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Table of contents for note


Vadych

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44 minutes ago, Vadych said:

Now it is possible to put the headings of three levels.
It would be great if a table of contents for a note is automatically created based on them

Just to clarify I think you mean a table of contents for the note not the old table of contents function in the lagacy which produced a separate TOC note with links to a number of other notes.

I completely agree with this idea, especially if it directly linked to the section of the note.

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You can create it - sort of. Just write several smaller notes instead of one big one, select them all, create the note links and place them into a TOC note. Not the same, but serves as a workaround.

Personally I hope that EN will use the header feature to take structuring text a little further, like TOC, collapsing and expanding text etc.

+1

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1 hour ago, DTLow said:

Please explain the "three levels"   
I'm not aware of any levels in the note contents

I assume he means the three header levels which become  <h1>,  <h2> and  <h3> in the .enex file

image.png.9cda3e41a346d67b833f755fff9fe88b.png

image.png.223590ec1efb141461155a1f40c1594a.png

The fact that EN are doing it this way does bode well for internal linking within a note at some stage in the future.

 

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On 5/11/2021 at 11:51 AM, PinkElephant said:

You can create it - sort of. Just write several smaller notes instead of one big one, select them all, create the note links and place them into a TOC note. Not the same, but serves as a workaround.

I'll have to beg to differ and say I'm not even sure that really serves as a work-around. One of the benefits of having all the content in the same note is that you can still scroll through the whole content easily. If the content is broken up into multiple notes, then there is no way to scroll through it all.

If you had a note with 50 different headers, you'd break that up into 50 different notes and have to go back and forth between each note.

Also, would the 50 different notes keep the same order? It would depend on what the sorting setting was and you'd have to prefix the note title with some kind of text that would keep them in the order you wanted.

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Side note -- I can't believe more people don't think having a built in table of contents (for just content in that note) is an awesome idea. Must just be one of those times where you are the outlier, but you thought you weren't. (And in this case, I'm the outlier.)

Btw, my opinion is that this table of contents should live in a sidebar and not be embedded in the note itself. (But being able to embed it in the note itself *also* would be ok too.)

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I think creating a Headers TOC would be awesome for notes that require scrolling.

I could see it being used for many purposes. For long-form notes, it would be a navigational element. For medium-form notes, it could be a content summary, e.g. 5-8 lines of headers that describe perfectly the summary of the note.

Personally, I would use it a lot for medium-form notes, as most of my Evernote content is short-form to medium-form notes. Sure I could use MS Word or Google Docs, but well, I would be really happy if Evernote did include that feature.

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On 12/28/2021 at 2:55 PM, jkap said:

Long notes are especially important in the new version of Evernote, since the removal of tabbed browsing and performance hits make it much slower to switch between many open notes

@PinkElephant see above. Switching between many notes is a worse experience in many cases. Additionally, your solution requires maintaining a table of contents note manually.

You say “it’s a better concept” to do it this other way, but I (and clearly plenty of other users) disagree, and have given specific, defensible reasons why. Saying “no you’re wrong” is user-hostile.

Regarding syncing problems — if that’s true, that is a separate issue, and should definitely be fixed. It’s not a reason to not implement this feature.

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On 2/11/2022 at 9:00 AM, Egholm said:

I'd love to see this feature - I too have large notes (that I refuse to put in another word-processor just in lack of this feature).

I discovered that they have in the competing product (Nimbus):

(I'm slowly being pushed/pulled that direction...)

Thanks for the Nimbus tip, I'm an avid Evernote user since 2011 but this particular lack on EN's part might lead me to migrate to Nimbus.

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I am really surprised that evernotes editor is still so poor and i find this distinction between a note and a document rather artificial.

Look at Obsidian, Confluence or just simple markdown or reST. The later two use a preprocessor to generate a toc from the headers.
Like for example is done on github or with pandoc.

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I am glad that I found this thread. :) 

I paid for Evernote for more than 10 years (from 2010/5/21), so I am quite familiar with many aspects of Evernote.

Until now, I still constantly feel very painful once every time I need the TOC feature, I guess that many members here know more than me about the scenarios.

To me, AFAIK, the workarounds are not enough... and I as a software engineer suppose this feature is not the rocket science, even it might be not that easy, like the syncing part.

For the lack of TOC, I am forced to find alternative note software, like obsidian/ulysses and many others, and compose a very detailed comparison matrix, in the end I write notes outside the Evernote for certain scenarios.

