RY27

On 10/17/2019 at 9:48 AM, jefito said:

I'd guess that the level-of-effort for implementing sub-notebooks would be about the same as implementing sections. It would be an architectural change, affecting the internals of notebook (need a list of sections) and notes (what section am I in?), as well as search and sorting (remember, notes can be sorted across networks in various ways, so "visual separation" wouldn't always be apparent), across all Evernote platforms, including the Evernote servers. I don't see much difference, conceptually.

I don't know if this is a lot of effort. Evernote basically implemented something similar with the Reminders in the "Snippet" view, where if you select a stack, the reminders are all organized by a notebook, each of which can be collapsed. 

On 12/4/2015 at 4:51 AM, Rob Freundlich said:

1. I'd like a way to sync the vector image to EN instead of the pixel image, and for EN to recognize it as if I'd done a handwriting note in EN. That way, I could fully edit the note in EN.  I know this would have to make the note unsyncable from NN, but that's OK.  Does anyone know whether EN's handwriting notes are in SVG format?  (NN can export as SVG, so I imagine they could sync across to EN as SVG)

 

Did anyone figure out a good way to do this?

4 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I would use Notebook names

• aaaaaa - Section 1
• aaaaaa - Section 2
• aaaaaa - Section 3

That works technically, but visually it’s not ideal. Also, if I have to retype the same phrase over and over again just go get the structure that I want, it tells me that the system that I’m implementing is not supported by the environment. 

On 10/16/2019 at 1:12 PM, DTLow said:

So, Stacks > Notebooks > Sections

Can you add some details?

It's not the same as notebook levels, but a rose by another name ....

It’s basically what Dave and jefito above said. You can think of it as a special type of note within a notebook that would essentially act as a header for other notes.  Would it be better than another level of sub-notebooks? I don’t know, just an idea based on what I saw implemented elsewhere and thought it was a helpful way to organize longer lists of items. For me when a list of notes gets longer than 6 or so items, it’s harder for me to grasp immediately what these items are and I actually have to read the titles with a different level of attention than just glancing at a list quickly. 

13 hours ago, jefito said:

I'd guess that the level-of-effort for implementing sub-notebooks would be about the same as implementing sections. It would be an architectural change, affecting the internals of notebook (need a list of sections) and notes (what section am I in?), as well as search and sorting (remember, notes can be sorted across networks in various ways, so "visual separation" wouldn't always be apparent), across all Evernote platforms, including the Evernote servers. I don't see much difference, conceptually.

You are probably right. I’ve no idea what’s easier to implement. 

13 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

If I'm understanding you correctly, it would be possible to do this (unless and until EN implements something more elegant) by simply creating a note titled "Separator" containing nothing more than, say, a horizontal line. And/or maybe a title for the following section.

You could do that but without an ability to manually organize notes within a notebook, it gets messy. You need workarounds like a numbering scheme to make sure that all the notes are in the right order vis-a-vis the separator. 

One alternative to multiple notebook levels could be adding an ability to add sections within each notebook so that there is at least a visual separation between the notes. I think, Todoist handles it beautifully in their latest beta version. 

6 minutes ago, DTLow said:

It would seem he or she is still looking back

I'm sure it's hard not to when you spent the last decade in Evernote. I bet many people who switch to another platform secretly (or not so secretly) wish that Evernote did what they wanted it to in the first place so they never had to switch. 

On 7/5/2019 at 10:49 PM, DTLow said:

I'm not into "BOOHOO, Evernote is so bad"

I agree that it's not necessary helpful. But I'm sure it's also cathartic for people to have a forum to complain and vent their frustration with Evernote (often not undeserved). Frankly, if Evernote we're doing such a bang-up job of keeping up with its users' needs and managing expectations, these conversations would not get as heated. I can't think of a forum for another software platform where people get as nasty and brutal to each other. 

On 7/6/2019 at 10:05 AM, DTLow said:

recommend they switch to a  product they're happy with.

Agree, except that if one has already switched to a different product or tried it, I don't see why that person would not share their experience here. Hopefully, that will save a few other people a few hours or a few dollars. 

On 6/21/2019 at 6:31 PM, DTLow said:

And yet, here you are

                                     How can we miss you if you won't go away

Why does it bother you that some other person found a solution to the problem in a form of a different app that he or she wanted to share here?

If Evernote cannot meet a certain need, I don't see why it's an issue to suggest a different solution in a forum directed to Evernote users. 

It's like some Cold War era mentality - don't you dare cross the Iron curtain and say anything positive about the other side! 

On 6/28/2019 at 1:49 PM, gazumped said:

Whatever

Why so much hostility and defensiveness? Even the behemoths like MS Word and OneNote can collapse text. If MS thought it was a "necessary" feature to include in their package (let alone Workflowy and Notion among the "newcomers" who have actually been around for years at this point ), it's not such a ridiculous thing to expect from Evernote who directly competes with these services. There is no need to admonish a person whose views have obviously been validated by Evernote's competition and are not limited to a single user in any imaginable way.

In my view, the sad part is that even if Evernote does end up introducing this feature, it's still playing catch up (and not just with a very old user request) but also with feature parity with it's competition.  

At some point the users would want to mold the software into something that works for them; and not mold the way they work and think to fit someone else's vision for the software. 

12 hours ago, d1234abc said:

RY27 - good comments. I like Notion's organizational flexibility too and the look/feel are nice. It can't currently store documents and allow for editing those documents and saving back to Notion, which Evernote does well. Notion requires you to download documents, make changes and then re-upload. That's too many steps to make the other benefits worth it for me. They say this feature is coming so I might check it out again later. I'd like it if Evernote incorporated some of Notion's organizational features.

