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(Archived) Can nested tags replace notebooks?


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I highlight a lot when I read.  Every time i start a new book I create a notebook and Evernote that bears the title of the book I'm reading.  For example, when I read the book Moby Dick I create a notebook in Evernote called Moby Dick and then I transfer my highlights from my e-book into that notebook.

 

 But pretty soon I'm going to run out of notebooks, and so I need to find a way to use tags to do the same thing.  I would like to create a tag called Moby Dick, and then the nested tags could be chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, and so on.  

 

But I don't know if this will work.  For instance, I created a tag called "Moby Dick" and then I created the tags chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, and so on and all those chapters are NESTED under Moby Dick.  If I do a search on the tag Moby Dick I would like to see ALL my highlights from Moby Dick no matter what chapter they are in.  And if I'm reading chapter 3 and I make a highlight and tag it ONLY with "chapter 3" then I would expect that to also come up when I search on the tag "Moby Dick" because the tag "chapter 3" is nested under the tag "Moby Dick."  But it doesn't seem to work that way.  Why doesn't work that way? I'm not sure I understand the point of nested tags.

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That's a really good question, my friend. I happen to have a few notebooks that I use for my reading notes, but instead of having a separate notebook for each book, I too use tags to organize each book I read. While I don't go so far as to create a separate chapter subtag for each book, I do tend to group all of my notes by chapter, thus eliminating the issue you're facing, and thus saving me a few tags in the long run. So every time I write a note on a book (say, for example, I were reading Moby-Dick) I would add the book's tag to the note.

 

When I go to search my note for other information, I just use this search query:

 tag:"moby dick" chapter 3

This works, assuming the words chapter 3 appear in the context of the note I'm searching for. I really don't bother with nested tags for each chapter or section. If I did, I would have to include my parent tag as well; that's just the way the cookie crumbles. The key point here, though is that nested tagging is mainly for organization, as jefito points out in this post.

 

Let me know if that makes sense or if you'd like me to clarify.

 

Happy reading (and tagging)!

 

- J.

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The answer to the question is "no", mainly because tags are different beasts than notebooks. Notebooks are used to contain Evernote notes, and a note lives in exactly one notebook. Tags are used to label (or describe) notes, and you can attach multiple labels to a note.

One thing: tag search does not honor tag nesting. period (it would be cool if it could). But that's not necessarily a bad thing. For example, if you want to tag books like Moby Dick, then you have tags like "Moby Dick", "War and Peace", "50 Shades of Gray" or whatever, and store them under a main tag, like "Books". If you want chapter tags (e.g. "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2", etc.), you can use them for any book; rather than nesting them underneath any of the books, nest them under a separate tag named "Chapters". Now when you read a book, tag the notes you make with the book title tag and the chapter number tag. You can find all of the chapter notes easily by a tag search like: tag:"Moby Dick" tag:chapter*

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