Is it possible to nest a notebook inside of a notebook?

[LMB 0]

Hello,

Is it possible to nest a notebook inside of a notebook?

If not, is there a recommended workflow to achieve similar results?

 

Thanks, 

LMB

[jefito 5,589]

This functionality doesn't exist in Evernote. You can:

 

* Nest notebooks in a notebook stack, but only to a single level.

* Nest tags to an arbitrary level.

 

Not sure what your intended use is, so it's hard to make a recommendation.

[LMB 0]

Here's my intended use.  CAPS indicates NOTEBOOK

 

BUSINESS

• ARTICLES
  • Note: an article posted n the web
  • Note: an article posted on the web, 
  • etc.
• PRODUCTS
  • Product info #1
  • Product info #2
  • etc
• RECIPIES
  • as above...
• REVIEWS

So I'm treating the notebooks like folders

In each folder, a collection of notes

[jefito 5,589]

A common approach is to use tags to delineate subcategories, e.g. ARTICLES, PRODUCTS, etc. So for example you might have two main notebooks: Business and Personal. You tag articles clipped on the web with the tag "Article", whether it's business or personal. If you want business articles, then you isolate the Business notebook and the notes tagged with "Article". And so on.

 

In general, I tend to try to limit the number of notebooks I use, since you can have only a relatively small number of them (100 for a free account, I think; more for a premium account), whereas you can have 10,000 tags. My rule of thumb is to create notebooks only when I need to, as in these situations:

* on desktop clients (Mac, Windows) for local (i,e, non-synced) notebooks that reside only on the local hard drive

* to share a group of notes with other people

* to designate a set of notes that will be cached on a mobile device so that they're available when you're offline.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

So:

Stacks contain ONLY notebooks

Notebooks contain ONLY notes

 

So you can have a stack called "Business" filled with several notebooks: Perhaps "Articles" and "Products"

In "Articles" you create notes that contain.... articles or whatever. 

"Products" you put notes that relate to product info. 

 

Now, this means you can limit a search to your business stack, for example:

stack:business gruntmaster2000

will search for both articles and product info for information on the gruntmaster2000

 

Perhaps you want ONLY product info on the gruntmaster2000 so you would search

notebook:"products" gruntmaster2000

This will ONLY bring up product info and NOT articles. 

 

You can use tags too. Lets say one note for the gruntmaster2000 product isn't really working for you. You can have many gruntmaster notes, and tag them all with gruntmaster2000. 

 

There's LOTS of discussion throughout this community about how to organize. 

Some links to get you started:

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/21329-effective-use-of-tags/

 

This one for sure:

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/33175-organizational-structure-in-the-stacknotebooktag-ecosystem/

 

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/57740-the-benefit-of-using-tags/

 

I wouldn't take anything said in these threads as the gospel, but they are definitely great suggestions from a lot of different perspective that might inspire a useful system of your own. 

[ptolemaios 0]

I would very much like the feature to stack stacks of notebooks. I've been using Evernote for school for a few years now and am now moving onto another school this coming September. I have a notebook for each course, and a notebook stack for all the courses I took in one semester. I have at least 8 notebook stacks for the 8 semesters I've used Evernote, not to mention one or two for personal things. But I'll be moving onto a new school and I'm hoping to move those 8 notebook stacks under one greater stack called "University of Waterloo" and start a fresh stack of notebook stacks called "York University" for example.

 

Please share with me how else I could organize my notes, or if this is a feature that I could suggest for future development.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I would very much like the feature to stack stacks of notebooks. I've been using Evernote for school for a few years now and am now moving onto another school this coming September. I have a notebook for each course, and a notebook stack for all the courses I took in one semester. I have at least 8 notebook stacks for the 8 semesters I've used Evernote, not to mention one or two for personal things. But I'll be moving onto a new school and I'm hoping to move those 8 notebook stacks under one greater stack called "University of Waterloo" and start a fresh stack of notebook stacks called "York University" for example.

