Exclude a notebook from search

[tavor 668]

Is it possible to exclude a notebook from a search. Using -notebook:NotebookName doesn't seem to work.

[JMichaelTX 4,119]

Is it possible to exclude a notebook from a search. Using -notebook:NotebookName doesn't seem to work.

 

You can't exclude NB from a Search, but you can exclude Tags.  So, as a work-around, you could assign a Tag to all Notes in the NB you want to exclude.  The Tag Name could even be the same as the NB Name.

 

Let's say the NB name is "Personal".  So you create a Tag named "Personal", and assign to all Notes in the Personal NB.

Then you could so a Search like this:  "-tag:Personal" and whatever other Search terms you'd like.

[George G 11]

There seem to be so many relatively simple things (like this request) that I google only to find dozens of hits of people asking for it (dating back many, many years) but no progress on having it implemented.  The reason I will dump Evernote at some point is going to be because of the mass of annoying little things like this that I can't customize to my workflow or preferences.  I don't need cute sharing or collaboration features that seem to be getting so much development time, I need simple preference choices to make Evernote not piss me off so much.

[jbk12 2]

its embarrassing evernote cant do this, the claims about it being a "powerful" search engine are silly. its a tool that doesnt allow you to even hide things from search. 

meanwhile-   we put a man on the moon 40 years ago.   not hating, just sayin....excuses

[DTLow 5,749]

>>exclude a notebook from a search

Moved to the feedback forum to be  better addressed as a feature request.  

Please use the voting buttons in the upper left corner to show your support

[jefito 5,598]

Nope, can't be done, per the search grammar: http://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php. I don't think that it's explicitly stated, but the BNF down at the bottom implies it: a 'notebook' scope modifier is not a 'negatable' term

[tavor 668]

 

Is it possible to exclude a notebook from a search. Using -notebook:NotebookName doesn't seem to work.

 

You can't exclude NB from a Search, but you can exclude Tags.  So, as a work-around, you could assign a Tag to all Notes in the NB you want to exclude.  The Tag Name could even be the same as the NB Name.

 

Let's say the NB name is "Personal".  So you create a Tag named "Personal", and assign to all Notes in the Personal NB.

Then you could so a Search like this:  "-tag:Personal" and whatever other Search terms you'd like.

 

Thanks, that's a decent workaround.

 

Edit: After tagging all the notes in the notebook, I wondered why I had created a separate notebook in the first place when a tag was sufficient. Notes dumped into main notebook and the unnecessary notebook deleted.

[C6REW 416]

Hi JM,

That's a good workaround. I have started Personal and Business Archives and thought it would be good to exclude them from a search.

Regards

Chris

[jefito 5,598]

Edit: After tagging all the notes in the notebook, I wondered why I had created a separate notebook in the first place when a tag was sufficient. Notes dumped into main notebook and the unnecessary notebook deleted.

Correct. If you rely on the special-tag-per-notebook workaround, that means that you constantly need to maintain the special tag on on all notes in that notebook to have your search work correctly.

[trenchantly 15]

It's crazy that you cannot negate a notebook search. It surely far more likely you would want to ask that query that to negate a tag (which you can do).

[DTLow 5,749]

On May 17, 2014 at 6:51 PM, tavor said:

After tagging all the notes in the notebook, I wondered why I had created a separate notebook in the first place when a tag was sufficient. Notes dumped into main notebook and the unnecessary notebook deleted.

There are reasons for using notebooks; sharing, local, offline
For organizing, tags satisfy my requirements
Also backup export preserves tags but loses notebook info.

11 minutes ago, trenchantly said:

It's crazy that you cannot negate a notebook search. It surely far more likely you would want to ask that query that to negate a tag (which you can do).

I agree that its crazy, but disagree about it being far more likely
My searches are mostly based on tags

[trenchantly 15]

I disagree. You disagree. That's life.

[goutos19 3]

Excluding notebooks is a useful feature that should exist.

Vis-a-vis the recent announcement from Evernote about the fact that it allows human beings to read portions of your notes in order to work on fancy machine learning functionality: Evernote consistently focuses on bells and whistles that are unnecessary, when there's lots of basic stuff that still needs to be added. Users have requested many very useful features that are never addressed. It seems like every time I go online to see if something is possible, there's a message from 2014 saying "no it's not possible", and apparently nothing was ever done about it.

