.  I usually use the underline character and others simply drop the spaces from the tag name.  For example:

tag:"Year 1"   OR   tag:Year1  OR  tag:Year_1

are all equivalent depending on your tag naming convention, but the quotes are required for the first option (tag:Year 1 will find notes with the tag "Year" and the number 1 somewhere in them)

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