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I could use "Tagged Notebooks"


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I work on films and use Evernote to organize all my notes, research, plans, drawings, etc. for the entire production.  I create a separate notebook for each scene.  Into each notebook goes everything, and each note is tagged with the name of the department that note applies to (i.e., Camera, Art, Locations, etc.)

 

So if I want to meet with a particular department, I just go to Tags, and select the tag for that department, and all my notes for that department - from all the different scenes - appear in one place. Very handy.

 

But let's say I want to meet with multiple departments about a particular set (such as John's House) or location (say, Vancouver or New York). It would be great if I could tag each Notebook with its set or location.  Then I could just isolate the scenes that take place in John's House, or just the scenes we're shooting in Vancouver.  

 

Obviously, it would be very inefficient to tag each note with Set and Location, as there are just too many notes.  So the workaround I use now is to add a Set and Location tag to the name of the Notebook, i.e., the notebook entitled "Scene 1 - Ext. John's House" is now entitled "Scene 1 - Ext. John's House #JohnHouse #Vanc".

 

I click on Notebooks in the sidebar, search for #JohnHouse or #Vanc and I see the list of notebooks for just those scenes. It's a little bit of a kludge, and would be a lot cleaner if I could simply tag the notebooks.  

 

Is there any way to do that? And if there isn't, this is my feature request to add the capability to tag notebooks, not just notes.

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In Evernote, you cannot filter by multiple notebooks, except in the case where you are filtering by a stack (which can contain multiple notebooks). You *can* filter on multiple tags in Evernote.

 

So in Evernote, as it exists in the world today, you can only tag notes, and not notebooks. There's no guarantee that Evernote will ever allow you to tag notebooks. You could tag every note in a scene notebook with a tag that's identical to the notebook name. Not very palatable in my view, but it might do as a workaround.

 

On the other hand, having a notebook per scene sounds like it might not be the best idea, since you are limited to 250 notebooks (I don't know a good range for number of scenes in a film). You could go the other way: have one notebook per film/project, tag by scene, department, set, and location.  Isolating a particular scene in a film is easy. Isolating a single department is easy. Isolating multiple departments and a set is easy. They're all just tag searches.

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Hi Jef,

 

Thanks for the quick and thoughtful reply. Yes, I could just tag every note with Scene, Department, Set and Location, but each scene might have 30 or 40 notes in it.  It's a lot of duplicated effort to tag each note with Set and Location, and I was hoping there was some way to simply group them by scene (there are maybe 100-120 scenes in a  typical script, so there's plenty of room) and just tag the scenes.

 

So the two workarounds I've found are 1) your suggestion and 2) what I'm experimenting with now, which is to add the tags to the name of the scenes (each of which is a notebook), and just do Notebook searches for those attributes. Neither is perfect, but I might get used to one or the other.

 

Again, thanks.

 

Roger

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Sounds like a pretty cool use of Evernote. Hopefully you'll come to a system that works for you. That would be a good topic for a "How I use Evernote for ..." blog item that Evernote likes to put out every so often ("Making Films" in your case) . Good luck.

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And this morning I figured out a way to tag every note that's easier than doing it manually.  Manually is a lot of repetitive work (which is why I was looking for a way to tag the Notebooks.)

 

Using your suggestion to simply put all the notes in one big notebook and tag them for scene, set, and location, I created a macro in Keyboard Maestro (I also could have used Text Expander).

 

Now, I create a note for Scene 1. In the Tags area, I type this string: #001.

 

That triggers a Keyboard Maestro macro that enters the scene number tag (001), then Tab and Right Arrow to create the Location tag (NYC), and then another Tab and Right Arrow to create the Set tag (Hotel).  (Note: I'm using Tab and Right Arrow to enter the tag and then put the cursor in position to enter the next tag, since Enter or Return didn't work for some reason. They moved me out of the Tag area and into the Title and Note area. Not sure why. It works when I use my keyboard, but for some reason not in a macro.)

 

Anyway, this means I have to create 100 or so macros - not too onerous with copy and paste - but once I've done that, it's a fairly quick way to create all the tags I need for each note.  I'm going to explore this further, but it just might be the best alternative to tagged notebooks (which I'd still prefer.)

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