Stacking Tags

[Momofthrees 20]

In Legacy, we could easily drop and drag tags into stacks.  The only way I can see in the latest WIndows version is to right click on the tag name, and select move. Find the stack in the list and select it.

I have hundreds of tags. There has got to be a better way to organize tags into stacks other than one by one!  The least EN could do is remember where I put the last tag and open up to there the next time, or let me select several tags at once to move.  This is literally 10 steps back from where EN was 2 years ago with Legacy.

[PinkElephant 8,174]

There are only stacks of notebooks - never if tags.

If you mean nested tags: In general (opposite to legacy) nesting tags is supported in all clients including mobile. Plus it is reflected in search (opposite to legacy) by including or excluding child tags when searching.

When I create a new tag, I place it right away where it belongs. No need to move hoards of tags around.

Do you use a system for nesting, or do you frequently change the nesting concept ? 

[Mike P 2,668]

5 hours ago, Momofthrees said:

In Legacy, we could easily drop and drag tags into stacks. 

You still can - both in the sidebar and the main tags window.

5 hours ago, Momofthrees said:

let me select several tags at once to move.

This has been mentioned before and is still a major disadvantage to those who used to do bulk rearrangement of tags in legacy.

[Momofthrees 20]

I can’t see how to drag and drop . How do you get to the main tags window in Windows 10

[Mike P 2,668]

46 minutes ago, Momofthrees said:

I can’t see how to drag and drop

You just click  on a tag and drag it onto another tag. When you let go the tag is positioned underneath the tag you dropped it on.

 

46 minutes ago, Momofthrees said:

How do you get to the main tags window in Windows 10

Click "Tags" in the sidebar or use the shortcut alt+ctrl+5

[Momofthrees 20]

That works great if the tag is right next to the tag you want to stack it in, but I have probably 1000 tags so I have to drag it through pages to get to the correct stack.  Legacy did this so well, and if it were still available, I'd literally go over there, do what I need and then come back to 10 like I used to do.  Not being able to bulk move tags is a big issue for a product that is supposed to help me do everything more efficiently.

But thanks for your response. At least I know I was doing it right.

[efx00 13]

I didn't know they had namespaces/stacks of tags in EN at all, so thanks for your post. I've been sorting out my mountains of tags since earlier today with this and found a little bit of a method that helps. (Maybe this is how you do it already, but I'll post here just in case it helps);

• in the left bar scroll to the tag you want to drag onto
• click on 'tags' above the tag list on the left
• it will open the tag search panel, find the tag you want to drag into the first one, and it'll pop up right beside it

Hope it's helps...

[Momofthrees 20]

On 1/21/2024 at 11:38 PM, PinkElephant said:

There are only stacks of notebooks - never if tags.

If you mean nested tags: In general (opposite to legacy) nesting tags is supported in all clients including mobile. Plus it is reflected in search (opposite to legacy) by including or excluding child tags when searching.

When I create a new tag, I place it right away where it belongs. No need to move hoards of tags around.

Do you use a system for nesting, or do you frequently change the nesting concept ? 

Really stack/nest. Symantics.   I do have a system for nesting tags.  I mainly use notebooks for sorting documents, but since I am limited 200 notebooks, I have to get creative. I am at 190 now, in case you are wondering.  I use Evernote only for genealogy and have 30+ years of research, both family and locations in Evernote.  Years ago, everyone was told to use tags because they could be nested and you had more. But frankly, it doesn't work all that well for me on my phone. I find it a bit clunky to be honest.  But I still keep both systems going because OCD.   Just weekend before last, I visited the state archives and copied deed index books for one ancestal line.  Once I had entered the information both found and not found, I had covered 146 microfilms.  And found 28 need deeds.  So 174 notes (146 for microfilms 28 for the new deeds), and yes, 146 new tags. (Microfilm notes and deed notes get the same Microfilm tag, creating a cross index of documents found on a specific roll of microfilm over time.)
Here's a real tag nest (and if we can ever nest notebooks more than one level deep, I will adopt something similar). For each county I research, the state archives has about 1000 microfilm rolls, so eventually, if I live 15 lives  I could easily have 6000 tags just for microfilms alone. Add in maps, County Histories, a few more states, and you can see where my system gets big quickly! It could be overkill, but it works for me and keeps all the research organized. And this was way more information than you wanted

>Family Files Father

>Family Files Mother

>State Research

>>Research in Tennesssee

>>>Davidson County

>>>>Davidson County Books

>>>>Davidson County Microfilm

>>>>> Davidson County 001 Deed Book A-C

>>>>>Davidson County 002 Deed Book D-F

>>>Lincoln County

>>>>Lincoln County Microfilm

>>>>>Lincoln County 001...

[Dave Green 210]

8 minutes ago, Momofthrees said:

I am limited 200 notebooks

Are you sure it is not 1000 notebooks now?  https://evernote.com/compare-plans

[Momofthrees 20]

I am not. I saw that a few months ago and posted it to another forum and two days later it was back to 200 and I don't want to run out and not be able to create ones I definitly need like a new surname folder at some point.  I sure hope you are right though!

[Mike P 2,668]

7 hours ago, efx00 said:

I didn't know they had namespaces/stacks of tags in EN at all, so thanks for your post. I've been sorting out my mountains of tags since earlier today with this and found a little bit of a method that helps. (Maybe this is how you do it already, but I'll post here just in case it helps);

• in the left bar scroll to the tag you want to drag onto
• click on 'tags' above the tag list on the left
• it will open the tag search panel, find the tag you want to drag into the first one, and it'll pop up right beside it

Nice trick. So you can basically have two independent lists of tags and drag tags from the right list onto the left list.  I'd never thought about seeing whether the two lists interact. Thanks.

