Why nested structure is not supported...

[hellobt 0]

Hi there,

Think this is a simple request from most free/paid users, but I can see the problem has lastted for more than 10 years...

I guess, the main reason why nested structure is not supported is:

    # nested structure will make the users easily migrate to other note app, say OneNote

    # while if organizing on tag system suggested by Evernote, it will be very HARD to migration! Although tag system is actually not as good as nested structure for real world practice.

[DTLow 5,736]

Evernote's primary organization method is the Tag feature,
and nested tag structure is supported (Mac/Windows/Web)

This is stored as a parent/child hierarchy.

[RY27 21]

That's like saying that OneNote supports tagging. Yes, it does, but its implementation is so terrible that maintaining more than a dozen tags becomes impractical. Same with Evernote's "nested" support, which is limited at its best and useless at its worst. 

• you can nest tags, but child tags are not aware of their parents and vice versa. It's basically a visual organization that Evernote itself is unaware of. 
• you can nest notebooks, but only to 1 level. 
• you cannot nest notes within a notebook, so you have to go through a brain damage of creating naming nomenclature, creating additional unnecessary notebooks or stacks, or creating one-off tags that mess up your entire tagging structure. 

So saying that Evernote "supports" nesting is a bit disingenuous, as you, as a "Guru" must know full well. 

[DTLow 5,736]

8 hours ago, RY27 said:

you can nest tags, but child tags are not aware of their parents and vice versa. It's basically a visual organization that Evernote itself is unaware of. 

This is generally true (child tags are not aware of their parent and vice versa) with these exceptions
- Evernote/Windows has a child search option.
- I use scripting on my Mac (Applescript) and have access to parent/child info.
- The screenshot above shows a functional nested tag list in my Mac's sidebar.

Note: there's only a single parent; it's a hierarchical relationship - I'd prefer multiple parents (relational)

[RY27 21]

1 minute ago, DTLow said:

This is generally true (child tags are not aware of their parent and vice versa) with these exceptions

- Evernote/Windows has a child search option.

- I use scripting on my Mac (Applescript) and have access to parent/child info.

But is this available on all operating systems? Not so much. And at some point hacking a software just to make it do what it should after paying $100/year for it just doesn't make sense. 

[DTLow 5,736]

8 hours ago, RY27 said:

But is this available on all operating systems?  

No, the nested tag structure is only available on select menus on select platforms (as I posted).

I make use of it, but also rely on a prefix naming standard; you labeled this as brain damage.

[KitKat2 0]

Sorry for hijacking, but how exactly do I use embed tags on the "New Version"?  I just made the switch to get better tables, but now my tags (which were embed on the old version) look "flat" now and there's no way of moving them around.

[gazumped 11,664]

On 8/3/2018 at 1:51 AM, hellobt said:

Hi there,

Think this is a simple request from most free/paid users, but I can see the problem has lastted for more than 10 years...

I guess, the main reason why nested structure is not supported is:

    # nested structure will make the users easily migrate to other note app, say OneNote

    # while if organizing on tag system suggested by Evernote, it will be very HARD to migration! Although tag system is actually not as good as nested structure for real world practice. 

Quoting this as a 'problem' is like saying KFC's menu has the problem of too many chicken dishes. 

Evernote designed a product in a particular way which has managed to attract 220M users.  Going by this forum,  a vanishingly small percentage of them have complained about the lack of hierarchical system,  and -so far- Evernote haven't done anything to change*.  Users who can't live without nested structures either make do or move on to the competition.

I don't believe that this is a secret plot to tie users into the Evernote product - and One Note et al could easily get around any such tactic by designing an import process that (at worst) would convert all easily processed notes,  and ask for user intructions if it found a note with too many tags.  And wouldn't users who just have to have folders have moved on before this became a problem anyway?

And a "tag system is actually not as good as nested structure for real world practice."  Really?  If you have any studies which have confirmed this I'd be interested to hear of them!

For the record this isn't a(nother) mindless defence of the company - there are situations where different data layouts are more applicable,  or more helpful - which is why some of my information is stored in Treepad,  more in is Freeplane and my Todos are in Tick Tick.  The rest is in Evernote,  although all of the previously mentioned apps link into Evernote through note links.  To give you an idea of the relevant importance of those apps - my Freeplane database is 25MB; Evernote is 16GB the others are less than 1MB.  Evernote is over 99% of my data storage.

I did point out elsewhere in the forums that it's possible to get around the non-nesting by using Evernote to collect the data,  by posting links to the notes into a nested-structure app like Treepad or even creating a Table of Contents note (or even a nested series of ToC notes...) and rearranging the note links into a different structure. 

* Evernote does have a new feature "Spaces" which might be their answer to this.  It's a business product at present and still in development,  so we'll have to wait and see where it goes...

[jefito 5,589]

On 8/2/2018 at 8:51 PM, hellobt said:

Think this is a simple request from most free/paid users, but I can see the problem has lastted for more than 10 years...

I guess, the main reason why nested structure is not supported is:

The main reason -- and it's pretty much encapsulated is from a nearly 10-year old post here: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/96180-nesting-multiple-notebooks-creating-sub-notebooks/?page=12#comment-11567 (@engberg was Evernote CTO at the time) --  is because they have nested tags.

It's nothing whatsoever to do with user lock-in.

 

[jefito 5,589]

On 8/3/2018 at 4:09 PM, RY27 said:

So saying that Evernote "supports" nesting is a bit disingenuous, as you, as a "Guru" must know full well.

