Converting to Tags, from Notebooks. Some questions:

[Kwitel 9]

First off, thanks in advance for reading.

 

So apparently I have been living under a rock. Only TODAY did I find out I can have as many sub-notes as I want, with infinite sub-levels, by using Tags, a opposed to Notebooks.

 

Ok, so I am going to convert everything over to a Tag-system. Before I do that, i have some questions:

 

1) How do i get the right "pane-view" in tags to mimic the pane of notebooks? More specifically, when I click on a notebook, In the right window I get to see all the information pertaining to that Notebook, in columns. This includes listing all the "sub-notebooks" in the stack, the titles of individual notes, the dates they were created, etc.

When I try to duplicate the system utilizing TAGS, I dont see anything in the right window, other than the tag names.

 

2) Similar to the above, when using notebooks and in the left column, if I click on a stack and it shows me all the sub-notebooks, there is a number next to each signifying how many notes are in each tag. It doesnt appear that i can get this using the TAG system either?

 

3) Again, along the same line of questions above, is there a way to bottom-reading-pane for individual tags, which you can see when viewing notes in a notebook?

 

Granted I think I might be very confused here because im not sure I know how to add a note to a tag...

 

Thank you for assisting this lost Evernote user! Much appreciated....

[jefito 5,589]

Which Evernote client are you using? The Windows client, has a tag panel similar to the notebook panel you mention; just click on the Tags header in the left panel.

 

Again, in the Windows client, in the tags list in the left panel, each tag has a note count associated with it.

 

Adding a tag to a note can be done any number of ways: drag a note to the tag you want in the left panel, or add the tag in the note header, or use Ctrl+Alt+T to bring up the Assign Tags dialog, for starters.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Tags are much different from Notebooks:

• Notebooks CONTAIN Notes
• Tags are NOT containers
• Notes can have multiple Tags ASSIGNED to each Note

If you display the Sidebar (Left Panel), you should see an item for "Notebooks", and then "Tags" (along with other stuff).

Both the Notebooks and Tags icons can be expanded to show the actual Notebooks and Tags in your account.

After you expand the Tags icon, just click on any Tag to filter the Notes list to Notes that have that Tag assigned to them.

 

In EN Win, there is a small right-facing arrow/icon just to the left of the Tags icon.  Click on this to expand/collapse the Tag list.

In EN Mac, right-click on the Tags icon to expand/collapse the Tag list.

 

 

 

First off, thanks in advance for reading.

 

So apparently I have been living under a rock. Only TODAY did I find out I can have as many sub-notes as I want, with infinite sub-levels, by using Tags, a opposed to Notebooks.

 

Ok, so I am going to convert everything over to a Tag-system. Before I do that, i have some questions:

 

1) How do i get the right "pane-view" in tags to mimic the pane of notebooks? More specifically, when I click on a notebook, In the right window I get to see all the information pertaining to that Notebook, in columns. This includes listing all the "sub-notebooks" in the stack, the titles of individual notes, the dates they were created, etc.

When I try to duplicate the system utilizing TAGS, I dont see anything in the right window, other than the tag names.

 

2) Similar to the above, when using notebooks and in the left column, if I click on a stack and it shows me all the sub-notebooks, there is a number next to each signifying how many notes are in each tag. It doesnt appear that i can get this using the TAG system either?

 

3) Again, along the same line of questions above, is there a way to bottom-reading-pane for individual tags, which you can see when viewing notes in a notebook?

 

Granted I think I might be very confused here because im not sure I know how to add a note to a tag...

 

Thank you for assisting this lost Evernote user! Much appreciated....

 

[Kwitel 9]

Ok, I think I have little more clarity now.

 

That said, I am confused as to why I then cannot create any additional subfolders.

 

Why would the developers of this product limit the user to just going  a certain amount of levels deep?

 

For example, I have a "personal" stack, and then a "health" notebook within it. Yes I can have multiple notes within that notebook but id like to have notes within notes or...go "one level deeper".

 

Why not just have unlimited sub-folder capabilities like outlook?

[jefito 5,589]

Ok, I think I have little more clarity now.

 

That said, I am confused as to why I then cannot create any additional subfolders.

 

Why would the developers of this product limit the user to just going  a certain amount of levels deep?

 

For example, I have a "personal" stack, and then a "health" notebook within it. Yes I can have multiple notes within that notebook but id like to have notes within notes or...go "one level deeper".

 

Why not just have unlimited sub-folder capabilities like outlook?

