Private notebooks, not included in All Notes

[Tenaran 0]

I thought it would be a great idea to use Evernote to capture my personal thoughts and feelings in a notebook called "Personal Journal"...   Then, when I opened up Evernote to grab something while someone else was watching my computer, I realised that the last note created appears by default!  Luckily it wasn't the most embarrassing of deep dark secrets.

I would love the ability to flag whether to exclude a notebook from appearing in the All Notes search in order that my personal private notes remain relatively private!  Also, it would make sense to exclude these from the search function, with perhaps an option to include "private" notebooks in order to enable searching of these more personal books, but it would need to be an explicit action to include these.

[Tenaran 0]

Ha ha, am I alone with this issue? Please can anyone let me know if I am missing an existing function that would save me from this issue in future?

[DTLow 5,745]

In the meantime, you can create a second account for your "Private Journal"

[Tenaran 0]

Ha ha, yeah cheers DTLow I figured that might be the only way atm   Surely I can't be the only person this has happened to though!?

[davedpss 7]

I would like to be able to exclude certain notebooks from the All Notes view. I would like to view most of the notes but exclude a few of the notebooks.

Thanks.

[DTLow 5,745]

40 minutes ago, davedpss said:

I would like to view most of the notes but exclude a few of the notebooks.

A work-around is to use a saved search.
Evernote has an extensive search feature that includes negation (exclude)
Tags can be excluded; -tag:aaaaaa 
Unfortunately notebooks can't be excluded.

I merged this request with a similar request

 

[CalS 5,310]

1 hour ago, davedpss said:

I would like to be able to exclude certain notebooks from the All Notes view. I would like to view most of the notes but exclude a few of the notebooks.

Thanks.

Pending EN adding any notebook exclusion logic you can use stacks.  Create one stack with the notebooks you want to exclude, put everything else in the other stack.  Then use the other stack as context for your searches.

[davedpss 7]

How do you limit your search to only look in a specific stack?

[DTLow 5,745]

1 minute ago, davedpss said:

How do you limit your search to only look in a specific stack?

Search      stack:"aaaaaaaaaa"

[davedpss 7]

Thanks, Another question. Can you put a stack into another stack and if so, how? I'm looking at them and not seeing how to do that.

Thanks again.

[CalS 5,310]

3 minutes ago, davedpss said:

Thanks, Another question. Can you put a stack into another stack and if so, how? I'm looking at them and not seeing how to do that.

Thanks again.

Nope.  Only the two levels, Stack - Notebook.

[DTLow 5,745]

12 minutes ago, davedpss said:

Thanks, Another question. Can you put a stack into another stack and if so, how? I'm looking at them and not seeing how to do that.

A stack of notebooks is all we get - No stack into another stack

The only hierarchy we get is for tags; parent/child for unlimited levels

[jeffvw 0]

Call it the opposite of notebook sharing, I'd like a notebook-level setting with two checkboxes. One is "Do not include in 'All Notes'," and the second (available only if the first is checked) is "Secure with password."

I think many of us use Evernote for some items we'd rather people couldn't accidentally see. So we put them in a personal notebook. But if we happen to have an "All notes" view up, that note and a preview to its contents might appear when we don't want it to. This would be a toggle to opt-out of All Notes for a specific notebook. You'd have to select that notebook to see the notes. As a second layer, a password could be assigned so you need to type it in (or touch ID) to see the contents of the note. That would only be available to notes excluded from All Notes.  

[jefito 5,598]

On 12/17/2019 at 10:13 AM, jeffvw said:

I think many of us use Evernote for some items we'd rather people couldn't accidentally see. So we put them in a personal notebook.

Or you could just use separate accounts, and share only what you want visible in your "non-Personal" account.

On 12/17/2019 at 10:13 AM, jeffvw said:

As a second layer, a password could be assigned so you need to type it in (or touch ID) to see the contents of the note.

Passwords for single notesand also for notebooks have been requested elsewhere in this forum. You should find those requests and add your vote.

[jeffvw 0]

1 minute ago, jefito said:

Or you could just use separate accounts, and share only what you want visible in your "non-Personal" account.

