(Archived) Need help organizing my Evernote! HAALPPP!

[TechGuy 16]

Ok, I've used it for years, then I ran into the problem of too many Notebooks. I loved doing it this away but I didnt realize there was a limit.  <insert qq here>

 

So, I went and changed them to use tags. I like tags now that I used them but I don't think I'm doing it right still.

 

How I'm organizing them is below.

 

My first question is how do I share a group of notes or share a specific tag? I have tags/groups of notes that I need to share with coworkers but I can't be going through literally hundreds of them and pick the ones I want to share.

 

My second question is, should I be using notebooks better? I don't understand how a notebook would work if tags would be specific to notebooks. Seems like it's pointless if a tag is specific to a notebook, then what the point is a notebook then?

 

Here is what I have:

 

 

Thanks for everyone's input!

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Tags work great for a lot of things, but sharing isn't one of them.  You can NOT select a group of notes by tag to share.

Your choices for sharing are either by individual note, or by Notebook.

 

But then there are a lot of clever people here, so maybe some of them have figured out how to work-around this limitation.

 

Good luck.

[jefito 5,589]

My first question is how do I share a group of notes or share a specific tag? I have tags/groups of notes that I need to share with coworkers but I can't be going through literally hundreds of them and pick the ones I want to share.

You can only share notes in units of individual notes or notebooks; you cannot share via tags (or other search criteria). So if you want to share a bunch of notes with your co-workers, you're better off trying to partition your notes database into convenient notebooks for sharing.

 

My second question is, should I be using notebooks better? I don't understand how a notebook would work if tags would be specific to notebooks. Seems like it's pointless if a tag is specific to a notebook, then what the point is a notebook then?

Tags are not specific to single notebooks; indeed, the fact that they you can use a tag across different notebooks can be useful. Notebooks are useful for partitioning your notes database into discrete sets of notes,since a note can only reside in a single notebook at a time. Tags don't automatically partition your notes as notebooks do; their strength is that you can categorize notes into different collections. A simple example: say you tag all notes related to your projects with the project's name (say, "Project A", Project B", and so forth), and you categorize all of your project notes by function (say, "Meeting", "Status Report", etc.). So now you can call out all of your notes related to Project A simply, or call out all of your weekly reports across projects simply, or call out all of your weekly reports for Project A with only a little more effort.

So what are notebooks good for? In Evernote, notebooks are a fundamental unit of sharing, as noted. On desktop clients, notebooks are the fundamental unit of local (that is, not synced to the Evernote servers) storage:, i.e., a local notebook. Somewhat conversely, on mobile clients, notebooks are the fundamental unit of offline storage (notes are cached on a device such that they are always available, even when you're offline), i.e., an offline notebook (available only for premium subscribers).

For example, I keep an offline notebook (it's named "@Todo"), where I keep notes that are important at the current time (often these are to-do notes, or notes related to something I am researching. This notebook is marked as "offline" on my Android device, and those notes are always available.

[TechGuy 16]

Great info all thx for the reply.

 

Looking at my current setup, would you break my work and personal info into two different notebooks? Maybe even the top tier tags into different notebooks?

 

 

[jefito 5,589]

In general, the minimalist in me says "only make notebooks where you actually need them". It's not a hard-and-fast rule with me, but it's a good starting point, in my opinion.

In your case, since you have a set of notes that you want/need to share with co-workers, then you would need to make a separate notebook for that. If there are other work-related notes that you don't want to share then you might want to move them into a their own notebook as well, and then make a stack of those two notebooks so that you can easily isolate all of your work-related notes. The reason for this suggestion is that you can easily isolate individual notebooks, but not multiple notebooks (except for *all* notebooks), but you can isolate all notes in a stack of notebooks. All of these rules are due to the way that the Evernote search grammar operates.

Everything else can go into another notebook ("Personal"?), unless you have other special needs, local notebooks (be wary of these: since they're by definition not synced to the Evernote servers, their content needs to be backed up by you explicitly) or offline notebooks.

[TechGuy 16]

In general, the minimalist in me says "only make notebooks where you actually need them". It's not a hard-and-fast rule with me, but it's a good starting point, in my opinion.

In your case, since you have a set of notes that you want/need to share with co-workers, then you would need to make a separate notebook for that. If there are other work-related notes that you don't want to share then you might want to move them into a their own notebook as well, and then make a stack of those two notebooks so that you can easily isolate all of your work-related notes. The reason for this suggestion is that you can easily isolate individual notebooks, but not multiple notebooks (except for *all* notebooks), but you can isolate all notes in a stack of notebooks. All of these rules are due to the way that the Evernote search grammar operates.

Everything else can go into another notebook ("Personal"?), unless you have other special needs, local notebooks (we wary of these: since they're by definition not synced to the Evernote servers, their content needs to be backed up by you explicitly) or offline notebooks.

 

Great! That helps me out. 

 

Thanks everyone, I have an idea what I need to do now!

[mdsd77 12]

okay so I am  Reorganizing myself....

 

I have a ton of Notebooks, and I think I want to go more with tagging and minimize the number of Notebooks.

 

When I go to delete a notebook, it says the notes within will be trashed.

 

am I missing something here?

 

I would think I would select a Notebook, then select all the files and move to my default folder (i renamed it INBOX)

then delete that folder i want deleted... then tag or retag all the notes?

 

is that the fastest  way to reorganize ?

 

or is their a REORGANIZE option i have not seen yet?

thanks...MD

[TechGuy 16]

This is what I did, if it helps any, this will at least start your tags.

 

So...

 

Create all of the tags that you have notebooks for and then start tagging everything. Don't delete any of your notebooks until you get everything tagged.  Don't delete any notebooks until you have moved the notebooks in the later steps.

 

Go into each notebook and select them all and create a tag for them. I named them the same thing that the notebook was named.

 

After I have everything tagged, I created three notebooks. 

 

_uncategorizzed

Personal 

Work

 

I then moved the notes to the appropriate notebook. Yes, all of them as 1 lump sum into the notebook.  I have about 2k notes in the two latter notebooks.

 

I use _uncategorized as the default notebook so if I add one, it goes there by default. That way I know to move them to the appropriate category and tag.

 

I then deleted the other 100 notebooks that I had, which should be empty now.

 

That pretty much sums it up.

 

Hope it helps.

[mdsd77 12]

thank you for the response...

 

yeah i just spent about an hour tagging individual notes, and when I was 3 from the bottom I realized I could tag them by doing

the select all method, then applying the tag to all of them at once.....

 

I think I may have too many tags, so I will think about that.

 

but I see your method and will put that into action, thanks...MD