How to make links within an Evernote page

[hills 5]

I would like to be able to create internal links within a single Evernote page, for example I have an Evernote page that tracks articles and I have them listed by topic alphabetically. I want to add the letters A thru Z at the top of the page, then add the matching letter at the beginning of each section making these letters "anchors". Then back at the top of the page make a hyperlink of each letter choosing from the list of available anchors to make a hyperlink to each anchor or letter. Then when I click on any letter at the top of the page it takes me to that section in the Evernote page. Like hyperlinks in a Table of contents to internal sections in a page/document.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,971]

Hi, @hills, and welcome to the forums. This has been requested countless numbers of times over the years. Whether or not it's on Evernote's development to-do list I can't say, but searching the forums will find lots of requests and discussion.

In the older Evernote for Windows, the best option was to break the content up into smaller notes, and then create a Table of Contents note (the instructions are here); but this has not yet been implemented in Evernote v. 10. In general, Evernote seems designed to work more smoothly with smaller notes, but the temptation to make things seem "efficient" by dumping everything into one large note is strong.

[hills 5]

Hi @Dave-in-Decatur yea I had thought of the making smaller notes and creating a TOC, a lot of work for that though as I have 100s of articles listed on the one page.
If Evernote is watching this Forum a reply from you on this topic would be nice to have from you!

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,971]

Evernote staff do look in on these forums, but they rarely comment, unless someone is having a dire support-related emergency. They're certainly well aware of the desire for internal links in a note, though.

Of course, it is possible to do a ToC note manually. (In the old Evernote you could select multiple notes and the program would create the ToC note automatically. If that seems like it would be worth the extra overhead, you can still install it alongside the current version; instructions here.) As you say, the manual process would be really arduous. It might be somewhat simpler using the alphabetical system you suggested in your original post: move all the articles beginning with A into one note, B into another, etc., then manually create links to those notes in a ToC note. Only 26 links to create (or less, if you don't have any articles starting with X!).

[agsteele 2,952]

Actually TsoCs are available in V10. Just one of those things implemented in a different way compared to Legacy.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,971]

18 hours ago, agsteele said:

Actually TsoCs are available in V10. Just one of those things implemented in a different way compared to Legacy.

Eh? Do you mean tables of contents can be automatically created from selected notes? I can't find a way to do that, nor do the help and learning articles offer any guidance for v. 10. Please say more.

[agsteele 2,952]

As ever highlight the notes to be included. Right click and select the option to create internal links (or Ctrl+Alt+L)

Open the now you the ToC to appear in and paste (Ctrl+V) 

You can also drag the table contents with the ✋ over the left hand end grab point.

[gazumped 11,698]

I'll contribute my inevitable Filterize plug - it's a freemium third-party add-in to the account,  which (amongst many other things) can keep a list of links updated according to a variety of tests and formulae.  These are effectively constantly updated ToC's.  I have one forinstance for 'all open tasks with a due date up to and including today' and similar for 'all open tasks in the next 7 days'.  More variables can be added with keyword, date and tag tests as required.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,971]

4 hours ago, agsteele said:

As ever highlight the notes to be included. Right click and select the option to create internal links (or Ctrl+Alt+L)

Open the now you the ToC to appear in and paste (Ctrl+V) 

You can also drag the table contents with the ✋ over the left hand end grab point.

Brilliant! I hadn't yet looked at the right-click menu with notes selected. I see that its contents seem to be identical to the blue-bar menu that pops up when notes are selected, so it can be done from there as well. Thanks! This is essentially a manual, not automated, creation of a ToC, which is still less efficient than the legacy app, but if the ToC note already exists this eases the process considerably.

[Mike P 2,661]

I completely agree that EN really works best with relatively short notes linked together though a table of contents. I find the new ToC functionaility really helpful because it is so easy to add items to the list and then, if you have used a numbered list, drag and automatically re-number the  items in the list. 

