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(Archived) Idea - pages/tabs


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I think it would be awesome to have Stacks, Notebooks, Notes and then Pages/tabs under each Note.

For example if someone's taking a class/course. He could make a new notebook "TheCourse". Then he could make a new note named "Lecture notes" under that notebook. Then he could write down notes for each lecture on a different page/tab under the note "Lecture notes".

But now you have to make a new note for each day/lecture, which is soon to be confusing. The other possibility would be very organize-friendly.

The others who are stuck in the old fashion method, could go along creating just a new note with no pages/tabs.

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Tabs for the note list, so that you could work on multiple notes at a time, have already been suggested (search the forum for 'tabs').

I'm not sure how tabs for notes would work; it's not a common document metaphor -- we generally think of tabs as useful for separate documents, not separate document sections. I'd suggest using separate notes for each lecture, possibly identified via a tag.

~Jeff

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But now you have to make a new note for each day/lecture, which is soon to be confusing. The other possibility would be very organize-friendly.

It seems very easy to preface each note title with the date in YYYYMMDD format & keep each day's notes in a single note. Then keep all notes for that course in a single notebook.

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But now you have to make a new note for each day/lecture, which is soon to be confusing. The other possibility would be very organize-friendly.

It seems very easy to preface each note title with the date in YYYYMMDD format & keep each day's notes in a single note. Then keep all notes for that course in a single notebook.

I COULD also make new .txt on my computer and name it in YYYYMMDD format & keep each day's notes in a single file. Then keep all notes for that course in a single folder.

We're talking about organization and comfortability here!

OneNote has pages/tabs. Why not Evernote?

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OneNote has pages/tabs. Why not Evernote?

We could also ask: "Evernote is cross-platform. Why not OneNote?" The point is that Evernote is not OneNote, and vice-versa. They each have their strong points, and their weak points. And Evernote at this time doesn't have tabs for notes. We're talking about how to make Evernote work for people with what it has today. If Evernote doesn't have what you require today, maybe it will someday, but there's no guarantee that it ever will; in the meantime, we can give you ideas about how you can organize your class notes in Evernote with the functionality it does have.

~Jeff

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I COULD also make new .txt on my computer and name it in YYYYMMDD format & keep each day's notes in a single file. Then keep all notes for that course in a single folder.

Yeah, you could. Problem solved.

OneNote has pages/tabs. Why not Evernote?

I don't know why so many people want to make EN into Onenote. I'm pretty sure if Onenote could have been made cross platform, it would have been done by now. And I suspect that's why EN is more streamlined.

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OneNote has pages/tabs. Why not Evernote?

We could also ask: "Evernote is cross-platform. Why not OneNote?" The point is that Evernote is not OneNote, and vice-versa. They each have their strong points, and their weak points. And Evernote at this time doesn't have tabs for notes. We're talking about how to make Evernote work for people with what it has today here! If Evernote doesn't have what you require today, maybe it will someday, but there's no guarantee that it ever will; in the meantime, all we can do is to try to give you ideas about how you can organize your class notes in Evernote with the functionality it does have.

~Jeff

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OneNote has pages/tabs. Why not Evernote?

We could also ask: "Evernote is cross-platform. Why not OneNote?" The point is that Evernote is not OneNote, and vice-versa. They each have their strong points, and their weak points. And Evernote at this time doesn't have tabs for notes. We're talking about how to make Evernote work for people with what it has today here! If Evernote doesn't have what you require today, maybe it will someday, but there's no guarantee that it ever will; in the meantime, all we can do is to try to give you ideas about how you can organize your class notes in Evernote with the functionality it does have.

~Jeff

Dude.

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I don't know why so many people want to make EN into Onenote. I'm pretty sure if Onenote could have been made cross platform, it would have been done by now. And I suspect that's why EN is more streamlined.

I don't want to make EN into OneNote, I'm just discussing a way to make it even better (by borrowing one feature elsewhere). It would also make users change from OneNote to Evernote within a heartbeat because aside from that one feature, Evernote is much better than OneNote; It's cross-platformed, it's lightweight (not bloated/crowded like OneNote (Office)), it syncs with a cloud, it has a smartphone app(s), etc..