Because Evernote prefers to have a single level with multiple labels (the GMail equivalent of tags), like GMail?

 

More seriously, they de-emphasize notebooks in favor of tags, which are often more flexible than hierarchical structures. Why not have a "Personal" notebook, with a "Health" tag, and other tags for other categorizations of Health, for example, "Fitness" or "Medical" tags?

[Kwitel 9]

 

Ok, I think I have little more clarity now.

 

That said, I am confused as to why I then cannot create any additional subfolders.

 

Why would the developers of this product limit the user to just going  a certain amount of levels deep?

 

For example, I have a "personal" stack, and then a "health" notebook within it. Yes I can have multiple notes within that notebook but id like to have notes within notes or...go "one level deeper".

 

Why not just have unlimited sub-folder capabilities like outlook?

Because Evernote prefers to have a single level with multiple labels (the GMail equivalent of tags), like GMail?

 

More seriously, they de-emphasize notebooks in favor of tags, which are often more flexible than hierarchical structures. Why not have a "Personal" notebook, with a "Health" tag, and other tags for other categorizations of Health, for example, "Fitness" or "Medical" tags?

 

 

I dont think I am following how using tags would make my life any simpler.

 

I would like to be able to view a notebook stack and then individual notes within those notebooks. 

Is my "view" any different when I begin to utilize tags?

 

I dont know why but I dont get the whole tags thing...if I want to find something, why wouldnt I either just search for it or simply find the notebook that I believe it to be in and look there?

 

Would you happen to know of any videos that i cant watch that would help me better understand how this works? 

[CalS 5,280]

Don't know of any videos, but the point is that you can also search by tags.  So to Jeff's point, you could tag all your health notes with the tag Health and then search using tag:Health.  It a simplistic way it would be like having all the health notes in a Notebook called Health.  You don't have to do it this way for sure, it's just an alternative, particularly if you run out of notebooks.  Some folks use keywords in the titles of their notes to search by as opposed to tags. 

 

More notebooks and additional layers of notebooks have been discussed many times in the forum.  Consensus seems to be that it is not going to happen any time soon, if ever.  So, alternatives do get developed.  It is what it is at this point.

[gazumped 11,661]

A quick Google with "evernote tag youtube" has 1.4M hits,  so there's material out there - try "Work Smarter with Evernote: Organizing with Notebooks and Tags" - http://youtu.be/hk1eKDNmhq4

[jefito 5,589]

I dont know why but I dont get the whole tags thing...if I want to find something, why wouldnt I either just search for it or simply find the notebook that I believe it to be in and look there?

Sure, you just can search for it, and that's perfectly valid.Lots of folks do that, some of who use special embedded keywords or titles to help them. But if you're going to depend on search, why would you care about notebooks, then? If you have a lot of notebooks, then you need to remember them all to "simply find the notebook". Might work for you, but it wouldn't for me. 

 

The thing about notebooks is that they force you to choose which single notebook a note belongs to. If I have a medical bill, then which notebook does it go into? The "Bills" notebook, or the "Medical" notebook? Whereas, if I tag it with both "Medical" and "Bill"", it doesn't really matter which notebook it belongs to; I just search on those tags and I see all of my medical bills. 

[Frank.dg 1,385]

There are two main ways in which tags can be used.

With the exception of the iOS clients, tags can be "nested" or stacked one on top of the other. This, for all intents and purposes, then enables one to mimic/mirror A notebook-within-a-notebook-within-a-notebook-type setup.

The other use of tags is to allow certain notes to appear in more than one context at the same time.

So tags are more flexible in two respects: One can use them to go deeper and deeper in your hierarchy... or to group notes from dispersed categories into one new, additional (or consolidated) category.

One could explain this all until the cows come home - however, the only way to understand it is to tinker around... and time. One could easily start with a notebook-based system... and then further down the line, if the need arose, you could easily modify your system, as I have done recently, to include tags in the mix.

I use tags for both dynamics mentioned. I like to have two main nested sections within my tag list - One that mimics notebooks and stacks... and another section that categorizes secondary contexts.

As Jeff mentioned above, one can use a hybrid of both a tag-based system and a notebook-based system. Only thing is, the benefits thereof are not easily seen when you're just starting out. A stack and notebook dynamic suffice. But further down the road when you need a notebook with the notebook within a stack setup - that's where you can begin to really put tags to use. You can modify a few previous stacks to become notebooks... and you can convert some of your previous notebooks to tag categories. That allows you the "one level deeper" many folk are looking for.

