Filter by tags after notebooks

[brihanrohan 5]

I've been asking for this or supporting other people's requests for such a feature, on and off for the last couple of years. Basically what I'd like to see is a way to see just the tags that belong to a selection of notes. So if I choose a notebook,then I'd like to be able to open the list of tags and just see a list of tags that applies to the notes in my open notebook. By choosing a notebook i have narrowed down my list of notes. It is useless for me to see tags which dont have any notes in them. The list of tags should reflect that fact that i am viewing a subset of my notes. Without such a feature the tags feature is almost worthless to me on my android device. It is alright if you are doing a specific search for something, but useless as a list for browsing because it is always an unwieldy list and its impossible to make it any smaller.

Without such a feature the only thing that I can think of to bring order to my notes is to create a million sub-notebooks for all of my notebooks, which would be kind of an old school way of doing things. Please Evernote developers, allow us to narrow down our list tags as we are also narrowing down our list of notes. It makes so much more sense.

[Wern 246]

You can simply sync your notes to EN on your PC. The Windows version of EN lets you do what you want:

View >> (tick off): Show unassigned tags

Wern

[rockky 32]

Yes, i also have made the same request.

If we are to create pseudo hierarchic data structures using tags .....then all tags utilized in a notebook should be 1.visible and 2.clickable from that notebook. NOW we have rough outline workflow potential.

Its a main feature I miss from Springpad,and others.

[brihanrohan 5]

Wern, thanks for the reply. I am requesting this functionality for the android device. Personally I think that much of the appeal of a tablet is the ability to pull it out quickly and take notes when something occurs to you. Note taking is pretty easy in ever note, but what's the point if you end up with lists of notes so large you end up being intimidated every time you open a notebook.

Rockky, after you mentioned Springpads ability to do what I am asking for I went to check it out. Unfortunately it doesn't do it very well. There is a way to filter by tag inside a notebook but you can't see the names of the tags which seems kind of pointless to me. To be honest though, this is such a fundamental part of the browsing experience for me that I think that I will go whichever of the two services sort out the issue the fastest.

If I end up sticking with evernote I think I might have to give up on tags altogether and just use the sub notebooks feature to enforce a reasonable navigational structure onto my notes. That would make for a nasty long list of notebooks though.

[Vulcanbomber 1]

Since you can nest tags, why not make a high level set of tags one for each notebooks and then have a set of tags under that

eg

Tag:Notebook1

Tag: Books

Tag:Shakespeare

Tag:Notebook2

Tag:Films

[rockky 32]

Brihan...what Springpad client?

On tablet all the tags in a notebook are displayed on the left.

On android mobile client...theres a 'filter' button allowing tag (and other) filtering within each notebook.

[brihanrohan 5]

Vulcanbomber, That sounds like a reasonable solution, except then what's the point of having notebooks? My point in this thread is that I want to be able to browse using a combination of notebooks and tags. At the moment it is one or the other.The only way to really utilize tags and notebooks together is to do a search, but that isn't a good way to browse notes, its only a way to get to something you are specifically looking for.

Shepard. I tried the android spring pad client again and found that if you rotate the tablet to landscape that yes indeed you can see the tag names for all tags that belong to a notebook. To be honest I am going to slowly start migrating notes over to that service and see how it works out.

[Vulcanbomber 1]

Well to be honest I've found it easier to use just 2 Notebooks.

Inbox as my default Notebook for items wating to be taggted

Master wher everything is tagged and filed, haven't needed anything else

[rockky 32]

Yes, with a notebook and visible clickable filterable tags (and tasks,checklist sidelists), the app can function much closer to an outline style structure.

I dont really understand why evernote doesnt have a similar UI since they tout tagging organization so much in lieu of nested notebooks.

[mbeaudoin 0]

I also need this feature on Android (Nexus 7). I have a "Completed" Notebook and it makes my use of tags useless. The Evernote experience should be the same across all devices.

[jefito 5,589]

The recent Android betas have this ability: click on the Search magnifying glass, select "Advanced Search". From there you can build up a compound search pretty easily. When you've selected all of your criteria, click on the search dropdown magnifying glass, and your note headers will appear in a dropdown list.

[brihanrohan 5]

Hi Jefito,

I tried v4.5 beta 3 on Android to see if you were correct. Unfortunately, it is still the same old method of browsing.

First let me illustrate exactly what I want to be able to do with a real world example:

1. Open a Notebook. (In my case: Japanese Vocab)

2. See a filtered list of tags that only apply to notes in the open notebook. Choose one. (In my case perhaps: Politics, or Sciences)

3. See a nice manageable list of notes and be able to flick between them in order to copy vocab items between them, etc.

But even in the latest Beta filtering by Notebook, or by Tag are independant actions and filtering by one doesnt affect the other. If you filter by Notebook in the advanced search, you are still presented by a list of all of your tags in the tags section.

I am vaguely hopeful that things are changing in the right direction. In the latest Mac version of the app, opening a Notebook now gives you a narrowed down list of just the relevant tags to that book. Hopefully that browsing method will eventually spill over to the Android app too.