[PinkElephant 8,174]

@Momofthrees You have created your own tags hell. By doing what you do, your tags expand with „2 at the power of n“. That’s the least efficient way.

Let me explain at the example of dates:

Say you want to create a tag for every day in the last 10 years. 

• With your system you need 3.652 tags, one for each day. If you want a nested structure, you need even more, because each nesting level takes additional tags. And every year you need to add at least 365 additional tags, plus more nesting level tags.
• In an efficient system you add 3 tags: Year (10), month (12), day (31). These are 53 tags. Every year I need to add 1 tag.

Both work for searching, but the combination works better. I can for example search for everything I saved on day 1-3 of every February of every year.

Conclusion: You decided for the most extreme way of building complexity INTO your tagging, instead of keeping the tags simple, and create the complexity by building the adequate searches. And now you try to make a maximum complex system more efficient. This fails, because the answer is not to shovel more tags from left to right in less time, but to reach the goal with only a fraction of your tags.

I keep my growing stock of notes pretty well organized with roughly 300 tags. The number of tags is not growing much any more, because I am weeding them out from time to time. Tags with only a few uses, or those I hardly ever use are eliminated, after tagging the notes with a better or more general tag. I don’t think there is a general maximum number, but with thousands of tags for an individual account, I doubt that the system is efficient.

On top of all, there is still OCR and full text search !

[Momofthrees 20]

Searching has never worked effectively for me. Because the bulk of my notes have images with 1800s cursive, EN tries to OCR and sends tons of negative hits. Sometimes the handwriting is so bad it is barely readable.

By tagging both the source note and microfilm note and ancestral note, I can in seconds get the information I need and only the information I need.

 

[Momofthrees 20]

5 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

@Momofthrees You have created your own tags hell. By doing what you do, your tags expand with „2 at the power of n“. That’s the least efficient way.

 

Both work for searching, but the combination works better. I can for example search for everything I saved on day 1-3 of every February of every year.

Conclusion: You decided for the most extreme way of building complexity INTO your tagging, instead of keeping the tags simple, and create the complexity by building the adequate searches. And now you try to make a maximum complex system more efficient. This fails, because the answer is not to shovel more tags from left to right in less time, but to reach the goal with only a fraction of your tags.

I

So, let's say I want to know every census source I have for 1850 Davidson County, TN.  I search for 1850 and Davidson County and Tennessee.  I get 198 documents.  Or I go to my 1850 Census M432 Roll 0875 (Davidson County, TN) tag and I get 8 results. The 8 results I needed on the first try over 5 different family groups.

[Momofthrees 20]

11 hours ago, Dave Green said:

Are you sure it is not 1000 notebooks now?  https://evernote.com/compare-plans

Dave, You are correct. That's what I get for posting off the top of my head and not looking in EN.   It is 1000 and I have 859. Not sure where my brain got 200 from.   So yes, I am still almost at the time.  Most ancestor stacks have 5-6 notebooks, so I basically can add 23-28 new surnames before I hit the max.  

[efx00 13]

1 hour ago, Momofthrees said:

Dave, You are correct. That's what I get for posting off the top of my head and not looking in EN.   It is 1000 and I have 859. Not sure where my brain got 200 from.   So yes, I am still almost at the time.  Most ancestor stacks have 5-6 notebooks, so I basically can add 23-28 new surnames before I hit the max.  

Perfect test-case for an a-la-carte plan, where you could top-up say, number of notebooks. @Federico Simionato

 

[PinkElephant 8,174]

5 hours ago, Momofthrees said:

So, let's say I want to know every census source I have for 1850 Davidson County, TN.  I search for 1850 and Davidson County and Tennessee.  I get 198 documents.  Or I go to my 1850 Census M432 Roll 0875 (Davidson County, TN) tag and I get 8 results. The 8 results I needed on the first try over 5 different family groups.

Your search is one dimensional. This means you preset the direction of search by the way you design the tag tree.

That's the exact opposite of a tag philosophy. Tags are made to connect the dots between otherwise unrelated pieces of information. Organizing tags in trees takes this advantage of tagging away. It will work, but only for the always same search concept. Ask a new question, and search will become very complex, or requires a rebuild of the tag structure. Plus you need way too many tags to be efficient.

Some examples: The easiest is the "ToDo"-Tag, that you apply to all notes that contain something to take care of (unless you use reminders or Tasks to this end, but that's another discussion). You can easily search for all open issues involving 2 of your coworkers, and excluding 3 others, and get a lot of unrelated notes - but all need an action.

The date tagging I mentioned is another example: You relate content just by a common date, but it can be "anything I related to the month of march in the odd years, skipping the even year dates, related to my family or my home town".

Tags are in principle working with a logical AND. If you want to improve the results, go for a Professional subscription, and use full Boolean search code (AND/OR/NOT) to include and exclude results at will. Search can be focussed on tags only, if the quality of OCR is too bad to use it.

[Momofthrees 20]

Why would I pay more for a Professional Subscription to solve a problem I don't have. You were the one with the issue of how I use tags, not me. My issue was being able to move them to their Stack, which was solved yesterday by another user.

[PinkElephant 8,174]

OK, then I will not molest you any more.

Maybe our discussion will help other users to set up an efficient tagging concept.

There are many ways this can be done - it's way easier to achieve efficiency by design than by operations.