Tag Autofill Issue

[scoobybri 0]

I'm not sure if there is a existing solution for this or if I have to put in a feature request. I am using Evernote to organize facts and quotes for a history book I am writing. Every fact or quote is labeled with as many relevant tags as needed so that I can find notes based on subject matter, fact type, source name, etc. I have many tags that have words that exist in other tags but when I start typing a tag by word, Evernote only finds notes that start with the keyword that I have started typing. This makes finding tags that have the keyword in it but do not start with the keyword very difficult. I have to remember every tag that has the keyword in it rather than have Evernote bring up a list of all tags that have that keyword in it. Here is an example:

Let's say I have the following tags in my tag list:

big green apple

big red apple

apple

fruit that is big

Let's say the note is something about apples. I start typing apple in the tag area and only the "apple" tag comes up even though there are three tags that contain the word apple in it. This means that I have to remember every tag that has the word apple in it. Simple when you have 4 tags like above, but when you have 1000 tags of which 30 of them have the word apple in them, it is really difficult to remember every variation of tag that has the apple keyword in it. In the same way, if you are looking for tags that have the keyword "big" in them, you only get "big green apple" and "big red apple" when you start typing "big." "fruit that is big" will only show up if you start typing "fruit." I would expect that all tags with the word "big" would show up in the list of tags that are auto listed when I start typing "big."

This would take one line in SQL to do this by simply using a "Like *keyword*" clause in the search statement. I'm not sure why Evernote does not do this when autofilling a tag as I type. It makes it really difficult to use tags when you have dozens of them that are relevant to the keyword you are typing.

Any ideas? Am I missing something?

 

[gazumped 12,064]

Seems to me the issue you have is trying to tell you something - if you used separate tags for size / colour / type of fruit,  you would only have one tag to find for 'apple' if other aspects are defined elsewhere.  To (maybe) make life a easier you could also group tags so that 'type' could contain pear / apple / orange,  and 'size' - big / medium / small.

[jefito 5,598]

2 hours ago, scoobybri said:

Let's say the note is something about apples. I start typing apple in the tag area and only the "apple" tag comes up even though there are three tags that contain the word apple in it.

There's an option that allows a similar behavior to what  you want in the Tag Picker (the little tag icon in the note list header): Tools / Options / Navigation : "Match tags by word prefix in the Tag Picker". When unchecked, it matches against substrings in the tags, so you could type "apple", or even "pple" and get matches. It would be nice if this applied to the tag selection in the note editing panel, too.

Me, I would usually use separate tags for the example that you give, but there are other use cases where the behavior you want would be useful, too.

[Don Dz 165]

1000 tags seem like a lot, I suspect that maybe you would have fewer tags if you separate the words into their own tags as suggested above.

For searching multiple tags together you can use saved searches. 

If you end up with too many searches, a table of searches note might prove useful. 

This idea has been discussed before, the following is just one example: