Managing long notes

[tavor 668]

With the recently announced changes as it relates to EN's tiers, I decided to download and play around with OneNote. The very first thing I checked was whether I could collapse/expand outline nodes. Given that MS makes Word and that collapsible outlines have been around for over 20 years, of course it could! And then I was reminded how desperately I miss this function in Evernote. 

This got me to wondering, how do you all deal with long notes in Evernote? My current strategies are:

1. Just let the note get long. This is great from a speed of note content addition perspective, as well as for portability. If I ever need to take my notes elsewhere, this method is the most portable. The big downside is that when I come back to the note, I have to do a lot of scanning to find the particular bit of info I'm looking for, or run a search inside the note, which can easily end up in doing a lot of scanning since a note generally covers a specific item/issue, so keywords can be all over the note. Another downside is the visual clutter.

2. When there is a relatively long and discrete section of the note, I'll make that into a new note and place a note link in the original note. Downsides are that this slows down the note content addition process, and it potentially creates a massive ticking frustration bomb. If I ever need to take my notes elsewhere, odds are good those note links aren't coming along for the ride. Even the .enex files do not include note links. Who wants to spend a lot of time piecing their notes back together once those links are gone?

The obvious solutions are collapsible outlines and/or internal note links, but since these have been long requested features with no word from EN if they will ever be incorporated, we'll have to make do. So how do you all manage long notes in EN?

[DTLow 5,736]

11 minutes ago, tavor said:

How do you all manage long notes in EN?

I use your Option 2; sub notes with links in a master note

Its not the expand/collapse of an outline, but it's workable.

Long notes don't work well

- as you pointed out, having to scroll down to the bottom

- makes searches less useful

- risk of corruption

 

[gazumped 11,666]

Yup I'm with him.  Manage long notes by not using them.  I use a list of links to shorter sections in a 'master' note to hold it together.  Since those links are the exact titles of the sub-notes in your document it should be too hard to find them again if you need to - I also tag or title my notes (usually title: I'm big on titles..) with a document code,  date or standard keywords as well as the individual section detail.  I like master notes - you can mess around with section order by reordering the list in the note.

Edit:  Or (I forgot) put your long note in a (Word etc.) document and attach the document to the note.  Copy/ Paste the content or add an Exec Summary to provide searchable keywords if necessary.

[tavor 668]

10 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Since those links are the exact titles of the sub-notes in your document it should be too hard to find them again if you need to

On that note, I seem to recall that at some point in the past, right clicking on a note and selecting 'Copy Note Link' and then pasting that note link into another note resulted in an internal URL showing. To avoid that and to get the note link to display the title of the linked note, I got into the habit of dragging notes into other notes to create the note link. But I just tried 'Copy Note Link' and when pasted, it shows the title of the linked note. Is that a change in behavior of the 'Copy Note Link' function, or am I going nuts?

 

10 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Edit:  Or (I forgot) put your long note in a (Word etc.) document and attach the document to the note.  Copy/ Paste the content or add an Exec Summary to provide searchable keywords if necessary.

That's not a bad workaround. It's trading one inconvenience for another, but it is nice to have that alternative.

 

[gazumped 11,666]

22 minutes ago, tavor said:

Is that a change in behavior of the 'Copy Note Link' function, or am I going nuts?

If it is a change,  it's not recent - I've been doing that for a while now and always see the title if you paste in another note.  Not sure if the same applies for other document types like email or Word...

[CalS 5,280]

I also avoid long notes, but if something does come up with lots of bits and pieces that are better viewed in a consolidated fashion, I will create a TOC note for the pieces, preserving note title in the links.

[s2sailor 2,200]

12 hours ago, tavor said:

The very first thing I checked was whether I could collapse/expand outline nodes.

I agree to the work arounds the others have mentioned, but I would also like the editor to have this ability very, very much.  FWIW, there is a thread in the feedback forum here where you can up vote if you desire.  It is the feature request currently with the most votes out there so hopefully the developers are at least aware of it.

[tavor 668]

4 minutes ago, s2sailor said:

I agree to the work arounds the others have mentioned, but I would also like the editor to have this ability very, very much.  FWIW, there is a thread in the feedback forum here where you can up vote if you desire.  It is the feature request currently with the most votes out there so hopefully the developers are at least aware of it.

Thanks for linking the voting thread on this.

Yeah, I agree - outlines are such a basic aspect of note taking and collapsible outlines have been around for over 20 years, so it's a glaring omission for a modern note taking app to not have this feature (unless we're talking a super simple note 'post-it note' style note taking app like Google Keep).

[s2sailor 2,200]

Now that Evernote has rolled their own editor I'm hoping that we will eventually see this, even if just on the desktop clients.

[wizzard 1]

I mind about interesting solution case that it would be nice to implement, where you could simply select the text you want to "collapse" and by right mouse click on it will get context menu with some "create related note" menu item. Then it should create new note populated with previously selected text and insert link instead of selected text at parent node.

In this case we use default functionality but only need to add context menu item with some automation.

[gazumped 11,666]

2 hours ago, wizzard said:

I mind about interesting solution case that it would be nice to implement, where you could simply select the text you want to "collapse" and by right mouse click on it will get context menu with some "create related note" menu item. Then it should create new note populated with previously selected text and insert link instead of selected text at parent node.

In this case we use default functionality but only need to add context menu item with some automation.

Hi.  Please don't cross post: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/101129-create-collaspible-sections-in-a-note/#comment-467682

- Even if different posts are relevant to your request,  just pick one.