Wilf Forrow

With the new ability to collapse & expand headers (wonderful), headers which were pretty useless have suddenly become massively useful. 

But they don't stand out enough in my notes, so I've been changing them to green, bold, underscore, which works really well.  But resetting the style individually on every single note, individually for large, medium and small headers is absolutely excruciating.  And I have a lot of notes.

I'd be happy with one preference setting for all notes, but in the ideal world, you'd be able to choose from several, perhaps on individual notes, or by notebook?  I haven't used templates, but could they help - eg store the header formats with a template?

I don't understand your talk of css - your example doesn't look like the web version, does the native app use css, and can you customise it?

I love Evernote, but I'm struggling with the recent visual changes.  Who thinks it's a good idea to have a dark grey font on a light grey background?  I can hardly read my tag buttons, the font is so narrow.  I use the triple hyphen shortcut underlines to split my notes up visually, but they're almost invisible now.  Is it because the developers are all under 30 with huge perfect monitors?

[ I've just discovered a (new?) setting for Note Width which stops centre justifying notes and truncating at 80 characters!
I wonder is there are more new settings I haven't discovered to fix the above issues? ]

I agree, when I moved from OneNote to EN, tabs were one of the things I missed.

Structuring big notes is one of the biggest challenges for EN, and I'm open to anything that makes it better, whether it's vertical or horizontal tabs, or outlining to show or hide chunks of note.  

Tags are brilliant to organise notes, so it’s disappointing that they don’t work for tasks. 
And there aren’t many tasks worth doing where the task title is enough. Surely a task could have a note behind it?

I agree nothing is easy, but we're trying to suggest a way to implement a really powerful feature for minimal code change, based almost entirely on what's already there.

It's almost exactly what Mike P does manually, with the tiniest bit of automation to make it 100 times easier.

I thought that one of the benefits of moving to a single code base was that they could do small developments more easily!

A more stream-lined process which seems very easy for Evernote to implement :

With respect, I know I can do that, but I don't, because it's just not very easy or intuitive, and it's just cludgey, almost un-usable.  And if you work in separate windows, the back arrow takes you back to the search list, not the separate window master note.

This would be a huge step forward and if done carefully could be the outliner so many of us are crying out for.
 

Big notes get unmanageable very quickly. But multiple separate notes are even worse - it’s too easy to lose notes, and almost impossible to manage their sequence. 

This would let us structure them painlessly.  Essential. 

I don't think trying to fiddle system dates is a good answer.  I've found Evernote randomly updates modification dates on old notes so they all appear as modified 'today'.

I agree, some more sorting options would be very useful, but for the moment, I use reverse date in the title, like 2022-11-14 xxxx, and it works pretty well.

I also have year tags, like 2022, 2021, etc, which are good to filter by.

17 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

If you want to narrow a search down, with a few taps or clicks you can add filters to reduce the number of hits. I mean, if your aversion against a solid search syntax makes your hand tremble when typing in the few commands you need.
Maybe you better explore some more of the possibilities (now you mastered cmd-J), instead of posting nonsense about Google search being sooooo superior. You ever noticed the first hits are there because the site owners paid to be listed first ? „Working soooo good“ - what a joke, maybe for Google to make even more money.

I'll try and keep my cool here.  My comments about Google are that it "just works" for most people, so they use it.  I would suggest 90% of Evernote users wouldn't know what "solid search syntax" means if it hit them in the face.  Evernote needs to attract that 90%, not the 10% who do, or the 1% that actually use it every day.

1 hour ago, Boot17 said:

With Evernote, I generally use the "Switch To" (Cmd-J on Mac) command for my searching. It seems like that only uses the note title name, tag name, or notebook name to find the first 10 items and then has a catchall "search *** in Notes" at the bottom. If I don't find the note by title that I am looking for in the "Switch To", then I search all my notes.

Brilliant!!!! Just tried "Switch To" (Cmd-J on Mac) command for the first time - thank you.  Found every "Intitle:" keyword I tried instantly.