[JMichaelTX 4,119]

2 hours ago, goutos19 said:

Excluding notebooks is a useful feature that should exist.

I agree.

Until/IF Evernote provides this feature, I have found that making good use of Stacks and Tags allows me to exclude the Notes I do not want included.

[EdH 1,670]

still absurd you cannot do this in the search query.

 

[cduong13 11]

+1

[andronat 1]

Can we please have this feature? I have many notebooks that I also share with other people and I don't want results from them in my everyday workflow :/

[blackberryocto 0]

+1 for the "negate a notebook in search" feature

 

Please implement this feature evernote team.

[Cucumbercutter 11]

+ 1: We really need a "negate a notebook in search" feature. For instance, I keep a daily logbook in a notebook and I don't want to include the information in this notebook in my general search. It should be quite easy to implement like that one should be able to right-click on a notebook and then add the feature "negate this notebook from the search engine". 

[sputnik77 0]

+1: same need here, shared notebooks and archive notebooks mess search up... 

[goutos19 3]

On 11/15/2018 at 1:40 PM, jbk12 said:

its embarrassing evernote cant do this, the claims about it being a "powerful" search engine are silly. its a tool that doesnt allow you to even hide things from search. 

meanwhile-   we put a man on the moon 40 years ago.   not hating, just sayin....excuses

 

[tavor 668]

Closing in on 5 years and we still cannot exclude a notebook from a search. Emojis are a lousy consolation prize.  😒

It's 2019 and I'm still using workarounds for this lack of basic functionality.

[DTLow 5,749]

23 hours ago, tavor said:

Closing in on 5 years ...

Makes you wonder about priorities; this request has  user votes.

[sputnik77 0]

This is actually possible. Just type -(stack, tag, notebook name) in your search queries.

[DTLow 5,749]

3 hours ago, sputnik77 said:

This is actually possible. Just type -(stack, tag, notebook name) in your search queries.

Notebooks are an exception; notebooks can not be negated.

Documentation at https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828

[jefito 5,598]

2 hours ago, sputnik77 said:

This is actually possible. Just type -(stack, tag, notebook name) in your search queries.

This actually does not work for either 'notebook' or 'stack'., at least in the Windows Evernote client, and is not allowed by the Evernote search language (http://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php), so probably not for the Web client either. If it works in other Evernote clients, then that would be good to know. It does work for 'tag', which is not what's asked for here.

[trenchantly 15]

On 1/17/2019 at 10:11 AM, sputnik77 said:

This is actually possible. Just type -(stack, tag, notebook name) in your search queries.

Not true.

[sputnik77 0]

57 minutes ago, trenchantly said:

Not true.

Well, than is some Mac OsX magic

Perfectly working here on Evernote desktop for Mac. Just be sure to use the -(stack, tag, notebook name) snippet at the very start of your search string.

[DTLow 5,749]

3 hours ago, sputnik77 said:

Well, than is some Mac OsX magic

Perfectly working here on Evernote desktop for Mac. Just be sure to use the -(stack, tag, notebook name) snippet at the very start of your search string.

Can you provide the exact search string to use.  Your example illustrates a negated text search

Here's a sample of the search string for notebook @Inbox and text Journal
Include Notebook       notebook:@Inbox Journal
Exclude Notebook      -notebook:@Inbox Journal    *** Not Valid ***

[trenchantly 15]

Having double checked, it doesn't work. On any device. Or online.

[George G 11]

As noted early on in this thread,  with tags this works on my Windows client, so in theory you could use the tag "ignore" and do something like:

-tag:ignore searchstring

But a simple checkmark in a notebook or some other way to make this more automatic would be very helpful, per the original request.  Since I often put reference texts and books into evernote those will get search hits almost every time - and if the a large book PDF comes up as the first hit then the rendering engine will freeze while the preview is processes.  If we can work around it with an addition to the search string, this could surely be automated easily as well.

 

[happycheese 2]

This is ridiculous that this does not exist. The Evernote search functionality already has negative logic. Why has this not been implemented? 