It will be extremely awesome if Evernote can dev this, and share the dev/release plan to users.

FYI: In the Empathy Mapping, I will write my pain on it. 😂 🥲 

image.thumb.png.5a273159394d7e586f78d58010eb2329.png

 

 

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On 3/2/2023 at 6:30 PM, agsteele said:

In Evernote the best approach is to create a series of shorter, smaller notes and then create a ToC note linking to each of these shorter notes.  With the backlink feature it is simple to navigate back to the ToC.

If the linking within a note is essential for you then probably the applications you name would be the way to go.

That's hardy a good approach. It's time consuming and counter productive.
 

Most note taking apps deployed this feature long time ago, and I can't believe Evernote would rather add some silly widgets than work on this 😳

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11 minutes ago, Mike P said:

Чтобы прояснить, я думаю, вы имеете в виду оглавление для заметки, а не старую функцию оглавления в лаге, которая создала отдельную заметку TOC со ссылками на ряд других заметок.

Полностью согласен с этой идеей, особенно если она напрямую связана с разделом заметки.

Yes, you got it right

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23 minutes ago, Boot17 said:

If you had a note with 50 different headers

I suspect this would be more of a document than a note   
I would be using a word processing editor (Apple Pages)    
The document would be stored in Evernote as a note attachment file

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There are still people who are so clever, but the simple difference between a workaround and a software change escapes their view from the ivory tower.

  • Workaround: Not so nice, some hiccups but available NOW
  • Software change: Eye watering brilliance, people around the world dancing in the street, but THEN (or maybe NEVER)

Personally I keep my notes short. Longer documents are attached, not scripted in EN.

We will have to wait and see if EN one day transforms the 3 header levels introduced with v10 into something with more function. It crosses my mind a TOC may be part of this package - THEN.

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Thanks - I appreciate the input. It’s just a different way of thinking about taking notes for me to break them up into smaller notes like that for some of my larger notes.

I’m hoping with the new v10 structure that they could/would add it, but I won’t hold my breath. 😃

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Was just thinking about this some more today... Perhaps Evernote wants to discourage super long notes as long notes make syncing, loading times and other things more problematic. Imagine a 40+ page note with 20+ tables, 50+ headers, 50+ tasks etc. and the syncing and rendering and other issues that could occur.

If there were a TOC and internal linking then it would encourage users to create longer notes and so EN would be shooting themselves in the foot to some degree. I hope that this *isn't* the case (that this is something they *could* do, but *won't* do), but it doesn't seem too unlikely that it *is* the case.

I'm more of a long note (aka document!) taker myself (not 40 page, 50+ table long though!). I've only got just over 1,300 notes at the moment, but if I broke those out into logically smaller notes I could easily have 40K+ 20K notes.

I use to look at the plan limitations of 100,000 maximum notes and think "why would anyone have so many notes?". Well, I can answer that now -- it's because maybe my notes could/should be broken into multiple notes.

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It is called EverNOTE, not EverNOVEL. Technically it is possible to write a lot of words into one note (200 MB is a small library, if only text is used). But the program is not designed to create this type of content. For long documents use a word processor - they are made for long pieces of writings.

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This would be incredibly useful for any note longer than a few screen-lengths. Quip has a really nice implementation (in my opinion.) 

Long notes are especially important in the new version of Evernote, since the removal of tabbed browsing and performance hits make it much slower to switch between many open notes.

To all the people saying, "just store it in a word doc" -- that's the equivalent of saying "don't use Evernote for this." Why not? There is no fundamental technical difference between a simple document and a long note. Evernote already supports many word-processing features (fonts, colors, subscript, etc). Anchor links are comparatively simple, and then it's just a matter of automatically building auto-generated anchor links into a UI overlay.

Evernote is supposed to be a "second brain," and sometimes that means writing docs/notes at greater length. This feature is relatively simple, and would make such content a better UX.

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Voting this feature.

 

Evernote has headings. I piece of me wishes there was a way for me to create a table of content within a single note. I have that have a lot of content, but I separate them with headings. It would be nice to have a table of content feature or macro so that I can quickly find subjects within my own notes. I have found the method shared on their website and YouTube video, but I don't think I will use this method. Creating an "app link" is a cool feature, but to use it to create a dedicated Table of Content note doesn't work well with my style of note taking. 

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I'd love to see this feature - I too have large notes (that I refuse to put in another word-processor just in lack of this feature).

