Request More Drill Down Layers

[JA2029 0]

Hello, I have begun using Evernote as a location to store all of the research that I do for writing, business, health, interpersonal, etc.  Up until my exposure to  Evernote, I created an extensive library of topical folders on my computer that drill down to specific articles about a specific topic (Example: Scientific Advances / Advances in Propulsion / Advances in Space Propulsion / Theoretical Space Propulsion Systems).  I literally collected tens of thousands of articles so that as I write my own works, I can easily find all related articles that I have found over the course of time.

Because Evernote has so many powerful functions that work well to allow it to be a library, can you please add the ability to folder material in greater "depth".  As I currently understand Evernote, there are Notebooks and Notes within those Notebooks.  However, only having two levels of organization creates enormous issues when trying to find a needle in the haystack, OR more so, trying to find 10 needles in a haystack that all relate to one another but were uploaded at different times, have different key words, etc.  The search features in Evernote may or may not help if I were to have tens of thousands of articles inputted, and certainly I may not find all related articles unless I did several searches with different terms.  My only other option is to somehow Title them all in a similar way.

Please advise.

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, JA2029 said:

Because Evernote has so many powerful functions that work well to allow it to be a library, can you please add the ability to folder material in greater "depth". 

Have you looked at the Tag feature.  It allows for a large hierarchy of levels.

For me, notebooks are what I use when I need default/sync/local/shared/offsite access

I use tags to organize and relate my data.

[CalS 5,280]

14 hours ago, JA2029 said:

when trying to find a needle in the haystack, OR more so, trying to find 10 needles in a haystack that all relate to one another but were uploaded at different times, have different key words, etc.

IMO, the power of EN lies in its search capabilities.  Enter the different key words in an ANY search and you will get all notes with any of the words, could be more notes than you want sometimes for sure. 

My advice would be to worry less about where something is put, but more about what criteria you want to use to find it; free text, keyword, or tags.  Use notebooks more as a hard segregation tool.  Deeper nesting of notebooks has been requested for some time but EN has not shown any interest in adding that functionality. 

So in the meantime....  Tags as a surrogate for your current folders could be a place to start an experiment.  Then you can drag the articles into EN by folder using the Import Folders function and have an easy time tagging them.  Just one notebook with a tag tree that matches your folders.  Easy enough to adjust later (other than the nested notebooks).

[gustavgi 308]

14 hours ago, JA2029 said:

Hello, I have begun using Evernote as a location to store all of the research that I do for writing, business, health, interpersonal, etc.  Up until my exposure to  Evernote, I created an extensive library of topical folders on my computer that drill down to specific articles about a specific topic (Example: Scientific Advances / Advances in Propulsion / Advances in Space Propulsion / Theoretical Space Propulsion Systems).  I literally collected tens of thousands of articles so that as I write my own works, I can easily find all related articles that I have found over the course of time.

Because Evernote has so many powerful functions that work well to allow it to be a library, can you please add the ability to folder material in greater "depth".  As I currently understand Evernote, there are Notebooks and Notes within those Notebooks.  However, only having two levels of organization creates enormous issues when trying to find a needle in the haystack, OR more so, trying to find 10 needles in a haystack that all relate to one another but were uploaded at different times, have different key words, etc.  The search features in Evernote may or may not help if I were to have tens of thousands of articles inputted, and certainly I may not find all related articles unless I did several searches with different terms.  My only other option is to somehow Title them all in a similar way.

Please advise.

Like @csihilling is on to, you have to rewire the thought that notebooks are the ones that needs "depth". When this topic is brought up I always ask how natural it would be for you to put several physical notebooks INSIDE another physical notebook.

And whatever you think you know about tags from other software, just forget that as it doesn't apply to Evernote's way of implementing tags. The depth and need for navigation or filtering is what Evernote tags are for. EN has a 250 notebook limit, but a 100.000 tag limit. Tags also let's you put the same note in more than one "folder" if the note concerns more than one topic.

Everyone has there own personal sorting system, but my in my way of operating I think of notebooks as solid "context containers". I therefore suggest you don't create a new notebook for a topic which is in ANY way related to the context of another notebook. If you ever think that you might sometime end up in a situation where you feel forced to chose between one notebook over the other, then your notebooks has names which are too "narrow".

Based on your post. I would suggest 4 seperate notebooks for Writing, Business, Health and Interpersonal etc.. You then also create 4 separate tags called Writing, Business, Health and Interpersonal as well. Those 4 tags you never apply to any note. But within those tags you create the prefered depth; Scientific Advances / Advances in Propulsion / Advances in Space Propulsion / Theoretical Space Propulsion Systems etc, and those you apply to notes as you wish.

And if the above "rule" about context is applied, you could also create a notebook STACK called business instead, and then create a notebook called HR and another notebook called Sales and Marketing - because those are unrelatable except that both departments belong to the same firm. But even though Sales/Marketing and Finance usually are two different departments, I would never suggest that you split those up through notebooks. Their focus on income/outcome is to dependent on one another and note content will likely intertwine.

I myself use notebooks only to separate sources from where information is collected, not the topics themselves. Sources are never interchangable according to the above "rule" about context. In this way I can also rank sources, and in that way later sort my search results by the most "relevant" source later. Topics are separated through tags only.

You can then decide in the options menu if you want a click on a "parent tag" to also include/show the notes tagged with its "child tags", or not.

If you uncheck this box, tags will work like folders in Windows - where the files inside a sub-folder won't show unless you navigate deeper. This means that if you have a folder called USA and a sub-folder called Florida, opening USA won't show you notes about Florida. However since you can add both tags to a note, you are in this way given the freedom to decide on a note-by-note basis under which tags your note will show up.

The are many threads about this. You can check this recent one for some more thoughts:

EDIT

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

On 6/23/2016 at 3:58 PM, csihilling said:

IMO, the power of EN lies in its search capabilities. 

@JA2029, et al:

I get your point.

IMO, searching and browsing and information presentation are often confused.

Searching is great when you have some idea of what you are looking for, some idea what the keywords are that are associated with that topic.

Browsing and information presentation is completely different.  Maybe you have no idea what the subject covers, or what the keywords are.  But you want to read and learn (or maybe relearn) about the subject at hand.  That's when a logical, hierarchical presentation of the subject matter is so important.

Think about it.  If you are taking a class, or a training course, or a tutorial, and the only material they gave you was a set of randomly organized "pages", but it had an index, and you could search it,  how would you proceed to learn a new subject?

I guess my main point is that we need *both* great searching, and great browsing/reading capability.