(Archived) Suggestions and bug

[Eseifan 0]

Hi,

I found out about Evernote about eight months ago and have been using it ever since. I’m what you might call a power user, with nearly 4,000 notes in my premium account and several dozens being added every week. I’m in the consulting business and my job requires me to monitor the press on a number of topics and of course I have to clip, classify and keep interesting articles. Evernote, with its easy clipping, tags and the ability to share has proven an incredible boon for me. For that, thank you very much.

Now for the bug (or what seems to be one): search doesn’t work well with clips in Arabic (in the Mac desktop client). I don’t know why this is, but sometimes it just fails to find the relevant word even though I know it’s there. No problem when searching for words in Latin alphabet, it is only search in Arabic that, sometimes but frequently, does not work.

And the suggestions:

1- It would be great if you could add more sophisticated search for tags, so that I could find notes that, say, have the A, B and (C or D) tags or notes that do not have a certain tag.

2- Why not make its possible to remove tags from a batch of notes. You can batch-add tags but not batch-remove them. It can be a pain in the neck to remove a tag from a couple hundred notes.

Thanx a lot.

[jefito 5,598]

I recently selected about 100 notes and dragged the wrong tag onto them. I then had to go in and select each note separately to remove that tag. Perhaps there is a way to remove a tag from a selection of notes, but I'm not aware of it.

Select your notes. Ctrl + Alt + T gets you to the Assign Tags dialog. Select "Hide unassigned tags" to show only the tags that have been assigned to your notes. Uncheck the tag that you want to remove. Click Ok and you are done.

~Jeff

[mdave 1]

Dave, I'm just revisiting this one. Would it be difficult to build a way to allow undo for an action (as opposed to undo an edit)? I'm sure you realize how essential this is in any application.

[mdave 1]

That's a brilliant tip. Thanks for taking the time to type it out.

We really need:

Undo Edit

Undo Action (or something like that)

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I recently selected about 100 notes and dragged the wrong tag onto them. I then had to go in and select each note separately to remove that tag. Perhaps there is a way to remove a tag from a selection of notes, but I'm not aware of it.

Thank you, Jeff, but I don't think it's a function of the Mac client.

Here's what I would have done:

Let's say my correct tag is "My tag".

If the number of correctly tagged notes was easier to select than the incorrectly tagged notes (say I have 100 that are incorrectly tagged & 20 that are correctly tagged), I'd create a new tag "My tag x" & assign the new tag to the 20 notes, then delete the tag "My tag" I'd then sync & wait an hour or so, then rename "My tag x" to "My tag". I know Dave has said this shouldn't matter, but in the past, I've run into some funkiness when renaming tags to the name of a tag I just deleted a few seconds earlier. So I prefer to err on the side of caution.

If the number of correctly tagged notes was a lot greater than the number of incorrectly tagged notes (IE 100 incorrectly tagged & 1200 correctly tagged), this is how I would have done it:

Say my original tag is "My tag". I'd create a tag "My tag x" and "temp tag".

I'd select the erroneously tagged notes & drag "temp tag" to them.

Do this search:

tag:"my tag" -tag:"temp tag"

Now you have all the notes that are correctly tagged "My tag". Select the first note, scroll to the bottom & shift click the last note (or whatever the quick Mac version is to select all) & drag "My tag x" to them. Now, all the correctly tagged notes are also tagged "my tag x".

Delete "my tag" & "temp tag". Sync & do the aforementioned hour wait & then rename "my tag x" to "my tag"

The second method sounds a bit convoluted & it kind of is. But it took me longer to type this out than it would have to actually do it.

[jefito 5,598]

I'm sure that Charles Babbage loves all of his children equally...

Seriously, it's a useful tool. and I hope it makes it your way too.

~Jeff

[Pitamakan 2]

That's OK ... we Mac users got Stacks a week before you Windows guys did! Small victories are better than none at all.

[jefito 5,598]

Now, now.

~Jeff

[mdave 1]

That's alright. Mac users have come to accept that from Windows users.

[jefito 5,598]

Thank you, Jeff, but I don't think it's a function of the Mac client.

Yeah, sorry. I usually disclaimer the things I know from the Windows client (which I use) when in the Mac forum.

~Jeff

[mdave 1]

Select your notes. Ctrl + Alt + T gets you to the Assign Tags dialog. Select "Hide unassigned tags" to show only the tags that have been assigned to your notes. Uncheck the tag that you want to remove. Click Ok and you are done.

~Jeff

Thank you, Jeff, but I don't think it's a function of the Mac client.

[jbenson2 2,149]

Ouch! I understand now.

Sorry but I've don't have a solution for you.

When I have to add a tag to a group of notes, I use the old-fashioned method of assigning the tag individually.

First I try to develop a search to find the notes I want.

For instance, let's say I want to find all notes that mention Obama but are not tagged Obama.

Notebook:Politics Obama -tag:Obama

20 notes might show up.

I click the first note, hit F3, and type Ob

Then press enter, wait 2 seconds, and the first note disappears (because it no longer meets the search criteria)

I repeat the process for the second note, which will also disappear, and so on.

Yes, I could drag the 20 notes to my tags, but I have hundreds of structured tags (Parent, Child, Grandchild) and it is easier for me to do it the way I mentioned.

[mdave 1]

Thanks very much replying.

I want to select some notes and remove all or some of the tags from the them. This would be useful if you were changing your tagging scheme or if you had used a tag to group some notes temporarily wanted to remove some of the notes from that grouping.

I recently selected about 100 notes and dragged the wrong tag onto them. I then had to go in and select each note separately to remove that tag. Perhaps there is a way to remove a tag from a selection of notes, but I'm not aware of it.

[jbenson2 2,149]

2- Why not make its possible to remove tags from a batch of notes. You can batch-add tags but not batch-remove them. It can be a pain in the neck to remove a tag from a couple hundred notes.

I don't have a Mac, so I probably should keep my mouth closed.

But, what the heck... let me just throw this out there.

On Windows Evernote, there is a Left Panel that contains

• Notebooks
  Tags
  Attributes
  Saved Searches
  Trash
  

If I right-click on a specific Tag in the left panel, I have the option to mass delete the Tag from all the notes it is connected to.

Maybe you can try that?

[mdave 1]

We are investigating options for better batch tag operations.

Hello Dave. Any progress here? Thanks.

[nhejazi 0]

I hope Evernote supports Persian and Arabic language as this is the main language for over 500 millions. I would definitely use Evernote as my main note taker if it supports Persian and Arabic language.

[engberg 89]

Ok, thanks for the clarification.

[Eseifan 0]

Thanx for the prompt reply. I should perhaps add that the problem with search in Arabic has nothing to do with diacritics, which are almost never used in newspapers, and certainly not in my clippings. The problem is clearly a software thing: copy the word from the text and put it in the search box and it still fails to find it.

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the feedback. We don't yet have support for any right-to-left (RTL) languages, and I believe that Arabic includes some extra challenges with things like diacritics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics) that our engineers will need work through to get the right behavior. (The "naive" implementation would have the problem you described ... sometimes, it would mysteriously fail to match words that a native speaker knows should match.)

We don't yet have Arabic support scheduled for Evernote, but we've been steadily expanding our international capabilities, and Arabic is obviously widely used.

We are investigating options for better batch tag operations.

Thanks