That would require logging out of your public account, into your private one, entering a note, logging out of private, logging into public — just to record one private note. Not exactly practical. 

[PinkElephant 8,818]

My question is how „private“ these notes should be ?

If they should be searchable, they have to go to the server, and they have to be accessed by the server program. This means they are not private, because the building of the search index means they are opened and analyzed (even when this is done by algorithms and KI). The same with the password - when the Server „knows“ it, it looses its privacy and at least theoretically the ability to protect the contained data.

If notes will strictly be kept private, they will be searchable only by means the creator of the note provides, like tags.

[DTLow 5,745]

On 12/17/2019 at 7:13 AM, jeffvw said:

One is "Do not include in 'All Notes',"

I merged your post with an existing feature request

You included a second request for "Secure with password."
It's a valid request; as per @jefito, address this as a separate post

[s2sailor 2,452]

On 12/17/2019 at 10:13 AM, jeffvw said:

I think many of us use Evernote for some items we'd rather people couldn't accidentally see. So we put them in a personal notebook. But if we happen to have an "All notes" view up, that note and a preview to its contents might appear when we don't want it to. This would be a toggle to opt-out of All Notes for a specific notebook. You'd have to select that notebook to see the notes.

Just to be clear, I think you are referring to "local" notebooks.  Evernote doesn't have personal notebooks.  As a work around, what I have done is to create two stacks, one for work and one for home.  The work stack contains all of my work notebooks and they are all local.  I then have two saved searches:  One that searches only the work stack, which avoids all of the home or personal notes, and the other a home stack search that excludes all work notes.  Using these two saved searches I then have a view all work notes and a view all home notes search options.

The idea of note or notebook level encryption is an often requested item.  I would like to see that as well.  In the meantime work arounds include using local notebooks or storing the data in passwork protected documents and attaching them to a note.

[CalS 5,310]

1 hour ago, jeffvw said:

That would require logging out of your public account, into your private one, entering a note, logging out of private, logging into public — just to record one private note. Not exactly practical. 

As a premium user you can have both accounts open at the same time, Windows desktop anyway.  Or you can use a browser to log into the other account and enter the one note there.

[jefito 5,598]

 

2 hours ago, jeffvw said:

That would require logging out of your public account, into your private one, entering a note, logging out of private, logging into public — just to record one private note. Not exactly practical. 

Not quite what I suggested. If you want to keep personal stuff private, then don't share it to a different account on work/shared computer. If you need to access your private stuff, do it on your phone. Sharing notebooks to a different account doesn't require you to log into a new account to see the shared notebooks.

Beyond that, if you somehow need to view your private stuff on a work/shared computer, then there's still always the risk that you'll have your computer in a state where it can be seen anyways, since what you suggested leaves that door open anyways, because it can always still be selected explicitly.

[jeffvw 0]

Maybe I'm not being clear on this: I don't have multiple computers and multiple accounts. I have one computer and one iPad I use for personal and business use. So I have multiple notebooks I use for personal use and business. All I'm saying is it would be nice to have a notebook not included in "All notes" so *if* I happened to have that view opened and someone was looking over my shoulder—even one of my kids—notes in that notebook wouldn't be included. 

That's it. Sure, there are multi-step workarounds, but that's not how I (and I think many, many … many typical users) use Evernote.

This isn't about NSA encryption; this is about accidentally revealing a note I'd rather not have someone see at that moment. The password is a second level that seems like a logical extension, but it's less critical. 

[CalS 5,310]

1 hour ago, jeffvw said:

Maybe I'm not being clear on this: I don't have multiple computers and multiple accounts. I have one computer and one iPad I use for personal and business use. So I have multiple notebooks I use for personal use and business. All I'm saying is it would be nice to have a notebook not included in "All notes" so *if* I happened to have that view opened and someone was looking over my shoulder—even one of my kids—notes in that notebook wouldn't be included. 

That's it. Sure, there are multi-step workarounds, but that's not how I (and I think many, many … many typical users) use Evernote.

This isn't about NSA encryption; this is about accidentally revealing a note I'd rather not have someone see at that moment. The password is a second level that seems like a logical extension, but it's less critical. 