It's absolutely true that Evernote supported nesting with respect to tags, though some people argue -- fairly, in my opinion -- that nested tags could be even better supported (I'd vote for exposing tag nesting to the search language). It is however not true that Evernote supports nested containers (with the minor exception of stacks, which can only contain notebooks), but nobody here is saying that anyways.

[Coalfield Sam 0]

Just want to throw in my two cents for any Evernote staff tracking how much this feature is desired:

Please...please...let us nest tags in Evernote Business. I'm a CFO of a mid-sized nonprofit that desperately needs cost-effective, efficient document management. I love Evernote, but the lack of this crucial feature nearly drove me away from the product, and it is a constant headache not to have it. We need multiple hierarchies and dimensions to manage our thousands of emails, documents, and their related workflows.

[RY27 21]

On 8/4/2018 at 11:50 AM, gazumped said:

Evernote designed a product in a particular way which has managed to attract 220M users.  Going by this forum,  a vanishingly small percentage of them have complained about the lack of hierarchical system,  and -so far- Evernote haven't done anything to change*.  Users who can't live without nested structures either make do or move on to the competition.

I don't believe that this is a secret plot to tie users into the Evernote product - and One Note et al could easily get around any such tactic by designing an import process that (at worst) would convert all easily processed notes,  and ask for user intructions if it found a note with too many tags.  And wouldn't users who just have to have folders have moved on before this became a problem anyway?

And a "tag system is actually not as good as nested structure for real world practice."  Really?  If you have any studies which have confirmed this I'd be interested to hear of them!

For the record this isn't a(nother) mindless defence of the company - there are situations where different data layouts are more applicable,  or more helpful - which is why some of my information is stored in Treepad,  more in is Freeplane and my Todos are in Tick Tick.  The rest is in Evernote,  although all of the previously mentioned apps link into Evernote through note links.  To give you an idea of the relevant importance of those apps - my Freeplane database is 25MB; Evernote is 16GB the others are less than 1MB.  Evernote is over 99% of my data storage.

I did point out elsewhere in the forums that it's possible to get around the non-nesting by using Evernote to collect the data,  by posting links to the notes into a nested-structure app like Treepad or even creating a Table of Contents note (or even a nested series of ToC notes...) and rearranging the note links into a different structure. 

These are all good points. My issue with these are as follows:

- I do not want to use 3-4 tools to do my work (notes can become tasks, and vice versa, and maintaining these across several apps is inefficient and cumbersome). Evernote is plenty flexible to accomodate this (except for mind mapping).

- Table of Contents feature is not easy to use. Creating TOC notes is fairly easy (on a desktop), but then maintaining them becomes a pain, when new notes need to be added or old notes need to be removed. This is especially painful  for longer TOCs, where having a TOC would be very helpful. Also, what do you do with all the notes that are listed in the TOC itself without cluttering your view? How do you distinguish TOC notes from regular ones?

[DTLow 5,736]

On 8/17/2018 at 4:17 PM, RY27 said:

Evernote is plenty flexible to accomodate this

This is my preference, using Evernote instead of multiple storage tools.  I like having everything in one place.
As to the discussion title, I make use of Evernote's Tag hierarchy feature.

>>I do not want to use 3-4 tools to do my work

I recommend using a selection of editors.
The note editor is ok for basic notes but I use a Word Processing app for serious work
I need some number crunching for expense reports so I export my receipts to a spreadsheet. 
The documents are stored in Evernote as note attachments.

>>Table of Contents feature is not easy to use. 

I responded at 

 

[jefito 5,589]

2 hours ago, RY27 said:

How do you distinguish TOC notes from regular ones?

Um, you tag them with "TOC"???? You put "TOC: " as the first part of their titles????

[CalS 5,280]

13 hours ago, jefito said:

Um, you tag them with "TOC"???? You put "TOC: " as the first part of their titles????

Or you can do a search for sourceurl:"file://Table of Contents"

[jefito 5,589]

25 minutes ago, CalS said:

Or you can do a search for sourceurl:"file://Table of Contents"

Nice one -- I didn't know that. That's only if you use the "Make Table of Contents not" command, though; I usually just make my own by hand.

[CalS 5,280]

3 minutes ago, jefito said:

Nice one -- I didn't know that. That's only if you use the "Make Table of Contents not" command, though; I usually just make my own by hand.

You could always add file://Table of Contents to the source url field.  ?  Kidding...

[gazumped 11,664]

Hmmn.  So much to learn,  so little time...

[Heathy65 3]

Have a look here, I happened upon this when looking for information on hierarchical tagging and saw a reference to Filterize which is a 3rd party service which will tag Evernote notes with the parent tags for notes with child tags.  Also seems to be free if you’re just using this feature.  Might be of interest.

[Bigload 0]

On ‎8‎/‎9‎/‎2018 at 7:48 AM, Coalfield Sam said:

Just want to throw in my two cents for any Evernote staff tracking how much this feature is desired:

Please...please...let us nest tags in Evernote Business. I'm a CFO of a mid-sized nonprofit that desperately needs cost-effective, efficient document management. I love Evernote, but the lack of this crucial feature nearly drove me away from the product, and it is a constant headache not to have it. We need multiple hierarchies and dimensions to manage our thousands of emails, documents, and their related workflows.

I agree. I would like this too.

[Stephan Breideneich 0]

On 9/11/2018 at 7:53 PM, Bigload said:

I agree. I would like this too.

I totally agree. I cannot understand, why nested tags are not supported within Evernote Business. We're new with our company to Evernote Business and I'm really disappointed about that fact.

And if that does not (yet) work, it would be nice if Evernote offers an alternative as an interim solution.