The only downside is there are no pages/tabs so you can organise yourself even more. Say I would buy a management-folder in a bookshop. It would have a name, then it would have sections and each page under each section would have a name. Doing this with tags is way too confusing. Of course I'm not saying tags are not unnecessary, they are great when you want to mark certain notes with some keyword and then easilly find them later on. But using them as a organization-tool is wrong - and way too confusing.

The organization structure I'm talking about is something like this...

uPeXa.png

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I got the following private message...

By the way, in Evernote, using a structured title can be very powerful.

90% of my notes follow this format

YYYY MM DD State City Subject Person

2011 01 17 MN Rogers Tires-Plus Taurus Tire Rotation JLB

How about a Notebook named 2011, each Note under that was named after the months (Jan, Feb, Mar, ..., Dec) and each page/tab under each Note was named after the days (01, 02, 03, ..., 31). That would be more organized and more comfortable!

If I were searching for some notetaking software (and I would not be familiar with Evernote or OneNote), I would go to some comparison site like this and decide from: 1) amount of general features. You're only missing two!

Maybe you could forward this to Evernote's project managers?

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The only downside is there are no pages/tabs so you can organise yourself even more. Say I would buy a management-folder in a bookshop. It would have a name, then it would have sections and each page under each section would have a name. Doing this with tags is way too confusing. Of course I'm not saying tags are not unnecessary, they are great when you want to mark certain notes with some keyword and then easily find them later on. But using them as a organization-tool is wrong - and way too confusing.

The way that you organize notes in Evernote is via Notebooks and tags. If tabs such as you suggest are ever implemented in Evernote, it will be quite awhile, so my recommendation to you is that you need to come to terms with using tags effectively in Evernote, or else you'll be fighting it all the time.

~Jeff

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The only downside is there are no pages/tabs so you can organise yourself even more. Say I would buy a management-folder in a bookshop. It would have a name, then it would have sections and each page under each section would have a name. Doing this with tags is way too confusing. Of course I'm not saying tags are not unnecessary, they are great when you want to mark certain notes with some keyword and then easily find them later on. But using them as a organization-tool is wrong - and way too confusing.

The way that you organize notes in Evernote is via Notebooks and tags. If tabs such as you suggest are ever implemented in Evernote, it will be quite awhile, so my recommendation to you is that you need to come to terms with using tags effectively in Evernote, or else you'll be fighting it all the time.

~Jeff

Tags are so global, not good for organising, but very good for finding stuff.

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It would also make users change from OneNote to Evernote within a heartbeat because aside from that one feature,

That's debatable. There are many posts on this board where someone states "___ (fill in the blank) will cause a lot of people to switch to Evernote." Every one has their own killer feature they think will make The Big Difference.

The organization structure I'm talking about is something like this...

I know exactly what you're talking about b/c I use Onenote, too. IMO, ON is better for brainstorming bigger projects that involve many emails, Word docs, Excel and/or Project files, etc. EN is much better at organizing & retrieving notes that pretty much stand on their own.

Evernote is much better than OneNote; It's cross-platformed, it's lightweight (not bloated/crowded like OneNote (Office)), it syncs with a cloud, it has a smartphone app(s), etc..
I don't know why so many people want to make EN into Onenote. I'm pretty sure if Onenote could have been made cross platform, it would have been done by now. And I suspect that's why EN is more streamlined.

You start adding tabs, colored notebooks, background colors, image editing (not done by third party apps), etc, all the other stuff that ON does that people want EN to do & you end up with a bloated app that's no longer cross platform. Translate, Onenote.

Doing this with tags is way too confusing. Of course I'm not saying tags are not unnecessary, they are great when you want to mark certain notes with some keyword and then easilly find them later on. But using them as a organization-tool is wrong - and way too confusing.

It really isn't, although it does take some thinking outside the box. And no, it's not "wrong."

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Tags are so global, not good for organising, but very good for finding stuff.

If by "organizing" you mean "ordering", then sure, but that's not the only meaning. But that's not what you seem to want, so good luck.

~Jeff

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BurgersNFries, many valid points.