You have been clear and the option is to vote for the feature in the upper left on this page.  

Workarounds are just other user suggestions because it can’t be done today.  Simplest workaround in my view is to put all notebooks other than the personal notebook in a stack and use that stack as your “All Notes” context.  Never to use actual All Notes again.  A solution which has its own warts but gets you what you want, pending this capability every getting added to EN. 

[s2sailor 2,452]

1 hour ago, jeffvw said:

All I'm saying is it would be nice to have a notebook not included in "All notes" so *if* I happened to have that view opened and someone was looking over my shoulder—even one of my kids—notes in that notebook wouldn't be included. 

If you use stacks and saved searches (saved as a shortcut), as mentioned above, you will have what you want, but instead of clicking on the All Notes icon, you will instead use the search shortcuts that you created to search for only those items in your search criteria.

[jeffvw 0]

I'm not seeing how, unless a notebook can be part of multiple stacks. I'd have to give up my stacking for other organization. Or is there a way to search only a subset of notebooks as part of a search (or exclude a notebook from a saved search)? 

I don't use saved searches that often, but now that I've spent some time digging into this, I think the feature should be exclusion from All Notes *and* All Notes Searches. Maybe I'm the only person in the world who ever had a note appear that I didn't want others to see. But I doubt it. 

[DTLow 5,745]

47 minutes ago, jeffvw said:

Or is there a way to search only a subset of notebooks as part of a search (or exclude a notebook from a saved search)? 

Use a Private tag at  the note level       
Your search would include   -tag:Private

[s2sailor 2,452]

37 minutes ago, jeffvw said:

Maybe I'm the only person in the world who ever had a note appear that I didn't want others to see. But I doubt it. 

No, I'm in that boat as well.  I only use one account for both home and work, that is why I mentioned my stack and saved search setup.  I have about 20K notes but only have two stacks and a handful of notebooks so setting this up wasn't too difficult for me but if you are already making heavy use of stacks I can see this being difficult to set up since EN only allows one level of stacks and notebooks can only be in one stack.  The ability to exclude notebooks from a search would be nice but we currently have to use tags for that.  You might give some thought to using tags instead of notebooks for some of your organization otherwise some of the other suggestions might be more helpful with your setup.

[CalS 5,310]

1 hour ago, jeffvw said:

I'm not seeing how, unless a notebook can be part of multiple stacks. I'd have to give up my stacking for other organization. Or is there a way to search only a subset of notebooks as part of a search (or exclude a notebook from a saved search)? 

I don't use saved searches that often, but now that I've spent some time digging into this, I think the feature should be exclusion from All Notes *and* All Notes Searches. Maybe I'm the only person in the world who ever had a note appear that I didn't want others to see. But I doubt it. 

Yup, said it had warts.  The only notebook exclusion of a sort in EN is the Stack.  Since stacks are only one notebook deep to solve your issue you could only have two stacks, one containing the personal notebook(s) and one containing all your other notebooks.  The other stack would be the context you would use so as to not have any of your personal notes appear.  Kind of is what it is with EN's current capabilities.

Another thought, if your personal notes are mostly text you could encrypt the note contents.  That would keep the note content from being visible.  FWIW.

[jeffvw 0]

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

Use a Private tag at  the note level       
Your search would include   -tag:Private

That works. But I can't see how to save the search as a shortcut. The help files say to just drag and drop, but it's not draggable on my Mac. The web instructions talk about three dots in the search list to edit the search, but no such dots appear. 

[CalS 5,310]

Right click in the search area.

[jeffvw 0]

If the text isn't active, all I get is "Customize toolbar." If it is, I get a context menu about the text content itself. See attached. 

[DTLow 5,745]

38 minutes ago, jeffvw said:

That works. But I can't see how to save the search as a shortcut. The help files say to just drag and drop, but it's not draggable on my Mac. The web instructions talk about three dots in the search list to edit the search, but no such dots appear. 

For saving a search  https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005267-How-to-create-a-saved-search

On a Mac, drag the saved search to the shortcut section