(Archived) Links to other notes / Subfolders

[monj 0]

Hi everyone,

I am using Evernote for many purposes; taking notes, making to-do lists, summarizing my ideas, etc. However, I feel like there is a feature missing in Evernote to allow for link notes to each other. For example, when making a to-do list, I sometimes need to give a link to smaller notes instead of putting everything together. I couldn't find such a feature and I was wondering if they would find it useful to add this to Evernote. In addition, allowing for subfolders might be also useful in this regard.

--Monj

[BradOwens 3]

Monj,

You may find these links useful. I believe the functionality that you are asking for exists.

Note Links: http://blog.evernote.com/2011/10/21/did-you-know-note-links-and-how-to-use-them/

Subfolders (called "Stacks" by Evernote): http://blog.evernote.com/2010/12/01/evernote-beta-for-mac-gets-sharing-and-notebook-stacks/

[monj 0]

Thanks BradOwens!

[May 268]

Yeah but... note links aren't all that useful and notebook stacks aren't really subfolders either...

Note links are useful when you want to reference some notes but they don't add any power at all whatsoever to the organizational structure. They don't replicate subfolders unless you do a lot of extra work.

The blog post is misleading

Note Links a powerful way to create an organizational structure that you like

Note Links are a super powerful way to bring organization, structure, and connectivity to all of your notes in Evernote.

I don't know what they are talking about there!

Note links aren't good for organizing notes at all. They are good for referencing notes but not organizing.

If you would want to organize your notes with note links you would run into problems such as:

Whenever you add/remove/change parent/child relationship in one note - You'd have to go and manually update the other note in a relationship.

Renaming a parent/child note - Would require editing all of its parent/child notes to update the name.

Those are just off of the top of my mind...

If you just add a note link to some note - you haven't really organized anything into any structure whatsoever, just referenced.

if you could actually use note links to link to child/parent notes from one note and get it added automatically to another note instead of editing both notes manually, then this would make note linking actually really useful.

The way I see it - note links are actually pretty useless now, they don't really add almost any functionality at all, other than fast switching between apps instead of manually copy/pasting random codes or other search strings.

If you'd want to make a connection both ways you'd actually have to

create new child note

sync

copy note link of child note

find parent note

paste child link into parent note

copy note link of parent note

go to child note

paste parent link into child note

Quite a lot of steps for something which could be streamlined to one step only.

The only viable way to organize notes in Evernote at this point is to use tags/"sub-tags"/keywords. Note links are useful only to reference some notes. They don't add any structure / structural metadata to notes at all unless you take a lot of extra manual steps and then its still too cumbersome to maintain.

Bottom line - use tags/keywords to organize notes, use links to make reference to some notes.

[monj 0]

May,

I agree with you and that was the reason I kept the blogpost. Links are hard to use and Stacks are actually visibly-categorized tags. You can't treat them as folders to contain notes.

[peterfmartin 221]

Note links aren't good for organizing notes at all. They are good for referencing notes but not organizing.

If you would want to organize your notes with note links you would run into problems such as:

Whenever you add/remove/change parent/child relationship in one note - You'd have to go and manually update the other note in a relationship.

Renaming a parent/child note - Would require editing all of its parent/child notes to update the name.

Those are just off of the top of my mind...

Add to the list that if you have a link pointing to a note, and then you merge that note with another, the link is broken rather than modified to point to the new merged note.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Note links are useful when you want to reference some notes but they don't add any power at all whatsoever to the organizational structure. They don't replicate subfolders unless you do a lot of extra work.

Agreed!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

i have been using links for organization. i don't know if i have much of an organizational "structure" to begin with, so i couldn't say if they add or detract from it. but, i think they are quite powerful, and i prefer them over tags or notebooks.

that said, they break whenever you try to move things around (infuriating), and you cannot create them on ios devices. so, i have recently found random character codes to be a great solution for me. yes, they are a little less intuitive than the really well-made evernote options available (tags and notebooks), but i prefer them nonetheless. there are reasons, but i won't go into them here.

just a short note here in support of links for organizational purposes

[May 268]

I think I know what you're talking about GM, I also think that by using random codes instead of note links you ARE actually creating an organizational structure by default because random codes work slightly different compared to note links, i.e. by placing the same random code in multiple notes you actually connect all of those notes, similarly to using tags.

Using a note link on the other hand makes only a one way connection... unless you place 2 different note links in both notes, i.e. place a link from parent to child in one note and place another link from child to parent in another note. Which takes a lot of steps...

there is a confusion in semantics... I think it really depends on what you mean/define by organizational structure.

I.e. making a one way link to a note from an index note to some other note doesn't really organize the referenced note itself even though it is in fact organized in the index note. I guess I need to show some examples to really explain this... It's confusing when you try to explain with just words

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

A notebook doesn't organize anything either You have to put related information in it for it to make sense. A link is just a link, until you put it together with other links in an index note to organize things. If that is an organizational structure, then I would have to say that note links contribute to it

No need for examples. I just wanted to point out the potential for note links to organize things. Folders and tags are cool too, but everyone knows that. I think they underestimate links.

[May 268]

Yeah, basically you just cluster notes together, whether you use random codes, links, tags, notebooks, notes - doesn't really matter. It could be done with any of those things but it would be a different process in each case and note links do take the most amount of steps to actually cluster notes ( considering current Evernote design). Random codes are slightly different. That's my point but it's hard to explain without providing examples.

I don't think note links are underestimated, because they don't add any functionality at all compared to an exact search string for example (other than being clickable).

I used to think that note links are underestimated until I took a good look at all of the possible ways I could think of to organize notes in Evernote and compared everything side by side...