I have heard of Evernote before but I never needed it. Until now I started in the university studying Computer Science, I needed some great software to handle all of my notes/data. Obviously, Word and many different folders wasn't doing magic so fellow students pointed me to OneNote and I started using it. I was bummed because I couldn't use it without having to set up Microsoft Office so I began my search and came upon Evernote. I fell in love with the idea.

I read heaps of reviews but I never got to understand how I could organise myself for school like I did before. I watched most of the videos on YouTube that covered tags and how you could use them to organise yourself. Really, I still can't figure it out. I find them so global, because every note can use the same tag. That's why I'm not fond of using tags to organise my notes, but instead I use it to tag notes with certain keywords and then finding the notes containing the keywords quickly.

Also, there must be a reason Wikipedia lists this as a GENERAL feature.

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I watched most of the videos on YouTube that covered tags and how you could use them to organise yourself. Really, I still can't figure it out. I find them so global, because every note can use the same tag. That's why I'm not fond of using tags to organise my notes, but instead I use it to tag notes with certain keywords and then finding the notes containing the keywords quickly.

In EN, I would suggest not using tags for keywords. Just use a keyword. :) IOW, instead of tagging a note with "Acer AOD255", simply put the words "Acer AOD255" in the note, unless they already exist. (I think you'll find many of the notes you want to attach a keyword/phrase to, already have that keyword/phrase.) Then just use the EN search on "acer aod255" (in quotes) and you will quickly find all notes that have that exact phrase in them. Enclosing in quotes eliminates notes that may have the word Acer and AOD255 in them but not together. The search words are also not case sensitive.

Jefito often tells people to think of tags as adjectives. In the Onenote screen cap you posted above, what I would do is use these tags:

  • Classes YE 2011 (parent tag)
    • Biology 101 (child tag)
      Math 101 (child tag)

I'd then create a note titled "20110118 - Math - today's subject" and tag it "Math 101".

Or I might create a notebook for each current class & tag & archive the notes into a single notebook at the end of the year b/c notebooks are not set in stone. This post explains how I use temporary notebooks for hot/active topics & then archive them when I'm done. In this case, I'd probably use this tagging scheme:


  • Classes
    • Classes YE 2011
      • Biology 101
        Math 101

Classes YE 2012

  • Fortran 101 ( :D )
    Lit 101

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In EN, I would suggest not using tags for keywords. Just use a keyword. :) IOW, instead of tagging a note with "Acer AOD255", simply put the words "Acer AOD255" in the note, unless they already exist. (I think you'll find many of the notes you want to attach a keyword/phrase to, already have that keyword/phrase.) Then just use the EN search on "acer aod255" (in quotes) and you will quickly find all notes that have that exact phrase in them. Enclosing in quotes eliminates notes that may have the word Acer and AOD255 in them but not together. The search words are also not case sensitive.

[...]

Currently I have...

1 Notebook and 5 Notes under it.

- School

...- Class 1

...- Class 2

...- Class 3

...- Class 4

...- Class 5

and each Note I name: 20111801 - Class 1 - Title

And I have 3 tags:

- Syllibus

- Classnotes

- Booknotes

This works for my organization but the titles of notes are so crowded. :?

You're not gonna break and just admit that tabbed/paged notes are better? :D

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Currently I have...

1 Notebook and 5 Notes under it.

- School

...- Class 1

...- Class 2

...- Class 3

...- Class 4

...- Class 5

and each Note I name: 20111801 - Class 1 - Title

And I have 3 tags:

- Syllibus

- Classnotes

- Booknotes

This works for my organization but the titles of notes are so crowded. :?

You're not gonna break and just admit that tabbed/paged notes are better? :D

You're not gonna break & just admit that tags are just as good as tabbed/paged notes? :)

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I would like to see a response from an employee. 8)

Just so you know, this is a user forum, and although Evernote employees read every post, they may not choose to reply to them (there's lots of us, and few of them). Suggestions and feature requests are certainly welcome, but as always, they determine which features get put in. At a guess this feature would take a fair amount of work to support across all of their platforms (new UI generally takes a lot of time to implement, relatively speaking), so you're probably not going to be seeing this anytime soon.

