(Archived) Saved Search confusion

[braintoniq 11]

I'm seeing how powerful Saved Searches could be, but I'm a little confused about how to 'write' them.

Is there a simple how-to on saved searches?

I'm trying to find all notes that do NOT have one particular tag (called where).

[ed_in_nj 3]

I've followed the links above but I'm having trouble creating a saved search...what I'm trying to do is: create a saved search that returns notes from a given notebook, for example the notebook "personal". What I've done is this:

In the search area type "notebook:personal" ... this results in all the notes in my personal notebook being displayed (as expected). However the option "New Saved Search" in the File menu is grayed out.

Any thoughts as to what I'm doing wrong? Thanks for any reply.

-Ed

PS: if I change the search box to "notebook:personal a" then the search returns all notes within the "personal" notebook that contain the letter "a". Of course this contains most, if not all, the notes in the personal notebook, but the interesting thing is: now the "New Saved Search" option is active.

[braintoniq 11]

It looks like a Saved Search has to contain a tag. If I do the same kind of search, for just "notebook:(one of my notebooks)" then the Save feature is also grayed out.

[jefito 5,542]

Knowledge base topic: https://www.evernote.com/about/kb/article/saved-searches?url=article/mac-saved-searches.

Another on search operators: https://www.evernote.com/about/kb/article/advanced-search?lang=en.

To find all notes that do not have the tag "where", the search is: "-tag:where"

[braintoniq 11]

Thank you, jefito. That helps a lot.

Two smaller things:

1. so commas are not needed between each operator? For instance, do I write

notebook:"Action Pending" -tag:1-Now -tag:2-When

or,

notebook:"Action Pending", -tag:1-Now, -tag:2-When

And related to this,

2. It seems that if a tag has a space in it, like Action Pending, then the operator needs to have quotation marks around them, as I've done in the two syntaxes above.

[jefito 5,542]

1: no commas; use spaces to separate

2: correct: for tags with spaces, you must enclose them in quotation marks