I discovered that they have in the competing product (Nimbus):

image.png.83b6261a581e5788b33438b4ab153007.png

(I'm slowly being pushed/pulled that direction...)

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You write about large text notes. It is a better concept to have smaller notes, and bind them together by a table of content note. For more comfort you can add some links between them.

A set of smaller notes reduces the likelihood of syncing problems, and at the same time creates that outliner so much desired.

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One thing I like about keeping more content in the same note is that it's easier to scroll and view the content that way. When it is in multiple notes, it is possible, but not as easy. (Don't be telling me I should use a Word processor for that and attaching it as a separate document...I already know. 😃 )

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As another user I reserve the right to have and post my own opinion. 

My preference is to take „the 80%“ now and apply them. Sometimes you discover you can do without the last nittybitty detail  anyhow.

Feel free to proceed on your own way, posting here and waiting - waiting - waiting …

 

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I really would like this as well. Being able to jump to specific headings would be nice. I would like to see it similar to Obsidians where the TOC is an option in the menu rather than taking up space in a note similar to Notions.

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42 minutes ago, bdholland said:

Thanks for the Nimbus tip, I'm an avid Evernote user since 2011 but this particular lack on EN's part might lead me to migrate to Nimbus.

Don’t do it lol, research nimbus some - they appear awesome but that’s pr. 

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If we can't have the TOC, I would like to have a level between Notebook and Note that we can use to organize notes in the sidebar.  For example, if I was doing a collection of history, I want to do something add some kind of Grouping like this:

  • Stack -> Country
  • Notebook -> Period
  • Group -> [People, Location, Event]
  • Note -> [Napoleon, Charles De Gaulle], [Paris, Mersailles], [Napoleonic Wars, French Revolution, WW2]

I can kind of do Group by tagging everything and filtering by tag, but it would be nice to set up something that would filter and organize by pre-generated tags so my sidebar shows:

  • France
    • 1800s
      • People
        • Napoleon
      • Location
        • Paris
        • Waterloo
      • Event
        • Battle of Waterloo 1
        • Battle of Waterloo 2
    • 1900s
      • People
        • Charles De Gaulle
      • Events
        • World War 2

 

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If you look at how EN is set up, you „offer“ a choice between hard to implement and near impossible to do.

I think both would request a major recoding of the app and the backend on the server. And it would finally break compatibility with the legacy clients.

The best solution is to keep notes short, and link them together by a TOC note leading to them. This works now, and is not depending on actions by others.

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Every note of mine is organized in a way that it resembles the TOC feature:

I have sections within the note, which are separated through horizontal lines and each section has a title as well as a unique date/time stamp.

The section titles I also have at the beginning of a note. Jumping to the relevant section is easy with the search function.

So it would be of course bettet to have more automation (e.g. I use a different color for the section title and currently there is no shortcut for changing color), but the structure works for me.

BTW, there is a nice IOS app called Shortcut, which allows for a date/time stamp. Similarly on web I have an addon called FlyMSG which also allows for a (colored) date/time stamp.

 

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Actually, I think it will be brilliant to have an option to create a dashboard for each stack. This would be ideal as I use Evernote both for work and my personal life, but I am unable to separate the two. The "Home" page merges my workspace notebooks with my personal notebooks, but I feel they shouldn't be in the same "Home" area. I'll try to elaborate more on the idea as I continue my experience with Evernote. If anyone has workaround suggestions, I will greatly appreciate it.

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This is a great idea, and should definitely be added. It would be a huge UX boost for power users. For long running notes, where you want to be able to quickly refer between sections, and not have to switch between notes, this would be killer. I'm glad so many people on this thread can see it.

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  • Level 5

„Look what these others have…“ is a rather poor argument. A program that „has it all“ would not be great, it would be unusable.

What you mean with note vs. document is not clear. EN has notes, and each note is technically a small website. There are no documents - there can be attachments to a note holding documents, and there can be links to documents stored elsewhere.

If you are believing some functions should be improved, contact EN support or send feedback.

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An internal note table of contents would be a nice feature to have but does fly against the EN philosophy of (smallish) individual notes linked tgether by a table of contents/internal links or filing using tags or notebooks. Remember this has never been a feature of EN (legacy or V10) so if it is essential to your workflow,  you chose the wrong tool.

