Notebooks within notebooks and other Qs

[Deb11 1]

Hi, posting as total newbie so sorry if this is ridiculously basic but I've searched for answers without luck and can't get any answer from Evernote support when I have messaged (ahem, not a great start EN...)

I'm writing a book and organising my chapters and the key topics within each chapter under them. I suppose this is my "outline".  I reckon I'll probably end up with max of 3 levels of nested notebooks, with everything else as notes.

Q1: How do I create notebooks within notebooks?

Q2: What is a notebook "stack" and is that the answer to the above (nested notebooks) or is that something else?

Q3: Can I change the order of notebooks and notes in the list? I see currently only date created/updated, title and something called group by type. What about in the order that I want them represented in my book?

Q4: When I attempted to create my first notebook I received the error in a red box "failed to create notebook", and it wouldn't let me.  What's that about?  Several hours later I could following the exact same steps, but I don't know what happened before.

Thanks!

Deb

 

 

[DTLow 5,736]

On 9/22/2020 at 1:14 AM, Deb11 said:

Q1: How do I create notebooks within notebooks?   
Q2: What is a notebook "stack" and is that the answer to the above (nested notebooks) or is that something else?

Evernote has no support for "notebooks within notebooks"   
For notebooks, you can assign notebooks to a Stack - this gives you two levels to work with

>>3  levels

Evernote's primary organization tool is Tags    
They have a parent/child structure that supports unlimited levels

You can use the notebook/tag trees to emulate folders for your notes

>>Q3. Can I change the order of notebooks and notes in the list?

Notebooks are in Name sequence (alphabetical)   
Adjust the order by adjusting the notebook  name

>>Q4: When I attempted to create my first notebook I received the error in a red box "failed to create notebook",

A screenshot might help    
You can contact Evernote support at https://www.evernote.com/SupportLogin.action

[gazumped 11,661]

Hi.  There are three ways to draft a long document - which,  as you will see,  are basically the same logic.

Method 1

• Create a Stack and add Notebooks for chapters or main plot points
• Within each notebook create a new note for each 'scene' and add a Table of Contents note to list all the notes
• Add a leading number to each note title - 0010,  0020 etc (like in old coding practice, this allows you to add 0011, 0012 later as extra narrative if you find it necessary)
• Use the ToC to re-order the content if necessary,  and re-number the titles accordingly
• On completion of the document sort each notebook on title and (if necessary) merge notes into one continuous flow.
• Copy and paste the content into a word processor file and add/ edit styles as necessary

Method 2

• As above,  but create a Stack for 'Drafts' and add one notebook for each individual document.
• Number note titles with both chapter and section IDs - 0010-0010
• Sort/ merge as above

Method 3

• Use a Word processor directly and attach the .DOCX (or whatever) file(s) to a note.  (NB this will be editable on any device that has the necessary WP editor software installed.)

 

It's important to keep backups of your database - especially in the last case - occasional typing errors might delete something valuable. 

Note History and 'Undo' can usually help,  but just in case...

[Deb11 1]

Thanks to both of you.  That's much clearer.

When I contacted Evernote online support they first insisted I could create notebooks within notebooks if I just dragged them on top of each other. Then they insisted I must be getting it wrong all the time because it wasn't working. They sent me videos of doing that *within* a stack when I asked them to show me how to create a stack.  When I asked them to prove this via another video, of course they couldn't, because I know now that's not how it works at all.

If it wasn't for this community, I'd still be going round in insulted, frustrating circles. Thanks again, your answers will be very useful.