[EdH 1,670]

On 1/26/2019 at 2:52 PM, happycheese said:

This is ridiculous that this does not exist. The Evernote search functionality already has negative logic. Why has this not been implemented? 

It should exist, but I wonder how complex it is to update the search syntax? Either it is really simple, or they have to coordinate the update of multiple apps/platforms, including their server for the web and remote searches from the client.

🤷‍♂️

[ButWeCould 0]

While I very much think evernote SHOULD adress it's search syntax to be more flexible and consistend and that this is long long overdue. (I propose something like THIS.) One option to filter out shared notebooks is by author.

You can exclude other authors by writing:

-author:"Max Musterman" (mind the quotes)

[s2sailor 2,505]

3 hours ago, ButWeCould said:

While I very much think evernote SHOULD adress it's search syntax to be more flexible and consistend and that this is long long overdue. (I propose something like THIS.) One option to filter out shared notebooks is by author.

You can exclude other authors by writing:

-author:"Max Musterman" (mind the quotes)

I went to your link and wasn't sure what point you were trying to make.  I would like to exclude notebooks in search as well but until then I just tag what I need to exclude and exclude the tag.

[ButWeCould 0]

Thats an example of a search grammar that I think is both: More simple and more flexible that evernotes current one. 

As i said author information is one  alternative because you don't need to tag manually and exclusion works for that case. (Shared notes  are tagged by their author so you might not exclude the notebook but you can excloude all notes not created by yourself) 

[Andr.A 2]

I found a workaround to exclude a notebook or stack of notebooks which is top-level.

Have all the notebooks which should be included grouped in one stack and the one that should be excluded should not be a part of that stack. For example I have the following notebook structure:

• Actionable
  • 1-Now
  • 2-Next
  • 3-Soon
  • 4-Later
  • 5-Someday-Maybe
• No-action-needed

To exclude the notebook "No-action-needed" I used "stack:Actionable".

 

   

[BeEfficient 44]

2021.... still not possible...

[Mike P 3,058]

1 hour ago, BeEfficient said:

2021.... still not possible...

While the official search syntax documentation says that this does not work I have found that 

-notebook:notebook_name

works fine. Will probably not work on legacy versions.

[BeEfficient 44]

@Mike P

I do use the new version of EN.

To correct myself and relating to this documentation:

It is not possible to exclude 2 notebooks like

searchring_word -notebook:notebook_name1 -notebook:notebook_name2

Can you confirm that?

 

[PinkElephant 8,999]

Try adding the „-„ part before the searched word (not sure it works).

[BeEfficient 44]

@PinkElephant

I can't believe it. True, if it is at the beginning, it is possible to exclude 2 or maybe more notebooks.

[PinkElephant 8,999]

It is sort of an interpreter, reads left to right and executes while it does. If the search word comes first, the next parts are practically ignored.

[random9q 0]

Ooh! Could we maybe even make this super easy to toggle between search sets, somehow?

I could totally see turning OFF searching inside my inbox by default, but when I want to sort my inbox searching ONLY within my inbox.

[PinkElephant 8,999]

You can apply a filter - once a filter is set, it will only search in the defined notebooks. All others are excluded.

There are no "negative" filters - you can't specify "Search all, except in this notebook".

[Mike P 3,058]

10 hours ago, random9q said:

Ooh! Could we maybe even make this super easy to toggle between search sets, somehow?

I could totally see turning OFF searching inside my inbox by default, but when I want to sort my inbox searching ONLY within my inbox.

You could start with a saved search (probably saved as a shortcut as you will use it alot) and then edit it. eg if you have a saved search of 

-notebook:inbox

You can run the saved search, click into the search box (or alt-ctrl-F on windows) and then add your search terms.

Searching only within inbox is the default behaviour if you start within the inbox.

[alokrajput13 1]

Works fine in EN Windows v10.28.3. Really useful to be able to exclude Notebooks in search syntax

[alokrajput13 1]

On 7/13/2021 at 2:37 PM, PinkElephant said:

Try adding the „-„ part before the searched word (not sure it works).

Worked well even without adding this syntax.