[rockky 32]

I have requested this same visible notebook tag 'feature', a few times well over a year ago and as you can see, it's not

happening....and of course they dont provide a simple user communication feedback service simply indication 'we've ruled this out for now', it's 'not in our present focus but under consideration for future releases' etc.

Very strange behavior. Ah well. Is what it is.

[jefito 5,589]

But even in the latest Beta filtering by Notebook, or by Tag are independant actions and filtering by one doesnt affect the other. If you filter by Notebook in the advanced search, you are still presented by a list of all of your tags in the tags section.

Yes, I understand that. The method presented was to show that you can filter by notebook and by tags on the Android at all. It could be improved.

[mustela7 8]

I'd like to second this: Mac version of evernote already has a separate tag search dropdown field doing exactely this: showing a filtered list of tags from the notebook(s) selected. Would be a great enhancement for evernote on android.

A different approach would be some checkbox "filter by selected notebook" beside the search field, also for other tag related functions within evernote (filtering notes by tags, tag suggestions list when tagging etc). I would prefer such a solution principally, but this is nothing already implemented on any other platform to my knowledge - which would be an argument against it though.

[brihanrohan 5]

Just to bump this topic. This feature is very important to me. Without the ability to see just the tags that apply to a filtered list of notes Ever note will never be a good study aid for me. The Mac version of the app I'd fantastic in this regard. Its what keeps me using ever note. Its both visually intuitive and powerful. Please bring this functionality over to android too.

[rockky 32]

I've pretty much given up on this same request I've made in numerous different ways but here's another bump up on this. 

[zendruid 0]

Full support for this. It's a little bewildering it even needs to be asked for. You click on a notebook and you expect to simply be functioning "in that notebook". It's the intuitive way to do it.  

[brihanrohan 5]

bump

please.

[brihanrohan 5]

Another beta comes out, but still this most basic of browsing functionality nowhere to be seen. It is clear that the evernote team see the value in such a browsing approach because this feature is in both the windows and mac apps. Please bring it to mobile.

[Mike F 0]

I find it hard to believe this is left out of version 5.8. What's the point of having more than one notebook if I'm unable filter my list using notebook AND tags. Please Evernote... fix this oversight.

 

I recently signed up a premium account. Reconsidering. 

[jefito 5,589]

I find it hard to believe this is left out of version 5.8. What's the point of having more than one notebook if I'm unable filter my list using notebook AND tags. Please Evernote... fix this oversight.

 

I recently signed up a premium account. Reconsidering.

Yeah, as best I can tell, the advanced search method is the only way to produce a list of notes filtered by notebooks and tags (I understand that it's not *the* note list). I prefer the way that it works in Windows, where you can pick a notebook, then drill down by adding tags.

[brihanrohan 5]

Thank you for replying. I love Evernote for Android but this issue is a big one for me. Let's keep this thread alive.

[rockky 32]

Course the widgets offer nice said  filtering also

[Rpfc 17]

Same here. Vital piece of functionality that is available in the Desktop client that is left out in Android. I can only assume that eventually it will be brought to Android, considering the various notes from EN staff that I've read on EN trying to achieve (near-)parity across platforms...

 

The solution brought forward by Jefito works, but is unfortunately as inelegant and frustrating to use as not using it at all. When you're left with 500+ tags (and those tags are not presented in tree-format in the advanced search section, but rather alphabetically), I'm left with choosing a tag from an enormously long list. This takes ages, and when you've got to do dozens upon dozens of searches a day it is just unwieldy. 

 

Hoping this will arrive (real) soon. 

[jefito 5,589]

Yeah, I know that what I suggested is definitely a workaround. Funny thing is that I seem to recall that the pick-a-notebook-then-pick-a-tag procedure used to work, but I'm not %100 on that. It would be useful, no question.

[Mark Silberbauer 1]

I'm also desperate for this feature. It's something that I do very often on the desktop and need to do the same on the tablet when in transit. I've tried to get around it with shortcuts to saved searches but this means I have to pre-configure them on the desktop. Also, when I don't have a connection, half the time they don't work (even though I'm a premium user with notebooks set to offline sync, and offline search indexing enabled, etc. etc.) which is a whole other extremely frustrating story.

[brihanrohan 5]

Android v06 is beautiful. I almost skipped a heartbeat when I saw the new search features highlighted in the blog post about the update. Alas, like all the previous updates the browsing method is purely cosmetic with no change to the underlying functionality. I think it has been about 5 years since I first started posting here about this simple functionality. I guess I'm nothing if not persistent...

[jefito 5,589]

Well, they did bring back the multi-tag filtering, so that's good. But to add notebooks to that mix would be even better.

[brihanrohan 5]

My yearly post to highlight this issue again.

Simply put I want to be able to choose a notebook (ie, Food) and then see a list of tags that have been applied to that notebook (ie, there's no point in me scrolling through thousands of tags that apply to all my other notebooks)

Please make the tag list in Android filter down to just the tags that have actually been applied to the list of notes in the current view. This is how the desktop apps work.

[brihanrohan 5]

Seems there is a dedicated Feature Requests board now. Could a moderator move this to that board please?

[eng tuncay 0]

any progress about this feature ?