~Jeff

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We do appreciate the feedback. We've chosen a particular set of tools to help you find the notes that you've created ... that includes:

* Notebooks (1-to-many organizational metaphor)

* Tags (many-to-many organizational metaphor)

* Stacks (for organizing notebooks into visual groupings)

* Saved Searches (for arbitrary dynamic discovery of notes without manual pre-categorization)

We'd certainly consider other options in the future, but any additional organizational metaphors need to offer some pretty concrete advantages to offset the visual complexity of more crud all over the screen. I.e. there needs to be something specific that you can only achieve that can't be done with one of the existing tools. Each new clever edge functionality that goes into an application is useful to someone, but eventually the end result becomes completely unwieldy for new users. E.g. bring up the 'Options' dialog in MS Word some time and count the number of tabs...

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...

Fortran 101 ( :D )

...

I've just started learning fortran...the compiler is brilliant "...unexpected junk after..." so helpful :lol:

The way I find works for me (and I know it is probably a bit of overkill, but...)

Notebook:

Uni


  • [*:2dgker7y]Fortran
    [*:2dgker7y]Physics
    [*:2dgker7y]Other uni stuff

Tags


  • [*:2dgker7y]Fortran <--Probably don't really need this...
    [*:2dgker7y]Physics
    -Labs
    -Principles
    -SGT
    -STR
    -Waves

Then I'll have a note that is titled with the title of the lecture e.g. "Space and Time before Einstein" in the physics notebook with tags: physics and STR

This way, I can search in various ways for what I am looking for...

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We've chosen a particular set of tools to help you find the notes that you've created ... that includes:

  • * Notebooks (1-to-many organizational metaphor)
    * Tags (many-to-many organizational metaphor)
    * Stacks (for organizing notebooks into visual groupings)
    * Saved Searches (for arbitrary dynamic discovery of notes without manual pre-categorization)

Great summary of Evernote's tools. I've saved it for future uses.

The Marketing and Knowledgebase folk could get some mileage out this.

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We do appreciate the feedback. We've chosen a particular set of tools to help you find the notes that you've created ... that includes:

* Notebooks (1-to-many organizational metaphor)

* Tags (many-to-many organizational metaphor)

* Stacks (for organizing notebooks into visual groupings)

* Saved Searches (for arbitrary dynamic discovery of notes without manual pre-categorization)

We'd certainly consider other options in the future, but any additional organizational metaphors need to offer some pretty concrete advantages to offset the visual complexity of more crud all over the screen. I.e. there needs to be something specific that you can only achieve that can't be done with one of the existing tools. Each new clever edge functionality that goes into an application is useful to someone, but eventually the end result becomes completely unwieldy for new users. E.g. bring up the 'Options' dialog in MS Word some time and count the number of tabs...

I definitely appreciate your logic here, Engberg. But there are ways to enhance functionality that don't actually increase complexity or clutter -- i.e. ways to just make existing functionality more general. For instance: you finally added notebook stacks. Thank you! That's one level of notebook nesting. So how about multiple levels of nesting? That doesn't really change or grow the UI at all -- just lets users do what they already know how to, and makes the tool far more useful.

The thing is, we just need hierarchical folders. Any collection of things you organise that gets over 100 items or so needs this. And especially Evernote, which is meant to "remember everything". Single level "categories" are just too limiting for "everything".

It doesn't matter much to me exactly how this looks or works: Multiple nested notebooks would work. A notebook list view that was hierarchical, with some notes under others would work too. I'm not a fan of OneNote's bizarre hard-coded nesting levels: groups, tabs, pages, sub-pages... It's both complex and inflexible, and not at all what I need. Just give me a general hierarchical nesting ability: no extra clutter or learning or documentation. Just folders, that 90% of computer users are completely and intuitively familiar with.

And no, the hierarchical tags don't really do it. Those are GLOBAL attributes, that can be applied across all notes. Useful yes. But it doesn't help me when I want to make a multi-level set of notes.

