Search question - not in notebook A or B

[jemostrom 5]

I'm trying to figure out the syntax for searching for notes with no tags but not including those in notebooks A, B and C. My attempts doesn't work, any advice on this?

What I tried was '-notebook:A -tag:*' as a first attempt but I get untagged items from notebook A in the search result

[DTLow 5,680]

The search feature is documented at    Evernote Search Grammar

The :notebook parameter is special.  

• Only one notebook can be specified.  
• No negation

As a work-around, I can search for no tags (-tag:*) and display the results in list view (Mac/Windows)
This allows for a Notebook column and sorting in notebook sequence

 

[jemostrom 5]

 Typical that I ended up with the special case  

Thanks

[TK0047 407]

6 hours ago, jemostrom said:

I'm trying to figure out the syntax for searching for notes with no tags but not including those in notebooks A, B and C. My attempts doesn't work, any advice on this?

What I tried was '-notebook:A -tag:*' as a first attempt but I get untagged items from notebook A in the search result

@DTLow 's solution is probably the best and will work for all options. Just in case:

If the other notebooks (the one you want to search in) are in a stack, you can search the stack eg. stack:"1 - Business Notebooks" -tag:*.

But I assume they are not. Just an option if you have not used that before.

[lisec 282]

Vote for my wishlist item here:  

  

[jemostrom 5]

16 hours ago, lisec said:

Vote for my wishlist item here:  

Done

[jefito 5,586]

Just another one for the long-ish list of search language enhancement requests. e.g. full Boolean search, regular expressions. The former of these would probably take care of this one too, being more general.

[lisec 282]

On 6/6/2018 at 1:12 PM, jefito said:

Just another one for the long-ish list of search language enhancement requests. e.g. full Boolean search, regular expressions. The former of these would probably take care of this one too, being more general.

When I first realized that Evernote didn't allow full Boolean searches I thought of it as a small app, not quite ready to play with the grown-ups.  But when it touted itself as a "no need to organize; just search" type of app I nearly lost my lunch I laughed so hard. When you have a lot of notes you have to implement a backup search structure, either tags or consistent file titles or something, or your search results will be the size of NYC's phone book entry for "Smith".

[jefito 5,586]

1 hour ago, lisec said:

When I first realized that Evernote didn't allow full Boolean searches I thought of it as a small app, not quite ready to play with the grown-ups.

But even so, I've found -- at least the way that I use Evernote -- that I don't need complicated searches to do the things that I need to do with Evernote. If I needed them, I can do that sort of stuff. But I just don't need them. Yes, I do tag; it's something that Evernote's good for. I don't do title-magic, or muck with dates. I do use reminders, and the occasional note link. I segment into notebooks mainly for sharing, so only a small number of these. But that's about it. Making a virtue of necessity? Maybe, but my preferred approach is to keep things as simple as possible. I deal with enough complication in my working life that I don't need extra.