But I've been using Evernote for many years and I'm still learning - so I go back to my original theme:  Evernote search is a key differentiator.  If it doesn't find our target in the first few notes, without any complicated syntax or keyboard shortcuts, it gives us a reason to look at competitors.  

The reason everybody uses Google search instead of Yahoo, AltaVista, Bing and all the hundreds of others is because it returns the most relevant results at the top of the list.  No trying to remember advanced search syntax.

Many search words appear dozens or hundreds of times in my notes - you would have thought having it in the title was a pretty good clue, and pretty easy to implement?

I know about "Intitle:" but I bet very few Evernote users do, and who wants to type that mouthful anyway?  I only ever use it when the results are so useless that I have to do the whole search again. 

I discovered Presentation Mode late, and used it a few times.  It was brilliant, especially for working with other people.  But it was a very hidden feature, and most of my Evernote was working on my own.

Now I do more team working, I would find it very useful, if it was easy for Evernote to do. 

Saying 'other programs do presentations' is only a good answer if you don't mind copying and reformatting your notes - the power of Evernote Presentation mode was that you could instantly present your existing Evernote in a way that was reasonably readable for everyone, with no effort.  I'd pay for that as a Premium feature, and I wouldn't need everything that PowerPoint can do.  Even better to have a 'convert to PowerPoint' button.  

But it's far less important than OUTLINING, which is probably the longest, most called-for missing feature of Evernote.  The team's busy - do Outlining, THEN presentation mode.

We discussed this in the note above. 

In terms of web vs app, I thought new features were tried first in the Web version, and if they work, they're added to the apps on the other platforms?

In summary:
- Edit tags for tag fragments or wildcards - on Mac, right click menu or keyboard shortcut (bit of a handful as ctrl/option/Cmd/T).
- Add tags to avoid tag fragments or wildcards - on Mac, click the bottom line 'Add tag' button or keyboard shortcut Cmd/'.

On 2/19/2022 at 11:14 PM, PinkElephant said:

Sort by title … duplicates carry the same title, followed by a „copy + number“ extension. Not hard to find.

I've been having a few duplicates, but they have the same title as the original note?  To the point that I have to rename at least one of them to differentiate them.

But showing 'copy' in the title would at least help, because you could search Intitle:copy to find them.

Although they don't happen often (mainly because the iPhone and iPad Evernote is now so slow I don't use it), Evernote has always been quite poor at warning you about them, and then about helping you sort them out.  Even the new "Evernote has found a duplicate - click to see it" message is quite awkward.

I'm normally reduced to copying each note to a text file and using a Compare program or Excel to find the differences.  It would be great if Evernote could do that for us.

On 1/27/2022 at 6:46 AM, Mike P said:

I agree but EN don't seem keen on preferences. I would also like the option of having tags in the hierarchy or just listed alphabetically when using the edit tags dialogue box.

The good news is that both systems are currently catered for. Use the tags area at the bottom of the note to search with tags starting with that letter (or letters) or use the edit tags menu if you want to search for all tags containing those letters,

Brilliant compromise - thanks Mike.
- Edit tags to get wildcards - on Mac, right click menu or keyboard shortcut (bit of a handful as ctrl/option/Cmd/T).
- Add tags to avoid wildcards - on Mac, click the bottom line 'Add tag' button or keyboard shortcut Cmd/'.

1 hour ago, Mike P said:

@mrkcvr @Wilf Forrow Initial testing of 10.30.6 (Windows) looks good. Tag names do not seem to be case sensitive anymore and so far all my tag searches containing the wildcard character (*) have returned the expected results. I'd be interested in your experience.

Mac 10.30.6-mac-ddl-public (3202) now looking good too !!!  

Wildcard "tag:" searches all work perfectly, not case sensitive, eg   "tag:loc:g*"  correctly picks up tags of "Loc:Greece" and "Loc:Germany".

Brilliant, Evernote.  Thank you.