If you must have a long note a possible solution is to give each section a unique heading (e.g. $A) and use "find within note" (Ctrl+F) to quickly go there. You could even just use the section titles as a ToC at the top of the note. Then select the text (shift+End) followed by Ctrl+F (search field is pre-populated with theh selected text)

[hills 5]

Regarding the response from @Dave-in-Decatur Posted Thursday at 06:06 PM that is a good idea I will look into, thanks for that tip. The rest of the follow-on comments I will review, thanks to all who have jumped into this discussion. Always good to get others perspectives.

[EricLorenz 97]

I have been reading everything I can about this, and sad to see that EN has chosen to not do anything for this. I seem to remember that they *did* have a feature that would allow you to do this in Legacy...Was this the case, and they chose to not implement it in v10? 

In my case, I use Notes within EN to track IT jobs in my business. I have sections for Conformation emails, SOW/Notes, Documentation, Deliverables, Invoice and Payment Receipt. After filling in these areas with all their info during the course of a job, the note gets long. It would be nice to create links to each of the section headers and create a 1 row table at the top of the note with links to jump down to each of the sections.

Sigh.

[Mike P 2,661]

3 hours ago, EricLorenz said:

I seem to remember that they *did* have a feature that would allow you to do this in Legacy...Was this the case, and they chose to not implement it in v10? 

Evernote has never had the ability to produce an internal table of contents or any other sort of linking within a note. As I described in my post above EN really works best with short notes, linked together, if required, by EN links, which can be collected into one ToC note. If your note becomes too long, then the options are to break it into smaller notes or use the ctrl+F hack to navigate through the note.  

The introduction of well defined headers in V10, which contain h1, h2 etc tags in the underlying html, does mean that it is probably easier to implement, if they wanted to, than in the legacy version.

[PinkElephant 8,170]

It is no problem to place links in a note, embedded into the text, spread over pages and pages of note text.

This means you can place a link exactly where you may need to make use of a switch to another note.

Following the link will always take you to the top of the referenced note. You can’t link into some other place in the targeted note. And the backlink takes you back to the note, not to the place where the link is embedded somewhere down in the notes body.

To avoid a lot of scrolling it is better to keep linked notes rather short.

[AlbertR 542]

On 2/2/2023 at 1:33 AM, PinkElephant said:

It is no problem to place links in a note, embedded into the text, spread over pages and pages of note text.
This means you can place a link exactly where you may need to make use of a switch to another note.
Following the link will always take you to the top of the referenced note. ...

This is exactly how I use linking to assemble my so calls "Overview" notes. 👍
Together with the new feature "view as preview" or simpler "view title" and backlinks, note linking is a really killing feature of EN. 💥

• Because I'm used to add new note content always on the top of a note, "view as preview" always shows the last information.
• Because I change titles of notes often (i.e. the state of a project changes), "view title" always shows "life" states in overviews (if I do not need at preview 😉)
• Bacause I used note links since ever, the new backlinks show many background information of note generation in the past 😁

But I've some suggestions to improve the work with note links more and more in future: 🙏

• If I copy a note link (ALT-Ctrl-L), I'd like to get a possibility to insert a note links as a "view title" immediately
  • currently Ctrl-V inserts it as a simple link that has to be converted to a "view title" in a seperate step 🤔
• "view title" links should be displayed inline with text
  • currently they occupy a new line 😞 

[gazumped 11,698]

Just now, AlbertR said:

I'd like to get a possibility to insert a note links as a "view title" immediately

Hi.  I thought that if you pasted a note link in an Evernote note it showed up as the title. If you post elsewhere,  whatever complicated magic works out what the link should look like then defaults to the URL.  To shorten the process I started pasting a note link into its own note,  then copying that link from the note into Google or my email.  It then shows up as a properly formatted link with the note title as the link.  This may be another of the joys of Windows.

(One drawback to this process - the 'parent' note to that link also then has a backlink to itself... )

[AlbertR 542]

16 minutes ago, gazumped said:

I thought that if you pasted a note link in an Evernote note it showed up as the title.

Ah - OK - THX for this hint. I figured out this is an option that has to be set (Ctrl-<Comma> -> Notes -> Evernote links...). I had to exit EN10 and restart it to make this acitve.

[gazumped 11,698]

Thanks!  Missed that so far - didn't realise it applied to images / PDFs / Google Drive / Youtube entries too!  Some playing required to see the changes I made...