I keep leaving and returning to Evernote. It has many advantages competing tools don't, but still -- it's just not totally working for me. I'm still reluctant to fire it up and note down every thought, or link I come across, because I know it will essentially just go into a big pile, that I won't be able to later collect and organise. Sorry.

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The thing is, we just need hierarchical folders. Any collection of things you organise that gets over 100 items or so needs this. And especially Evernote, which is meant to "remember everything". Single level "categories" are just too limiting for "everything".

I strenuously disagree. I lose things in hierarchical folders. Which one did I put something in? How far down? And I spend so much time trying to decide where to file things that I don't have time to actually use the information. The beauty of tags and Searches is the speed at which I can dump information into Evernote and still actually find it later. I find that Evernote stays out of my way. Nested folders are just way to much work to keep organized.

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Just give me a general hierarchical nesting ability: no extra clutter or learning or documentation. Just folders, that 90% of computer users are completely and intuitively familiar with.

If you do a bit of thinking outside the box, you will be able to utilize tags in the same way you would nested folders, only the tags are a LOT better b/c you don't have to remember if that note about a wonderful restaurant is listed under restaurants or San Diego. This has been discussed at great length on the message board. So I would suggest you peruse the threads on sub notebooks, sub folders.

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The thing is, we just need hierarchical folders. Any collection of things you organise that gets over 100 items or so needs this. And especially Evernote, which is meant to "remember everything". Single level "categories" are just too limiting for "everything".

Not everyone *needs* hierarchical folders, though I understand that it would be useful to some folks. Anyways, there's plenty of discussion pro and con elsewhere in the forum, if you care to search (I'd start with 'hierarchical folders').

I keep leaving and returning to Evernote. It has many advantages competing tools don't, but still -- it's just not totally working for me. I'm still reluctant to fire it up and note down every thought, or link I come across, because I know it will essentially just go into a big pile, that I won't be able to later collect and organise. Sorry.

If it's not working for you, then it's not working for you -- I felt the same way about the ribbon interface of the older version, and didn't really get into Evernote until the current approach took hold. But I feel that tags may be more useful than you may realize at organizing your notes. I don't miss folders in the least, even though I am very familiar with that organizational structure. Hope it all works out for you.

~Jeff

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Hey, thanks for the suggestions, guys. I'm familiar with the previous discussions about hierarchical folders... but it came up again in this thread, so I contributed here -- because we still don't have them :D

I'm also familiar with the tag system, and do use it a lot. I agree, tags are very useful, and in some ways better than folders, because notes can have multiple tags. I really started using EN 3+ again when you added hierarchical tags. Similar to my previous statement, without a hierarchy, I could never manage 100+ tags. I need to keep them structured; e.g. all tags about food, politics, products, etc, under those appropriate parent tags.

One problem with the hierarchical tags that still exists, is that child tags don't automatically imply their parents. So, I can't, for example, find all notes about "politics" just by selecting it. I have to select the individual child tags. It might help if I could multi-select all children, but EN doesn't allow multi-tag select.

Of course, you'll suggest that I simply manually apply the parent tags along with their children. Which sometimes works, but has multiple problems: First, it requires me to do work and thinking that a time-saving tool such as EN should be doing for me. Second, it fails whenever I change the tag hierarchy, reorganising tags under different parents etc. Really, it should just be a convenient feature: select a parent tag, display all notes with that tag or children -- otherwise, why would I have made them child tags in the first place?

Finally... to anyone who "strenuously disagrees" that nested items are needed: why in the world would you oppose them? You don't have to use them, you can continue organising things the way that's easiest for you to remember, and the feature is completely invisible and harmless to you. It's not even an extra menu item or button you have to see -- just the behavior that occurs when you drag one thing onto another.

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Hey, thanks for the suggestions, guys. I'm familiar with the previous discussions about hierarchical folders... but it came up again in this thread, so I contributed here -- because we still don't have them :D

Or you could post in the prior threads where some of the same points/suggestions have been made already.

I have to select the individual child tags. It might help if I could multi-select all children, but EN doesn't allow multi-tag select.

Not sure what you mean -- multi-tag select is allowed on the Windows client at least (multi-selection in the tag tree via click, ctrl-click, shift-click). Or maybe I'm not understanding exactly what you're trying to do.