When searching for tags in filters or tag view, you can type fragments,  so for example "22" will find "2022" and "Shopping:2022".  It's really useful.

But when adding tags to a note, you can't - you must type the start of the tag, so "22" only offers to create tag "22" - you'd have to type "Shop" to find "Shopping:2022".

Please can adding tags find tags by fragment like the other tag options.

6 hours ago, Mike P said:

It seems it doesn't work 100% reliably. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. It seems to generally work more reliably when the tag name does not contain non-alphanumeric characters but even that is not guaranteed. However it does seem to work as expected on the web version. I have tried the classic thing of deleting my local data but it didn't help.  I have raised a support ticket and will report back.

Thanks!  It seems to work perfectly on the web, but I can't get it to work at all on the Mac, (10.29.7-mac-ddl-public (3186), Editor: v140.0.17554, Service: v1.46.2).

My tags are nested to 2 levels with ":", so I've redone the tests with single level tags, and alpha characters only:
Mac client:

• tag:ByLoc  works
• tag:byLoc  fails (case sensitive, which is a nuisance)
• tag:B*.        fails
• tag:ByLocB*  fails
• BUT
• tag:201*   works perfectly, picking up 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
• tag:2*.      works perfectly, picking up 2, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022

Web client:  All work perfectly, and they're case insensitive, including  tag:bylocb*.

If the web is the pilot for the other client apps, then we'll get that soon - bring it on!

The most valuable thing I have lost is wildcard tags, like Tag:Eco* which used to work, was not case-sensitive and was brilliant. 

My tags are structured as Eco:Air, Eco:Carbon, Eco:Climate, etc.  I can search tags by "Eco:", but I can now only filter one at a time, which is a real pain.

So I would really like to have wildcards back.  

Intitle is a good workaround, but I don't remember having to use workarounds like that with Google search, which is why they're at the top.

That's a good hack as a workaround, but after 10 years of being an Evernote customer, I was really hoping to not have to remember complicated hacks to do basic document management.  This is the sort of thing I was hoping we could have at our fingertips:

+ Introduction to outlining (click + to expand)
+ Why Evernote needs outlining 
-  How it might look
   This is a paragraph that has been expanded by clicking the '+' at the start of the line
   and only appears as a single outline the rest of the time.
   So however big this block gets, maybe including tables, diagrams, pictures, etc,
   it doesn't take over the whole document and make me lose the overview.
+ How it could be done
- Additional features
  Ideally it would be easy to include hyperlinks to other notes as below.
  Even more ideally, I wouldn't need to worry about whether any text was embedded in
  the current note, or linked to a separate note - Evernote would magically take care of it.
+ My separate note which looks like it's embedded in this one but is really separate.
+ The benefits to the whole Evernote community

Please!!!!!
 

13 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

You can use the text styles for exactly this:

Change the text to whatever you want

With the cursor inside of the changed text, click on the text styles button, to the left of the font name. It usually says "Normal text".

Go on the triangle behind "Normal text", select the second option from the popup menu to use the selections format to change the normal text style.

This will change all note elements formatted with "Normal text" to the new style. The change is local, will only apply to this note. To change it back, use "Reset "Normal text" to standard".

 

So Evernote has all the code to do a format painter - they just need to create a button called "format painter", and do all those complicated steps for us automatically!  Why don't they?

Tried to report it as a bug, but the only categories I was offered didn't seem at all appropriate, so have reported it in the FaceBook group which seems tbe monitored by EN staff:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/evernotecommunity

12 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

The AppStore versions are know to behave differently from the direct download - they run in a sandbox, which shields the OS and other apps from the one running inside of the sandbox. Maybe this explains why in one case the shortcut is carried over to the OS level, and in the other case not.

For me this would be a nice case for a support ticket.

P.S. Personally I prefer the direct version.

That's very interesting, thanks - but it can't be an Apple restriction, because other apps work fine - it must be EN. 
I tend to use the app store to support Apple because I know they're short of money, because the updating should be more automatic, but I think Evernote might have cracked that now anyway.