Tip/Workaround - Searching for Notes With Only One Tag

[freyja313 46]

The following might seem a little obsessive-compulsive but that's how I roll...

My Rule: Every note has to have at least one "valid" tag applied to it. 

My Truth: A lot of times I add notes and don't tag them right away so every so often I go through all untagged notes and tag them properly. 

My Problem: While going through a note cleanup project recently, rather than tag some of the "cleaned up" untagged notes properly, I tagged them with single semi-valid-to-those-notes placeholder tags and now want to go back and find those notes and add the additional "valid" tags they should have. Because the placeholder tags I used for these notes are valid tags in their own right, I can't just search for all notes tagged with "X" tag, plus I also am not sure which placeholder tag may have been applied to those notes anyway. However, since I know the notes that were tagged as part of that project only have a single tag on them, I want to track down all notes that have a single tag and then review those notes to make sure they're tagged properly. 

I tried to find info on searching for notes that have only one tag on them and stumbled across these posts:

That first thread indicated you could sort by tags in list view and you should easily be able to see which notes only have one tag on them. Problem is I have about 4000 notes and 170 tags so that's not really feasible for me. I *did* discover that if I select and copy the list of notes using CTRL-A and CTRL-C, I can paste the list into Excel, then use the Text to Columns command on the Tags column to separate each tag into its own column and then delete the rows that contain more than one tag. Once that's done, I should be able to quickly review what's left and clean up from there. <Insert "Ta-da!" emoticon here.>

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, freyja313 said:

 

That first thread indicated you could sort by tags in list view and you should easily be able to see which notes only have one tag on them. Problem is I have about 4000 notes and 170 tags so that's not really feasible for me. I *did* discover that if I select and copy the list of notes using CTRL-A and CTRL-C, I can paste the list into Excel, then use the Text to Columns command on the Tags column to separate each tag into its own column and then delete the rows that contain more than one tag. Once that's done, I should be able to quickly review what's left and clean up from there. <Insert "Ta-da!" emoticon here.>

I'm curious how you go from cleaning up your spreadsheet to cleaning up your notes.

When you updated the tags in your notes, did it also update the Change Date

Sorting by Change Date might help in isolating the notes.

[jefito 5,589]

9 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I'm curious how you go fro cleaning up your spreadsheet to cleaning up your notes.

When you updated the tags in your notes, did it also update the Change Date

Sorting by Change Date might help in isolating the notes.

Modifying a note's tags is not supposed to modify Updated Date, and that's by design, if I recall correctly. It doesn't appear to in the Windows client.

[CalS 5,280]

You could highlight the notes with one tag in list view after sorting by tag and add a tag to all of them (Ctrl-Alt-T), say !Fix.  Then do a search on !Fix, sort by tag, and have at it.  Delete the !Fix tag from each note as you do the clean up.  When the !Fix is at zero notes, you are done.

EDIT:  Not a solution, didn't think it through.  Oops.  

[freyja313 46]

48 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I'm curious how you go fro cleaning up your spreadsheet to cleaning up your notes.

When you updated the tags in your notes, did it also update the Change Date

Sorting by Change Date might help in isolating the notes.

No, updating tags unfortunately doesn't change the "updated date" - that would certainly make things a lot easier!

So I threw the list into EN. Each note title and it's corresponding attributes appears on one row with each attribute in its own column. The tags are lumped together in one column separated by commas so I use Text to Columns on that column which splits each tags into its own column. For example, I have a note with four tags on it so when dumped into Excel the single tag cell says "@thetop, Discounts, Household, Organization". After doing Text to Columns, I now have four cells, each with a unique tag listed in it: "@thetop", "Discounts", "Household", "Organization". I then use sort and filter to manipulate the rows and delete the rows that I've reviewed. I started with 4412 notes (rows). Right away I knock off 633 rows which are notes that have no tags (so, um, yeah, I been slacking on that for a while...) Any note that has two or more tags on it I can knock off so that removes another 3205.  That leaves me with 574 to review so I sort those by their single tag and then do a quick visual review of note title to tag in Excel. Anything I think looks good gets deleted from the spreadsheet, anything I'm not sure of (essentially whatever's left on the spread after removing the "good" ones) I double check in EN and update accordingly. Does that make sense? 

[freyja313 46]

36 minutes ago, csihilling said:

You could highlight the notes with one tag in list view after sorting by tag and add a tag to all of them (Ctrl-Alt-T), say !Fix.  Then do a search on !Fix, sort by tag, and have at it.  Delete the !Fix tag from each note as you do the clean up.  When the !Fix is at zero notes, you are done.

This is good suggestion and I've used a similar method for a different clean up project (tagging all notes with a placeholder and then untagging once reviewed until nothing's left.) The problem with what I'm doing here is that sorting by tag sorts alphabetically by the alphabetical first tag in a note so all  the single tag notes are buried in between all the multiple tag notes all the way down the list. Within EN, I'd have to go through the list manually and I know I'd more than likely miss a few. Here's an example what that looks like:

@Tables
@Tables
@Tables
@Tables, @thetop, _TTD
@Tables, @thetop, _TTD, _TTG, Android
@Tables, NB_Daily Journal
@Tables, NB_Rest Menus, RM_Asian
@thetop, _TTD
@thetop, _TTD, _TTG, Android
@thetop, _TTD, Android
@thetop, _TTD, Family & Friends
@thetop, _TTD, Travel
@thetop, _TTG, Food & Bev, Household
@thetop, Household
@thetop, LOL
@thetop, Money
@WORKING
@WORKING
_TTD
_TTD
_TTD
_TTD, _TTG, Business, Crafts & Creativity, Jewelry
_TTD, _TTG, Crafts & Creativity, Food & Bev
_TTD, _TTG, Entertain & Recreation

Using my Excel method I can easily strip out all the notes between @Tables and @WORKING as not needing to be reviewed simply by sorting the second tag column, plus it takes care of ALL the "dual tag" notes at the same time so I'm able to dump 3000+ notes in one shot. EN + Excel =

[CalS 5,280]

17 hours ago, freyja313 said:

Using my Excel method I can easily strip out all the notes between @Tables and @WORKING as not needing to be reviewed simply by sorting the second tag column, plus it takes care of ALL the "dual tag" notes at the same time so I'm able to dump 3000+ notes in one shot. EN + Excel =

Yeah, my bad - brain f3rt on my part I am afraid.  I have used Excel as well to find things in the past like notes that haven't synced between PCs.  Thanks for the Text to Columns hint.  I actually wrote code to separate the tags.  <grumble>

Edited the original post.