Filtering notes - Tags?

[andrewattard 2]

Hi,

I'm capturing a large number of recipes in my evernote, at least a few hundred.  I'd like to use tags (or another feature) to define which of those recipes require which cooking tools.  For example: Recipes #1 requires a knife, a frying pan, and a cheese grater.  Recipe #2 requires a food processor, wooden spoon, and a baking sheet.

Tagging them as such is fine. However, in the future I would like to be able to choose recipes based on the tools I have available.  The dilemma I'm having now is - how do I filter to view the recipes which only require a wooden spoon and a baking sheet, for example?

Obviously I can't filter to "any note containing the tag wooden spoon and baking sheet" since this would also return results that are tagged with these + many other tools.

Any other feature or query I can use to get around that?

[DTLow 5,242]

You can use negation in a search.

For example   -tag:spoon excludes all notes tagged with spoon

[andrewattard 2]

Thanks for the quick reply @DTLow. I'm using windows on a surface laptop by the way, though I also use the Android version as well.

I don't think the suggested solution will work for me, since it might mean adding 30+ negations in a single query.  If I use the same example I mentioned above - where I'm searching for recipes which require ONLY a wooden spoon & a baking sheet - then I assume my query would have to be something like this:

Any note containing [wooden spoon] [baking sheet] -[pots] -[knife] -[blender] -[frying pan] -[grater] etc.....for every piece of possible kitchen equipment.

[jefito 5,528]

8 minutes ago, andrewattard said:

Obviously I can't filter to "any note containing the tag wooden spoon and baking sheet" since this would also return results that are tagged with these + many other tools.

In Evernote you can express simple AND filters(the default), simple OR filters (using the any: modifier), but not mixed AND/OR filters.  In this case, this is not so hard:

tag:woodenspoon tag:bakingsheet -tag:lemonsqueezer -tag:sousvide

An OR filter would look like this:

any: tag:woodenspoon tag:bakingsheet

 

[jefito 5,528]

2 minutes ago, andrewattard said:

I don't think the suggested solution will work for me, since it might mean adding 30+ negations in a single query.  If I use the same example I mentioned above - where I'm searching for recipes which require ONLY a wooden spoon & a baking sheet - then I assume my query would have to be something like this:

Yeah, you may be overthinking this a bit. It does seem curious to be organizing by equipment as opposed to, say, ingredients. And while filtering by tag existence can actually be quite simply done in Evernote for Windows (using Alt+Shift+T), filtering by lack of tag is not so simple.

[andrewattard 2]

@jefito Thanks - yea, I thought so. Was hoping there'd be some workaround, but perhaps not.

If you were curious - the reason that I am filtering by equipment: I travel a fair bit and love to cook, but obviously I cannot travel with all my kitchen equipment.  This will (hopefully) allow me to easily locate recipes based on the equipment I have available in whoever's kitchen I'm visiting 😀

[jefito 5,528]

1 hour ago, andrewattard said:

@jefito Thanks - yea, I thought so. Was hoping there'd be some workaround, but perhaps not.

If you were curious - the reason that I am filtering by equipment: I travel a fair bit and love to cook, but obviously I cannot travel with all my kitchen equipment.  This will (hopefully) allow me to easily locate recipes based on the equipment I have available in whoever's kitchen I'm visiting 😀

Ah, interesting. The way I'd approach that sort of problem is to identify a basic set of tools that anyone wold have, and then tag to identify more exotic/specialized tools that are not in the basic toolkit. But maybe even that's too much to ask for, depending on kitchens you visit.

[CalS 4,801]

On 4/8/2019 at 11:32 AM, andrewattard said:

Any other feature or query I can use to get around that?

IMO, simplest solution is to create a tag for each implement and then do a search for the tools available.  Then a search for tag:wooden.spoon tag:frying.pan would return a set of recipes that contain both tags with some potentially having other implement tags.  Manual culling or additional search parameters at that point.  Not perfect...

[jefito 5,528]

7 minutes ago, CalS said:

IMO, simplest solution is to create a tag for each implement and then do a search for the tools available.  Then a search for tag:wooden.spoon tag:frying.pan would return a set of recipes that contain both tags with some potentially having other implement tags

And this is exactly the kind of search that Evernote makes easy in Windows with Alt+Shift+T.

[DTLow 5,242]

On 4/8/2019 at 11:47 AM, andrewattard said:

it might mean adding 30+ negations in a single query. 

30+ negations would describe my kitchen 😋

One idea is to group the instruments and prefix the tagnames; for example Basic-Spoon, Master-Mixer, Pro-Processor

-tag:Pro* excludes all the Pro tools

[andrewattard 2]

Thanks everyone! All good suggestions, although not perfect, I think some combination of them will get me most of the way there.

I appreciate the quick and thoughtful input.