When I do have a longer note (which I avoid if I possibly can) I do something very similar ot @ghon 's suggestion above. Section titles with words separated by an underscore can be selected with a double click so I create section titles with a TOC at the top of the note. Navigation is then

  • double click the section in the TOC
  • Ctrl+F
  • <enter> twice to go to the second occurence of the text (ie the section title at the top of the section)
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4 hours ago, Mike P said:

An internal note table of contents would be a nice feature to have but does fly against the EN philosophy of (smallish) individual notes linked tgether by a table of contents/internal links or filing using tags or notebooks.

We may still yet see a built-in table of contents feature yet, which will be useful (and I'd love to see that implemented as a side bar that you can toggle open/closed) but the part about "EN philosophy of (smallish) individual notes" rings so true to me. I used to create longer notes (and still do sometimes) and I found that I had a harder time finding things. If instead, I used better titles, smaller (and more) notes, better use of tags -- man it's so much easier to find what I'm looking for now and jump right to it (with the 'Switch to' command generally... love that guy!)

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Another thought worth pointing out here is that for Enterprise users where you are sharing notes with your organization, a table of contents allows you to self-contain several pieces of information, without having to share many notes and other additional notes just to explain where everything is.

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  • Evernote Expert

I am sure that this request has been heard many times.  But since we are almost all other users around here we cannot tell you what the plan is.  I can say that plans are almost never announced until shortly before they become available.

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17 小時前, agsteele說:

I am sure that this request has been heard many times.  But since we are almost all other users around here we cannot tell you what the plan is.  I can say that plans are almost never announced until shortly before they become available.

Thank you @agsteele :)

very appreciate your prompt reply!

I can understand that it's hard to commit the plan or specific release time to the public.

Maybe it's helpful to share with user about the intention, like:

  1. the priority on the roadmap is pretty low (P4,P5) / it's not the "Evernote way" ☠️
  2. we are also eager to have it, it's on the way (under design / implementation / testing ) 🚀
  3. we encountered technical issues 😣

I suppose these info can help user to make better decisions
for example, someone might not leave Evernote if the feature is on the way.

my two cents, thank you and hope Evernote keeps evolving :) 

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  • Evernote Expert

You may well be correct but, as things stand, Evernote does not publish a roadmap. As fellow users we can only help you to manage your expectations ;)

Of course, the new owners may take a different approach to announcing plans.  We'll see if anything changes in the weeks/months ahead.

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11 minutes ago, ShankPossible said:

Currently i need to divide and conquer my notes into smaller pieces to find them better

In Evernote the best approach is to create a series of shorter, smaller notes and then create a ToC note linking to each of these shorter notes.  With the backlink feature it is simple to navigate back to the ToC.

If the linking within a note is essential for you then probably the applications you name would be the way to go.

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  • Evernote Expert

This has always been the Evernote way. So until it changes it remains the best option available.

I make no comment on what may be better, just point to the current way of achieving this feature.

As for the "silly widgets", I think you will find many users for whom these are key features. Each to his own.

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  • Level 5

Most <enter software> does this or that, and EN doesn’t, which is <add conclusion, the more extreme the better>.

There is a simple solution: Then go use the software that does what you need for your use case. No app will ever have everything, and what we (all fellow users) can propose are working solutions with the tools that are available.

In this case I have added my vote to the feature request log ago. Until implementation the best available solution are several small notes, linked together.

The backlinks option added recently boosts this approach a lot. Moving between linked notes is far easier now.

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On 12/17/2022 at 3:34 AM, autogenix said:

I am really surprised that evernotes editor is still so poor and i find this distinction between a note and a document rather artificial.

Look at Obsidian, Confluence or just simple markdown or reST. The later two use a preprocessor to generate a toc from the headers.
Like for example is done on github or with pandoc.

Yeah I would recommend like Confluence does, just pull the header tags, make them hotlink-able and then put them in a box to the right side. Quip even does it, and they're smaller user-base than EN.

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When the header text Styles were introduced with the new editor, I expected this feature to lead to a better handling of longer notes, like using the headers for a TOC, or as jump marks to quickly move between chapters. But as we see today, this didn’t materialize.

The better option is to keep notes short, and knit some of them together by creating a TOC note, leading to the related notes. Since the backlinks were introduced, navigation between linked notes is simpler than ever. Using the backlink you can always go to the TOC note, even if you opened the individual note without going through the TOC.

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17 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

When the header text Styles were introduced with the new editor, I expected this feature to lead to a better handling of longer notes, like using the headers for a TOC, or as jump marks to quickly move between chapters. But as we see today, this didn’t materialize.