Really, it should just be a convenient feature: select a parent tag, display all notes with that tag or children -- otherwise, why would I have made them child tags in the first place?

Yes, agree that that would be useful; I've suggested that sort of operation a couple of times myself :)

~Jeff

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It might help if I could multi-select all children, but EN doesn't allow multi-tag select.

??? You absolutely can assign multiple tags to a note.

Finally... to anyone who "strenuously disagrees" that nested items are needed: why in the world would you oppose them? You don't have to use them, you can continue organising things the way that's easiest for you to remember, and the feature is completely invisible and harmless to you.

If Dave said "Hey, we can add sub notebooks very quickly & easily & it won't bloat the app, either." then that would be fine by me. But that hasn't happened so it would seem it would require a LOT of engineer time to add functionality & probably a complete overhaul of the database. In fact (also addresses the parent/child tag thing):

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=11277#p45212

After all the talk about nested notebooks, I'd bet if it weren't too hard to implement, they would have done that instead of stacks.

I'd rather that time/money was devoted to adding features that actually add functionality or adding hardware so they can increase the upload limits again. :lol:

(Not wanting to appear greedy, but the more I use EN, the more stuff I find that I want to put into EN...)

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  • 5 weeks later...
We do appreciate the feedback. We've chosen a particular set of tools to help you find the notes that you've created ... that includes:

* Notebooks (1-to-many organizational metaphor)

* Tags (many-to-many organizational metaphor)

* Stacks (for organizing notebooks into visual groupings)

* Saved Searches (for arbitrary dynamic discovery of notes without manual pre-categorization)

We'd certainly consider other options in the future, but any additional organizational metaphors need to offer some pretty concrete advantages to offset the visual complexity of more crud all over the screen. I.e. there needs to be something specific that you can only achieve that can't be done with one of the existing tools. Each new clever edge functionality that goes into an application is useful to someone, but eventually the end result becomes completely unwieldy for new users. E.g. bring up the 'Options' dialog in MS Word some time and count the number of tabs...

I definitely appreciate your logic here, Engberg. But there are ways to enhance functionality that don't actually increase complexity or clutter -- i.e. ways to just make existing functionality more general. For instance: you finally added notebook stacks. Thank you! That's one level of notebook nesting. So how about multiple levels of nesting? That doesn't really change or grow the UI at all -- just lets users do what they already know how to, and makes the tool far more useful.

The thing is, we just need hierarchical folders. Any collection of things you organise that gets over 100 items or so needs this. And especially Evernote, which is meant to "remember everything". Single level "categories" are just too limiting for "everything".

It doesn't matter much to me exactly how this looks or works: Multiple nested notebooks would work. A notebook list view that was hierarchical, with some notes under others would work too. I'm not a fan of OneNote's bizarre hard-coded nesting levels: groups, tabs, pages, sub-pages... It's both complex and inflexible, and not at all what I need. Just give me a general hierarchical nesting ability: no extra clutter or learning or documentation. Just folders, that 90% of computer users are completely and intuitively familiar with.

And no, the hierarchical tags don't really do it. Those are GLOBAL attributes, that can be applied across all notes. Useful yes. But it doesn't help me when I want to make a multi-level set of notes.

I keep leaving and returning to Evernote. It has many advantages competing tools don't, but still -- it's just not totally working for me. I'm still reluctant to fire it up and note down every thought, or link I come across, because I know it will essentially just go into a big pile, that I won't be able to later collect and organise. Sorry.

Quoted for truth!

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Quoted for truth!

The truth of the matter is that tags suffice for some, and not for others. I don't expect to see subfolders any time soon, as the Evernote folks seem to have other features at a higher priority, so those who want them can draw their own conclusions as to whether Evernote is the best product for them, or not.

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Finally... to anyone who "strenuously disagrees" that nested items are needed: why in the world would you oppose them?

I never said I opposed them. I was specifically replying to the post that said "we" need them. "We" don't. Some people want them, which is not the same as everyone wanting them. I don't use stacks, either but I don't oppose their presence.

However, as was already stated, I'd prefer time and effort be spent on other things.

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