(Archived) Suggested feature: categories

[gfco 1]

I use only two notebooks, business and personal, and everything else gets organized with tags. But now my tag list is getting overly bloated. For instance, under the tag jobs, I might have 100 or so specific jobs per year as sub tags. Same thing for bids, customers, vendors or any other list related tag. It would be helpful for situations like that to to have another organizational level of categories, in order to keep the tags list at a reasonable level and also create a more properly structured filing system.

[May 268]

It's all the same thing

[jbenson2 2,149]

It is unlikely that Evernote will be creating another group of categories for sorting. Over the past few years, there have been a lot of discussions on deeper levels of notebooks, but that direction does not appear to be in the cards for Evernote.

I've been using Evernote with 1,200 tags. I would keep the two notebooks and then use two levels of tags

For business, using the examples you cited:

Bids

bid-Artesian

bid-Caspella

bid-Egret

Customers

cus-BritishTelecom

cus-Delphi

cus-HewlettPackard

cus-Nokia

Vendors

ven-AbcPlastics

ven-DefMachining

ven-Samsung

Similar parent / child tags can be set up for the personal notebook.

[jefito 5,598]

To expand on May's point: how would "categories" be any different from "tags"? Would they interact? How would they be applied? To notes? To notebooks?

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

If you use the Windows client, you have the good fortune of being able to use Tag Hunter.

[gfco 1]

It is the same thing, in the sense that tags can be a descriptive label of anything. I guess I'm used to a framework that separates those labels. (outlook: categories/tags, toodledo: projects/contexts/tags, quicken: categories/tags.) Like sub notebooks, it may diminish the simplicity of the program, but it may help (inside-the-box people like me) conceptually and add some functionality.

[jefito 5,598]

Hmmm, looks like Outlook (which I've used a fair amount in the past, no more, though if I can help it) doesn't actually have any notion of tags, just categories. Anyways, I'm not sure that I see the point of having two separately named (and presumably managed) concepts that actually have identical functionality (if you have tag bloat, how are you not going to just swap it for category bloat?). As it is, Evernote's notebooks and tags are different in nature, and tags are pretty flexible, so that works pretty well for me, not that I embody every possible use case.

I am curious, though -- what categories would you add? Why not just have multiple tags on a job? There's nothing wrong with maintaining separate tag classification schemes.

[gfco 1]

Jeff, I see what your saying. I am still trying to figure out the best way to organize notes, I was thinking things like jobs, projects, bids in the categories group, things that will continually grow and change.my tags would be a select list of items that would not change. Things like bills, receipts, budget, etc. that would be associated with a category, and other things like auto, family, insurance, tax, books etc.

[jefito 5,598]

I think you're on the right track...

Tags, labels, categories, they're all pretty much the same thing; it's really up to you to figure out how best to make them work for you. You can organize your tags into trees in the tag list, which may help keep the clutter down, but you can always apply tags independent of the tag trees that they live in. And you can apply multiple tags to a single note.

So yes, you would definitely want some permanent tags, as you mention, but you can have transient tags, or sets of tags to describe a process. For example, you might have a set of tags for a job process state: "Under Bid", "Contracted", "In Progress", "Completed", or the like, and set the current state as one of these as you move through the process. A lot of this is really up to you, as tags are pretty flexible.