 

Please share with me how else I could organize my notes, or if this is a feature that I could suggest for future development.

 

Hi. I'd recommend tags, especially for archived stuff. In the case of Waterloo, I'd select everything in each of the notebooks, tag it with a name like "waterloo_physics_451" or "waterloo_history_394" and dump it all into one notebook called "archive." Make a saved search for "tag:waterloo_history_394" so that anytime you want to refer to those materials, you just click the saved search, and it all appears, just as iff it was in a notebook.

 

If you are into making personal wikis, you could also make a table of contents for each of your notebooks, then dump them into the "archive" notebook, and just navigate your files using the table of contents.

[CalS 5,280]

I would do as GM says and use tags. 

 

I would also consider adding a tag to each note for the notebook and stack it was originally in, create a tag tree of the new stack/notebook tags, and move all of the notes to a notebook called the name of the school.  You can then emulate, to some extent, the notebook structure you had with tag searches.  FWIW.

[LBK 2]

I also agree with GroupMonkey.

 

1. Select all notes from your Waterloo Physics 101 class (or whichever class). This will let you automatically tag all notes with tags of your choice. I agree waterloo_physics_101 makes sense. Then, move all notes to your "Waterloo" notebook (or a general Archive notebook).

 

2. Rinse and repeat for all other classes.

 

3. Create saved searches as necessary.

 

I found this article to be incredibly helpful when developing a system for notebooks/tags.

http://www.jamierubin.net/2014/07/15/going-paperless-how-i-simplified-my-notebook-organization-in-evernote-part-1/

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

A further option is simply to leave the broader organizational structure as it is (or modified using the suggestions above as you see fit), but to also get the UW stuff out of the way visually. I typically do this for older stuff that is not really relevant on a regular basis. In this case I prefix the notebook or stack with a "z". I don't use a hierarchy so unlike you I have stacks available so I have a stack of old notebooks that are not in active use (e.g., old coursework, previous research material, etc). This stack is called "zArchive". It sits at the bottom of my notebook list, nice and out of the way, and when I'm done with a given notebook, I just toss it in to zArchive and be done with it. 

 

So, in addition to some of the organizational techniques suggested above, which are all very good, you can also try using prefixes to move things visually out of the way. 

 

The other thing to consider is how relevant your UW stacks are now. You say you have 1 stack per semester. Is the "semester" information really relevant at this point? So I envision something like this (correct me if I am wrong)

 

SEMESTER 1 (STACK)

   Course A (notebook)

   Course B

   Course C

   Course D

   Course E

SEMESTER 2 

   Course F

   Course G

   Course H

   Course I

   Course J

and so on.

 

I wonder how important those semester stacks are for long-term storage and retrieval of your old course material. Do you need to know whether POLI141 was in semester 2 or semester 4 when you revisit it next year looking for that note about neoliberalism? Will you know to go to the semester 5 stack for PSYC320 notes when you go looking for them? Will you even remember that PSYCH320 was in semester 5?

 

As I see it, based on my (mis?)understanding of your current organization, your se of stacks may have been important while you were actively contributing to those notebooks, but since you are moving on and like only rarely retrieving information from those notebooks, you might be better off doing something along these lines:

 

zUNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO (STACK)

   Course A (notebook)

   Course B

   Course C

   Course D

   Course E

  Course F

   Course G

   Course H

   Course I

   Course J

 

Personally I think it would be highly unlikely for semester information to assist in retrieval, and in fact it could inhibit it as you try and remember which course was in which semester. It also isn't likely to help in search (Which is one of the major benefits of stacks in the first place). Odds are low that you will need to query a specific semester ('hmmm did I wrote about gravity in Semester 3, or 6? Lets try Stack:"semester 1" gravity').

