(Archived) "nested" notebooks

[mr.jim 0]

If notebooks could be "nested"- eg: "notebook hierarchy" or "sub-notebooks", then Evernote would be completely useful for our organization. An example is how folders can be nested in Google Docs. Tag hierarchy is nice, but not sufficient.

thanks,

jim

[fayence 0]

I think maybe I'm after the same thing. On IE7 I was able to create a sub folder in my Bookmarks, for example Food and Drink would have sub folders Pubs, Delis, Organic, Vegetarian, Game, Recipes etc and some of those would have further sub-folders. Evernote is more versatile, I just can't see a way of having sub-folders.

[kbedwards 0]

There has to be a way to do this. It doesn't make sense that such a great piece of software would just jumble all your notes together with no ability to organize into subfolders (i.e. HEALTHCARE as one notebook, then under that medicine schedule, allergy shoot room hours, sinus infection tracking, kids vaccinations, etc)

Maybe the devs intended for us to use a separate notebook for each of the subjects I listed above? (Allergy shot room hours as one notebook, vaccination schedule as another, etc)

I understand TAGS have hierarchies...but that's really not the same thing.

I plan to keep reading until I find out how...

[heather 604]

We actually intended you to use notebooks, and then tags within notebooks.

[kbedwards 0]

Thanks, I see the light now. See here:

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=9337&p=37292#p37292

Still trying to figure it out though. As long as there is a method to the madness...

[shimra 14]

We actually intended you to use notebooks, and then tags within notebooks.

Doing that doesn't work very well for me because you have all sorts of tags to sort through that have nothing to do with the notebook you want. (In other words, all tags are always displayed, not just those found within the selected notebook)

Suppose you have a work and personal notebook.

You don't want to have to scroll through the sub tags for personal to get to the work category you need. You can make a hierarchy in the tags, but those don;t work well because of a) selecting the root tag doesn't select a subtag and you now have to worry about tags, subtags, and notebooks. To make it worse, evernote always has a different default notebook selected depending on which you used last (at least on windows) so you are not going to remember which is selected when you load up the program. Also, sometimes using the search bar or selecting a different notebook does or does not deselect the tags and you have to reselect them. (I forget offhand and don't have a client on this computer) It's a mess.

[kbedwards 0]

I understand very quickly how it could get confusing when you have...50, 75 100 tags?

But messy as it may be...I have not found anything better out there, that plays so well between my iphone, desktop and various other computers I use, though I have only tried a few different apps.

Any suggestions?

[mr.jim 0]

Is there a reason they aren't readily adding this feature? Is is a programming difficulty or have they just not gotten around to it?

[shimra 14]

Is there a reason they aren't readily adding this feature? Is is a programming difficulty or have they just not gotten around to it?

I like Evernote, but this is my biggest complaint.

I think sub tags were in 2.2 but were essentially removed in this version.

The staff has been pretty silent on why they won't implement sub tags or sub notebooks.

My guess is it has nothing to do with ease of programming, but either

a) they are afraid sub notebooks won't fit on a cell phone user interface

or

some high level staff member has a pet theory that subnotebooks are not user friendly

I think its far more user friendly to give people the options of using just notebooks and subnotebooks without worrying about tags. Switching your mental model from notebook to tags seems to me to add another layer of complexity. I also suspect the "you never know which notebook is selected by default when the program boots up from memory in windows" implementation in user interface 101 failure, because user interface design is supposed to have consistency, but I'm hardly an expert.

[x2eagle18 0]

As a scientist, I would love to be able to keep my lab notebook in Evernote, but this only way I see this as feasible is through sub-notebooks. I am currently using a separate program to keep my digital lab notebook. I use tags to keep track of my scientific papers in Evernote which works better than any other method I have previously tried, but I don't want tags to overlap between my lab notebook and my papers. A hierarchy for both tags and notebooks would allow me to keep everything in one location making everything more organized and convenient.

[Tintin19 0]

The thing for me, with regard to using Evernote for my work is keeping notebooks for projects. I run lots of 'mini-projects' that require much research and recall. The best way for me to do this would be to set up a notebook for each project, but with 100 or so a year it would get too much to handle in the notebook pane. To nest these, or have a way to archive 'old' notebooks (but have them remain searchable) would mean I could keep the notebooks on display as the current ones and not be cluttered with old ones.