Sorting by tag

[johnlocke108 7]

One of the features that I used frequently in Evernote Legacy was to sort my notes by tag. It doesn't seem like I can do that in the new Evernote. Is there a way of doing this or requesting the feature? 

[gazumped 11,689]

Hi.  Second question first: https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/forum/449-product-feedbackfeature-requests/

Regarding the rest - can you explain with more detail why you want to sort by tag?  What's the process here?  You're right that it's not available directly in the new version.

[AlbertR 540]

3 hours ago, gazumped said:

Regarding the rest - can you explain with more detail why you want to sort by tag?

Because I've defined my tag names with a clear plan (starting with a special character that groups tags by their usage). Some details are described in Tag Editing, Adding now has more friction this makes use of Evernote as a knowledge system weaker

Ability to sort by tags is very helpful during research activities to narrow down fuzzy searches.
And the ability to sort by reminder [done] times would be very helpful also 😉

Both are not soooo hard to implement because data is available and every gridding tool is able to sort by any column...

 

 

 

[gazumped 11,689]

46 minutes ago, AlbertR said:

Both are not soooo hard to implement because data is available and every gridding tool is able to sort by any column...

Yeah - but "every gridding tool" isn't doing half of what else Evernote is doing and only has a fraction of the load on their servers.  I used to be involved with an account that 'only' had 250,000 users and our head of software used to take a walk around the local docks (as in shipping harbour) to work up his nerve 'think carefully through' any updates/ upgrades we were just about to release before pushing the big red button.

With 200M+ users you might want to be very very cautious with changes...

Anyway:  I use tags too,  but usually to -tag:<name> them in and out,  and (occasionally filter).

There was a search that helped with reminders,  though I don't know whether it would help with this use case - have a look at reminderOrder:*

[Mike P 2,650]

I normally don't need to sort by tags. In my use cases I can normally find a search that will do the job better.

However there is one instance where I really miss sorting by tags. I have 7 top level tags (Finance, Home, Technology etc). Sometimes I want to see if there are any notes which have only been tagged with one of these top level tags and no sub tags. In legacy I would

• filter for the top level tag (say Finance)
• sort the results by tag
• Scroll down to the list of tags starting with Finance
• Visually check whether the first and subsequent entries had no other tags 

Now I have to visually scan hundreds of notes tagged with finance.

Maybe AI will allow me to do a free text search of "find all notes which are tagged only with Finace" but I'm not holding my breath.

[CalS 5,281]

@Mike P Not pretty, but you could create a saved search tag:finance -tag:a* -tag:b* ... 

Not bad once the search is created.  🤷‍♂️

[Mike P 2,650]

3 minutes ago, CalS said:

you could create a saved search tag:finance -tag:a* -tag:b* ... 

You're right that would work in principle provided you never changed the subtags. In Finance there are 119 sub tags. I would need to do several saved searches because it would exceed the 4096 characters allowed in a search. I can't use the "include sub tags" function for that reason

[Mike P 2,650]

2 minutes ago, Mike P said:

In Finance there are 119 sub tags

I know this because the drop down list of subtags can be selected and copied (ctrl+C) into Excel. The easiest way I know of getting a list of tags out of EN

[CalS 5,281]

@Mike P Ouch.  Add a layer (Fin1, Fin2, ...) between Finance and the sub-tags?  Not trying to put a round peg in a square whole, just spit balling. 

Workarounds can be sensitive I know.  I've tended to use them with all forms of software when I really need something a product doesn't quite do.

[AlbertR 540]

17 hours ago, gazumped said:

Yeah - but "every gridding tool" isn't doing half of what else Evernote is doing and only has a fraction of the load on their servers.

Yep - but sorting by tags and displaying/sorting by reminder [done] times in a normal note list is a simple client feature.

It never uses any data from within a note (that might be not cached so far). Note titles, tags und other properties are stored in tables that are synced long before note content is available at the clients. So this functionality might be implemented completely without any link to the server - even when working offline.

To make a column sortable needs a simple property setting in the gridding tool. Every SW developer knows this.
To make a column viewable in a gridding table not that easy - but only because you need the possibility to configure grid columns. EN's SW developers know how to do this because it is done already for other properties.

[gazumped 11,689]

Hmmn.  Wish there was an emoji for I hear you, but don't necessarily agree / understand this well enough to argue.  I'm going with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for the time being...

[MvdH 407]

9 hours ago, AlbertR said:

Yep - but sorting by tags and displaying/sorting by reminder [done] times in a normal note list is a simple client feature.

It never uses any data from within a note (that might be not cached so far). Note titles, tags und other properties are stored in tables that are synced long before note content is available at the clients. So this functionality might be implemented completely without any link to the server - even when working offline.

To make a column sortable needs a simple property setting in the gridding tool. Every SW developer knows this.
To make a column viewable in a gridding table not that easy - but only because you need the possibility to configure grid columns. EN's SW developers know how to do this because it is done already for other properties.

Technically, in a system where you do the "paging" of a sorted list server-side, so not loading all the results at once in the client, makes needed that you sort server-side. But for a product caching all notes locally, yes, sorting can be done 100% client-side. I'm already a little bit happy they have tags sorted in the tag-field of a resulting view/list of notes. I the first versions of v10, they had those in random/creation order. Horrible was that. Next step I could really use is indeed sorting on the tags column in a resulting view, because of my use-case described here: 

 

[johnlocke108 7]

I sort by tags for some of the same reasons mentioned above. By adding tags for topics, level of urgency, or location, I can easily manipulate notes. Annoyingly, I can sort by date and name but not by tag. 

It seems like a relatively simple feature that already exists in Evernote Legacy. I've used it for years. It's the only reason I haven't switched to V10.

[bmcl26 495]

I am not a big user of Tags although I do have a few that I use.  I sort all my notes by Date Created