Selecting all notes in Parent and nested tags

[Mayonline 3]

Hi, I feel the need to move my notes around in evernote and start using notebook stacks, rather than so many tags.

I have several parent tags with nested tags under them.  I would like to be able to select the parent tags and have it select notes for itself and all nested tags too, so I can move them to a new notebook in one go.  Is this possible?  Or do I need to move each tag individually to the ew notebook.

I hope this makes sense?  Any help appreciated.

[Mike P 1,688]

41 minutes ago, Mayonline said:

I would like to be able to select the parent tags and have it select notes for itself and all nested tags too

As far as I know the only way tou can do this is with the advanced search syntax. If you only have a small number of child tags it will be fine but might get tedious if you have lots. The syntax will look like:

any: tag:parent tag:child1 tag:child2 ...

where the ... is for all the other child tag names. The any: ensures you don't only get notes that are tagged with all the different tags listed.

[PinkElephant 5,140]

This is possible through a filter. Hit the parent tag, and select „include all child tags“. Here an example, even works on mobile, thanks to v10 that brought nesting to the mobile clients.

Since Tags really got a boost with v10, I would rethink the project. Notebooks are not a really good way to organize things in detail. And they are a disaster when looking at it from a workflow perspective.

[Mike P 1,688]

2 minutes ago, Mike P said:

all the other child tag names

It's not easy to get a list of tags that you could work with. My workaround is to

• add all the tags to a new dummy note. Using alt+ctrl+T this is quite straight forward
• click the first tag in the tag area at the bottom of the note. Then shift click the last. All the tags should now be selected
• Press ctrl+C to copy all the tags
• Paste the tags somewhere you can work with them. eg the dummy note. You will find a list of tags separared by commas.
• Unfortunately you will then need to edit it by replacing each comma with tag: 

# What you get
+eBook,+readingList,$critical,$pinned,R

# what you need

tag:+eBook tag:+readingList tag:$critical tag:$pinned tag:R

•  

[Mayonline 3]

Thank you both.

Pink Elephant, where do I find "include all child tags"?

I am using PC desktop app

 

[Mike P 1,688]

33 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

This is possible through a filter. Hit the parent tag, and select „include all child tags“.

That's a much easier way of doing it! It's a relatively new thing and I had forgotten it. Choose your main tag and then the little arrow to the right of the tag name in the blue lozenge.

 

If you have alot of tags it will still fail with

 

[Mayonline 3]

Thanks again!

From my brief experiment though unless mistaken, this will find notes with tag1 AND tag2, rather than tag1 OR tag2 which is what I actually need.

 

[PinkElephant 5,140]

No, it finds everything with any of these tags, which is an OR relation. At least it does on my iPhone, giving it a quick try.

[Mayonline 3]

Mmmm, I think my issue may stems from the fact that some tags are made up of two or more words.

For example, this works  any: tag:apple tag:orange   it returns note that are tagged with either apple or orange

This doesn’t any: tag:Orange tag:December 2021  I think this returns notes tagged with orange or december, that mention the word 2021 ??

Is there a way of maybe encapsulating december 2021 so it views it as one word?  Maybe tag:"december 2021"

When I use the 'include sub-tags' method, rather than typing in a manual query as above, I get zero results!  I am convinced that on PC desktop app, it is doing tag1 AND tag2, rather than tag 1 OR tag2

This is confusing! 

Thanks for the help

 

 

[Mike P 1,688]

18 minutes ago, Mayonline said:

Maybe tag:"december 2021"

That's exactly right. I try to avoid spaces in my tags and use undersctores instead, so there is no need for the inverted commas.

20 minutes ago, Mayonline said:

I am convinced that on PC desktop app, it is doing tag1 AND tag2, rather than tag 1 OR tag2

That was the behaviour in the past. It has changed reasonably recently. What version of EN are you on? Current Windows version is 10.47. I've just double cecked and it is definitely doing OR for me.

 

[Mayonline 3]

I'm on 10.47.7

I have created a new simple tag structure as follows.  Each tag has one note in and the tag names have spaces

When I click the blue lozenge and then select 'include sub tags' method it works fine'.  The results are as expected.

1) However, when I try this on a real tag I have, which has >100 sub tags, and even sub sub tags, I get zero results!

2) I tried it on an existing parent that had 11 subtags (no sub sub tags) and a total of 36 notes in all tags and it worked fine. 

3) I then tried it on an existing tag which had which had 70 subtags (no sub sub tags) and it found zero results.

Strangely, whilst clicking the blue lozenge and then selecting 'include sub tags' in item 2 above works, if I right click the tag in the left sidebar and select 'filter with sub tags', I get no results?!  I believe this does indeed do an AND as per this 

 

 

 

 

[Mike P 1,688]

1 hour ago, Mayonline said:

if I right click the tag in the left sidebar and select 'filter with sub tags', I get no results?!  I believe this does indeed do an AND as per this 

You are right. The clue is that if you use the sidebar option you see all the individual tags listed as blue lozenges. Unless you have tagged a note with all the tags (I never do) you don't get any results, as expected.

If you are getting search results that are not what you expect then I would try the same search on the web version. If you get different results you will proabably need to rebuild the local database by logging out of the desktop version and selecting "remove my Evernote data from this device". In summary:

tag:tag1 tag:tag2 searches for notes which contain tag1 AND tag2

any: tag:tag1 tag:tag2 searches for notes which contain tag1 OR tag2

Using the drop down from a blue lozenge tag searches for notes that contain ANY of the tags or subtags

Right clicking a tag in the sidebar and choosing  "filter with sub tags"  searches for notes that contain ALL of the tags and subtags

[PinkElephant 5,140]

About efficient tagging: With the tags year and month I can tag everything, and just need to create one tag per year (or I create them in one go).

With one tag combining year and month, I permanently need to create new tags.

This is something that I avoid - my strategy includes nesting, but no tags build out of several words.

Fortunately something like this is easy to change, and with a one time effort finding content can be improved.

[Mayonline 3]

thank you very much for all the advice.

On the web version, everything works as expected.

I will rebuild my local db as suggested

thanks again