Hide "Untitled" title or use text from beginning of note

[turnwhipple 3]

Since people use Evernote for different uses, sometimes it's not necessary to specify a note title. However, "Untitled" is displayed for all notes which don't have a title. This is a waste of UI screen real estate and is absolutely useless in helping users visually locate notes within a list. To make things worse, the presence of the "Untitled" text causes the note body text snippet to be truncated.

Please, PLEASE, do something about this. In cases where a note title is not specified, the body text should be displayed in list view instead. 

The Evernote user forum has 9 pages of posts asking for a resolution to this issue. There are over 450 user requests about this that date back to 2008. That's 11 years, with nothing being done about it.

I do like Evernote for the most part, but it's really not maintaining its competitive edge.

[MatS14 19]

On 5/8/2019 at 3:06 PM, turnwhipple said:

Since people use Evernote for different uses, sometimes it's not necessary to specify a note title. However, "Untitled" is displayed for all notes which don't have a title. This is a waste of UI screen real estate and is absolutely useless in helping users visually locate notes within a list. To make things worse, the presence of the "Untitled" text causes the note body text snippet to be truncated.

Please, PLEASE, do something about this. In cases where a note title is not specified, the body text should be displayed in list view instead. 

The Evernote user forum has 9 pages of posts asking for a resolution to this issue. There are over 450 user requests about this that date back to 2008. That's 11 years, with nothing being done about it.

I do like Evernote for the most part, but it's really not maintaining its competitive edge.

I TOTALLY agree to this! And also I looked at it and it has 19 pages instead of 9 @turnwhipple.

Edited May 10, 2019 by MatS14
"And also I looked at it and it has 19 pages instead of 9 @turnwhipple."

[jefito 5,589]

Um, all that was is a search for posts that contain the text "untitled", it's not clear that all of them are asking for what you are.

That being said, in the latest Evernote for Windows application, if I create a new note and type into it, or paste some text in to it, the new note does indeed take the first line of text as its title, where it will show up in the list view Title column. If there's a scenario where this doesn't work, you should probably specify it.

I checked my note database of ~7500 notes, and found <10 that had "Untitled" as note title. Several of those actually had just an image as their note content, so "Untitled" seems like a valid choice in those cases. Several others looked like web clips gone awry; not sure what happened there, but if "Untitled" goes into the note's title field when the note was created (as opposed to having the title field be blank) for whatever reason, then that's semi-valid, at least. That left a couple of pretty old notes that I'm not sure what might have happened; there certainly was some debate over what the proper behavior should be in the forums at the time (2009-2010, I think), so it's hard to tell.

As I say, if you have a repeatable scenario that demonstrates the problem, you should post it here, along with the Windows client you're using.

[turnwhipple 3]

2 hours ago, jefito said:

That being said, in the latest Evernote for Windows application, if I create a new note and type into it, or paste some text in to it, the new note does indeed take the first line of text as its title, where it will show up in the list view Title column. If there's a scenario where this doesn't work, you should probably specify it.

Thanks for your response. It's great to hear that Evernote for Windows is working properly in this regard, but I can confirm that the Evernote web-based client, as well as the current version of Evernote for Mac (v7.9.1) does not do this. If you create a new Note using either client, and insert text only in the body, the title will always display as "Untitled" in list view. 

If you open the individual Note to edit the title on either the web and Mac clients, both will recognize the title field as blank, which is expected behavior. But if you edit the same note in the iOS client, the title field shows up as being populated with the word "Untitled," rather than a blank field. Creating a new Note in the iOS client, however, properly populates the title with the contents of the note.

 

[turnwhipple 3]

2 hours ago, jefito said:

Um, all that was is a search for posts that contain the text "untitled", it's not clear that all of them are asking for what you are.

Fair enough. I'll just amend this to say that there have been people who've asked for this feature since October of 2008. It would be great if Evernote made this behavior consistent across its client software.

[jefito 5,589]

34 minutes ago, turnwhipple said:

It would be great if Evernote made this behavior consistent across its client software.

Sure, consistency would be great.That seems to be what they're focusing on currently. I have no idea where they are in the process.

Thanks for adding the examples. I'm on Windows almost exclusively, at least for making content, Android for reading notes and clipping from web sites, and the web only occasionally.

[CosmicVoyager 4]

YES! Please fix this on Mac client!

[CosmicVoyager 4]

Still waiting for this in the Mac version.

Please have beginning of note text show as title in notes list instead of "Untitled" when no title is entered.

[agsteele 2,942]

2 hours ago, CosmicVoyager said:

Still waiting for this in the Mac version.

Please have beginning of note text show as title in notes list instead of "Untitled" when no title is entered.

This is an old thread and, clearly, the is associated isn't going to change.

V10 is now consistent across OS so Windows and Mac are the same.

It has been requested in other threads but there is no sign that it is planned. I don't know if it is complex or easy to implement but we have what we have at the moment

[Callum Birch 0]

My tuppence worth: I use Evernote, in part, to work on "knowledge" notes. When captured, the notes are often vague. Once a week, I expand on them. It is only at the very end of this process that adding a title is valuable. In fact, in my case, I move the notes elsewhere once they are fully developed. Only then do I add a title. That being the case, I find the titling feature is a big distraction. It would be incredibly valuable to see notes in card view without a title (as though I were looking at index cards with scribbled notes on). With that being said, I can't argue with the logic of titles and automatic titles for the majority of folks. I'm talking about a specific, niche use case. So I can't imagine there will ever be a day that Evernote removes the feature. BUT... my use of Evernote, as part of the creative process, is not all that unusual. The creator economy is growing. There will be more and more people like me who want to customise Evernote in the way I do... or they'll move to (or create) better platforms yet to be developed. So, if Evernote wants to cater for people like me (and they may not), then making it an option to turn of titles would be valuable. If it doesn't want to cater for people like me, well, then, so be it. Can't argue with that. I chose Evernote for this stage of my writing process because it's the best around at CAPTURING notes. It's not the best for other stages. So I'll just move the notes elsewhere if needs be. Anyway, in summary, I think there's a growing need for customisations like (and including) this... but I totally understand if Evernote prefers to cater to the masses.