But the base is built - I think (hope, expect, ...) we'll get in-note TOCs (in not soooo long time 🙏)
(BTW: auto-generated in-note TOCs are not the end of all wishes: I'd like to get anchors in notes to create hyperlinks to jump to anchored phrases in notes 😉)

17 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The better option is to keep notes short, and knit some of them together by creating a TOC note, leading to the related notes.

True with at least one exception: If you plan to share an important note with others, creating related notes is a bad solution. My document of missing (Legacy-)Features is an example that would benefit a lot of a local TOC...

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Just thinking out loud: We know about the deficiencies of the current syncing when notes grow larger. Maybe EN engineers don’t want to encourage long notes at the moment ? A TOC for a note would certainly make single, extensive notes more attractive.

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Just thinking deeper (regarding "base is built"): To implement in-note TOC, every line in TOC needs an anchor within the note as a destination when clicking on the line. Simply having headings is not enough 😞

Note content is coded in HTML (at the end). So I will explain my thoughts by some HTML fragments...

  • Headings are defined by H-Elements like <H1>text</H1>
  • Anchors and hotlinks are defined  by A-Elements
    • Anchor: <A name="anchor-1">text</A>
    • hotlink: <A href="#anchor-1">Jump to...</A>

A complete destination headings might be

  • <H1><A name="chp-1">Chapter 1 (in text)</A><H1>

Within a TOC you have to code

  • <A href="#cpt-1">Chapter 1</A>

to see a hotlink (normally in blue) like

  • Chapter 1

If you click on "Chapter 1" your cursor will move to the heading "Chapter 1 (in text)". As long as you do not change the href-name of an anchor, a hyperlink text and|or the viewable text of the target anchor can be changed to any value - without disturbing the functionality of your TOC construct...

For EN developers this means that they have to implement...

  • ... an internal href-name management
    • names have to be unique within a note
    • names should be retained as long as possible because they might be used in other situations also (not discussed here: maybe used to create backlinks to TOCs within a note or as anchors for hyperlinks from outside the note...)
  • ... a suitable UI to manage hrefs by the user.
    • href-names should be changed at all occurences (even outside the current note?)
    • but href-names should be changable in single occurences also (to redirect single links)
    • All in all it should be very easy to use (because normal EN-users do not want to know about this stuff - they simple want to see TOCs 😉)

This is only a very small excerpt of needs to implement in-note TOCs. I'm sure, EN-developers are working hard on this. The've many  examples in other apps - but it's not easy to get it really "easy to use" 😞

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14 hours ago, agsteele said:

I suspect that HTML isn't going to be the way forward

OK, not trival HTML but anything that will be understood by the underlaying browser. The technic behind hotlinks (here: in TOCs) and anchors will be the same. New sync algorithms will be based on smaller snippets of note text which can be identified in HTML also. Cannot see any relationship between needs (and problems) of TOC and possibly coming new sync.

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5 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

No devs here - contact support.

Forums > Product Feedback/Feature Requests > General Feature Requests 

To Evernote anyone who actually works at Evernote: 

Please add a TOC feature to individual notes to link to headings. This is currently one of my top 3 feature requests.

 

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The presence of EN staff on the forum is rare, and we have no indication they actually read feature requests and start hacking away. Just FYI - this is just one of a number of similar feature requests, and has much less votes than the oldest one, most voted for this feature. It is more than 10 years old.

How do you read the outcome ?

To contact support is the only assured way to drop anything on to the desk of a staff member.

You can send feedback as well, but from the communication rules, it will be read, but usually not answered.

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It is so tedious that there is still no normal table of contents generation within notes. Again, they stuff the app with all sorts of nonsense, e.g. ToDo list and this basic functionality (which is overdue for years by the way!) is still to come.. one day.. or not.

As I'm using Microsoft Loop more and more, somehow the priorities are handled properly here and the TOC generation was one of the first implemented feature... if we're talking about a knowledge management system!

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  • Level 5

You seem to be sure your priorities are everybodies priorities, and if not, they are the most important in the world.

Know what: You missed your chance 18 months ago. You could have bought EN and make sure your priorities are followed.

Since you missed the opportunity, you need to fall in line with us ordinary folks, waiting for things to happen.

Those who use what is there instead of having phantasies about what should, simply keep notes short, and create a TOC note for navigation between them. We even get nice backlinks for better navigation, courtesy of EN that added this feature early 2023.

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