why does -tag:XXX no longer work to filter our notes containing that tag?

[idoc 416]

I would like to do a search of all notes in a particular notebook but would like to exclude a particular tag from the search.  In the past, I would simply put a minus sign on the tag to exclude that one  eg:       -tag:dog and it would find every note that did not have this tag.  This no longer seems to work.  In fact, it is now finding me the search results that still have tag:dog but also have "dog" in the title or in the body of the note.  How can I search a particular notebook for any and all notes that exclude a specific tag?  Thanks in advance.

[PinkElephant 8,998]

Just tried, for me -tag:mytag still does exclude the tag mytag from the search.

Mac client 10.96.5

[idoc 416]

Thanks Pink.  Just to be clear: Let's say that I want to search all of my notes in my notebook "WORK"  for the key work "proparacaine" but I want to exclude all notes that are tagged with "patient scan". How would you do this search?  No matter how I do this search I can not get it so that all my notes with "proparacaine" come up but exclude those that have the tag "patient scan".

 

[PinkElephant 8,998]

Just did my own example: Find all notes with the word "Invoice" that do not hold the tag "Tax". These are all invoices that are not relevant for my tax return.

Works fine, I get a ton of notes that hold invoices, but none of them carrying a "Tax" tag.

When I remove the "-" I get all with the word "Invoice" AND the tag "Tax".

Which is the expected behavior.

[idoc 416]

OK, so I discovered something interesting about why my search wasn't working.  My tag's name was "patient scan".   However, if I change the tag name "patient scan" to "patientscan" then it works perfectly.  I experimented some more and discovered that the same problem applied to "2023 Taxes" or "2022 Taxes" ie: trying to exclude those tags using -tag:2023 Taxes or -tag: 2022 Taxes does not work.  When I changed the name to 2023Taxes and 2022Taxes I can then exclude them.  Bottom line, is that apparently tag names can NOT have spaces if they are to be used in exclusions.  I don't know if this is a bug or if I should have known about it before.

[bumblebeenero 19]

5 hours ago, idoc said:

Let's say that I want to search all of my notes in my notebook "WORK"  for the key work "proparacaine" but I want to exclude all notes that are tagged with "patient scan". How would you do this search?

Type exactly the following in your search box (copy paste from below if you want): 

notebook:work proparacaine -tag:"patient scan"

This should work. From what I understand, the reason your search is not working is that you are NOT using quotation marks around your tags. 

You need to tell Evernote that "patient scan" is not two different words but a single tag. And hence the quotes.

When you type tag:patient scan in the search box without the quotes, Evernote thinks that patient is the tag and scan is the keyword you want to search.

[PinkElephant 8,998]

It’s a long standing rule of thumb that we better avoid having spaces in tag names. It makes handling easier. Same for notebook names.

You can make your own concept, like typing a dot, dash or an underline instead.

Or use quotation marks.

[idoc 416]

Thanks everyone. I should have figured this one out sooner. I will try eliminating the spaces in tag names or perhaps using the quotation marks. Both options sound good.