I suppose as I see it based on my (mis?)understanding of your organization, semester information was relevant, but is no longer likely to be terribly helpful for long term storage & retrieval. You could, rather easily, select all the notes in a given semester stack (e.g, select every note in Semester 1) and apply a tag of "Semester 1" so that you at least have the same info as before, it is still targetable in search, but you gain back Stacks for archiving purposes. 

[Wordsgood 526]

Scott, I see that you survived the winter storms over yonder on the East Coast of Canuckville! Good to know!

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Scott, I see that you survived the winter storms over yonder on the East Coast of Canuckville! Good to know!

Survived by a hair! Now its double-digit temperatures (celsius, that is) and blue skies! Hope things are well for you! 

[nazdash 0]

I also have the same issue. I love tags, but in lot of cases I need only one hierarchy dimension, something like folders on pc/mac. 2 levels deep in EV (notebooks, stacks) is not enough for me. The best what I found is to create my own software.

If you are interested please follow this link - http://unit.ms. 

Would be happy if it could solve your problem also.

[a1b2 0]

I also!

Today I started to examine Evernote and it was simply great! Until I find out, that only one level of notebooks can be made :(.

To use Tags to achieve hierarchy is just strange and I can't understand why the notebooks are not organized in hierarchical levels via the Stacks?

This would be much more intuitive and reliable then the Tags. Tags can be just Tags, but the Notebooks needs to be organized hierarchically. 

Now I am thinking to uninstall Evernote agein :(.

[CalS 5,280]

4 hours ago, a1b2 said:

I also!

Today I started to examine Evernote and it was simply great! Until I find out, that only one level of notebooks can be made :(.

To use Tags to achieve hierarchy is just strange and I can't understand why the notebooks are not organized in hierarchical levels via the Stacks?

This would be much more intuitive and reliable then the Tags. Tags can be just Tags, but the Notebooks needs to be organized hierarchically. 

Now I am thinking to uninstall Evernote agein :(.

Feel free to search the forums for tags notebooks and hierarchy.  Many posts discussing the pluses and minuses of EN organizational strategies and the question of to hierarchy or not to hierarchy.

[DTLow 5,736]

On 2017-07-08 at 오전 5시 48분, a1b2 said:

To use Tags to achieve hierarchy is just strange and I can't understand why the notebooks are not organized in hierarchical levels via the Stacks?

This would be much more intuitive and reliable then the Tags. Tags can be just Tags, but the Notebooks needs to be organized hierarchically. 

Evernote uses Notebooks to identify notes that are shared, sync'd/local, offline
Perhaps that might make the lack of hierarchy less strange

You might try to adjust your comprehension of the terminology.  
Notebook/Tags are labels you apply to a note. 
Your post is equivalent to saying Evernote must have FOLDERS, Notebooks are just strange

btw  We don't have tag hierarchy on the iPad platform.  
I’m managing ok, but I have to prefix my tags so they sort alphabetically
I do refer to the tag hierarchy of my Mac to organize my tags

[jefito 5,589]

On 7/8/2017 at 8:48 AM, a1b2 said:

To use Tags to achieve hierarchy is just strange and I can't understand why the notebooks are not organized in hierarchical levels via the Stacks?

I sort of agree that using tags to structure notes hierarchically is a little counterintuitive, and I really don't use tags that way myself, but one of the interesting things that falls out of using tags in this way is that you can set up multiple tag hierarchies, and a note can be reside in any of the hierarchies (something you could not do with nested notebooks, since a note resides in exactly one notebook). This gives you the ability to have multiple ways of organizing your notes; with tags, you don't need to be hierachical about it, which makes tags so appealing to me.

On 7/8/2017 at 8:48 AM, a1b2 said:

This would be much more intuitive and reliable then the Tags. Tags can be just Tags, but the Notebooks needs to be organized hierarchically. 

Evernote has traditionally disagreed with this opinion. They added stacks as a simple way to organize notebooks, but have resisted making notebooks hierarchical. As noted by others, there's plenty of discussion on the topic, dating back to 2008 or so, but so far, Evernote has not changed its position on nested notebooks.