A hybrid system can easily mimic a notebook within a notebook within a stack setup - especially on desktop, where in the note list (middle panel), one can filter for the available tags within a notebook context very easily.

My system is predominantly a hierarchical thing, as opposed to needing notes to appear in more than one category/ context at the same time. Even so, tags have given me an additional level deep within to work. If my system ever gets any more complex, I could go a tag within a tag within a tag within a notebook within a stack deep. In fact, for one or two cases I have done just that.

[Wordsgood 526]

Hi.  You might find this YouTube video by Evan Carmichael helpful.  When you open the link (below) you'll notice he has a whole series of Evernote videos. If you want to peruse them, it's easiest to just suscribe to his channel.

Evernote Tutorial - Notebooks or Tags - Which is Better?

http://youtu.be/lPCLknRhgvk

The forum's own SPG "Evernote" Scott also has his own series on YouTube, which I also found most helpful. Here's a link to the 1st of his series:

http://youtu.be/xxMJGtBXkvc

These and other videos easily found on YouTube are all a bit dated in that all the apps have seen at least a few updates since they were posted. However, they do all showcase the basics of Evernote as a whole, and might help to wrap your head around the whole concept of not relying on the standard concept of files and folders in a hierarchal system that we're all so used to dealing with.

The basic strengths of Evernote in my experience are:

➡ It's cross-platform access where you can all your notes from virtually any internet-connected desktop computer and all your mobile devices.

➡ It's search ability that allows you to find any note with as many (upto the 250 limit assuming you have a free account), or as few, Notebooks as you want.

There are some heavy power users here who have massive research databases in their accounts accounts yet have no need for more than one or two Notebooks. Some rely heavily on the use of proper Evernote Search Grammar as outlined in the below linked Knowledge Base (KB) article. Others depend on using keywords and descriptive titles with consistent a date style starting each Note title. i.e.: YYYYMMDD, or DDMMYY, or in my case DD/MM/YYYY

Search Grammar KB Article:

https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php

Advanced Search Syntax KB Article

https://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#!/article/23245321/

Evernote is basically a blank slate, or virtual bin, if you prefer, where you can store various types of digital data. And while searching this forum, or Google and YouTube, to ask questions and see how other users organize their EN Databases is helpful, the only way to really see and get the best value is to experiment to see what works best for your particular use case. That might result in settling into a combination of all the above strategies and the use of Tags and/or Stacks.

For me personally, as I've gotten better at structuring notes and their attributes like Tags so a quick search will drill through hundreds of notes quickly, that my reliance on Notebooks is getting smaller all the time. I don't use Stacks or the Advanced Search Syntax at all now, and find searching with "natural language" and/or for specific Tags, gets me to the note(s) I need pretty fast. For example, I read a lot and like to keep reading notes, reading lists, favourite authors I follow and book wishlists. I can locate specific notes by searching my Reading notebook for specific books by typing in the book title or author or whatever other Keywords I think might bring up what I need. If they write in more than one genre, I can first narrow the search paremeters by pulling up all the notes Tagged with the specific genre or sub-genre.

That isn't how I started out when new to Evernote. I had come from decades of thinking and working, in a deeply complex, large paper and electronic heirarchal file and nested folder systems. The idea of not working within that framework horrified me. I restructured my database a few times, first adding notebooks like crazy and gerry rigging a cross-referencing system.

My best advice? Date all your Note Title in a consistent manner, use keywords that make sense to you both in the titles and the body of your notes. Watch some YouTube videos and search this forum using keywords such as Tags, Organization, Optimizing Evernote, Note Titles, Dating, Keywords, Plain Text, etc. Read through long threads where various long-time users have posted some great examples.

Good luck!

[Wordsgood 526]

Oh dear, that was one of my marathon replies. Sorry, hope it doesn't overwhelm you...

[dakotacheryl 2]

Wordsgood...what a wonderful, thorough and thoughtful post...thanks so much for taking the time !!

[Wordsgood 526]

*blushes* You're most welcome!

[gazumped 11,661]

I think the variety and depth of the responses highlights one basic Evernote premise - find a system that suits your own needs;  it might be all notebooks,  or all tags,  or a mixture of both;  but play around with it and see what you prefer.  Your data isn't going to disappear whatever you do,  or change (although backing up your information is a really really good idea - https://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#/article/28607737).  Try different approaches out so you can see what works best with your data,  on your devices,  and for you personally.  Everyone is different!