Agree on all counts. 

Tried to use Notion exclusively for 2 months but now see myself going back to Evernote. The biggest challenge is getting information into Notion quickly. 

The organizational freedom in Notion is great, but I ended up spending too much time trying to figure out the best way to organize data as opposed to working with it. 

It did help me simplify how I use Evernote going forward, so in that regard it was a useful exercise. 

On 4/2/2019 at 7:20 AM, dbvirago said:

I have devised short term work-arounds, but unlike EN

What are your workarounds?

Unless Notion implements a true email integration (as opposed to relying on 3rd party services like Zapier, Workato or IFTTT), I don't see it being a strong contender to Evernote. One should not be paying premium subscription for a service and then require another expensive subscription just to get your data in. 

Until then it will be a fun toy or just a standalone tool that can complement someone's Evernote use but not replace it. 

I just don't see email going away, regardless of what collaboration features a note-taking or database platform may have. Everyone has access to email no matter what software they actually use. Not everyone can be convinced to take notes or store data or documents under specific constraints that each platform will inevitably impose. Any software developer who doesn't get it will fail eventually and will be relegated to some geeky niche (e.g., Workflowy), and that is why Evernote and OneNote are still around and have significant followings and why people use things like Trello even though it's nothing but an electronic version of post its. . 

2 hours ago, DTLow said:

You didn't mention the important Notebook function of identifying notes as
- private/shared
- online/local (Windows/Mac)
- offline (IOS/Android)

Added that in the table above

2 hours ago, DTLow said:

Evernote supports two fields for organization of note data; Notebooks and Tags (both are fields in the note metadata)
There is no support for Folders.  
You seem to be comparing use of the Notebook field to the Tag field

You are correct, fixed that. 

It looks like there are a lot of discussions that go on about the utility of using tags versus notebooks, and how some people prefer to organize using one or the other. While people seem to get into the weeds about why tags or notebooks are better, I haven't seen a good summary of how Evernote handles these, so I'm providing one below and which, I hope, will give people a better basis to decide on which form of (or combination of) organizational tools to use. 

Without further ado, here is the summary of differences of how Evernote handles tags and notebooks (each type referred to as an "attribute" below):  

To summarize the above,  the main differences are as follows:

• An item does not need to have a tag, but it must have a notebook
• An item can have unlimited number of tags, but it can be in only one notebook
• When adding OR removing notebooks: two things happen in one single step:
  • Removing current attribute  
  • Adding new attribute 
• When removing tags: only one thing happens
  • Removing one of the current attributes 
• When adding tags: only one thing happens
  • Adding a new attribute
• Tags can have unlimited levels of hierarchy, where notebooks can only be grouped in 1 level

Also, don't forget about the special notebook called "Trash":

• Keeps all existing attributes (including the notebook where the item was prior to being deleted) 
• Removes the item from regular interface (search, tag, notebook)
• Note that within "Trash" one can search for other notebooks, to which a deleted item belonged prior to being deleted! 

The fact that this has not been implemented is just stupid. 

...instead, let's just spend hours making a new logo that looks just like . . . the old logo. 

On 8/4/2018 at 11:50 AM, gazumped said:

Evernote designed a product in a particular way which has managed to attract 220M users.  Going by this forum,  a vanishingly small percentage of them have complained about the lack of hierarchical system,  and -so far- Evernote haven't done anything to change*.  Users who can't live without nested structures either make do or move on to the competition.

I don't believe that this is a secret plot to tie users into the Evernote product - and One Note et al could easily get around any such tactic by designing an import process that (at worst) would convert all easily processed notes,  and ask for user intructions if it found a note with too many tags.  And wouldn't users who just have to have folders have moved on before this became a problem anyway?

And a "tag system is actually not as good as nested structure for real world practice."  Really?  If you have any studies which have confirmed this I'd be interested to hear of them!

For the record this isn't a(nother) mindless defence of the company - there are situations where different data layouts are more applicable,  or more helpful - which is why some of my information is stored in Treepad,  more in is Freeplane and my Todos are in Tick Tick.  The rest is in Evernote,  although all of the previously mentioned apps link into Evernote through note links.  To give you an idea of the relevant importance of those apps - my Freeplane database is 25MB; Evernote is 16GB the others are less than 1MB.  Evernote is over 99% of my data storage.

I did point out elsewhere in the forums that it's possible to get around the non-nesting by using Evernote to collect the data,  by posting links to the notes into a nested-structure app like Treepad or even creating a Table of Contents note (or even a nested series of ToC notes...) and rearranging the note links into a different structure. 

These are all good points. My issue with these are as follows:

- I do not want to use 3-4 tools to do my work (notes can become tasks, and vice versa, and maintaining these across several apps is inefficient and cumbersome). Evernote is plenty flexible to accomodate this (except for mind mapping).

- Table of Contents feature is not easy to use. Creating TOC notes is fairly easy (on a desktop), but then maintaining them becomes a pain, when new notes need to be added or old notes need to be removed. This is especially painful  for longer TOCs, where having a TOC would be very helpful. Also, what do you do with all the notes that are listed in the TOC itself without cluttering your view? How do you distinguish TOC notes from regular ones?

1 minute ago, DTLow said:

This is generally true (child tags are not aware of their parent and vice versa) with these exceptions

- Evernote/Windows has a child search option.

- I use scripting on my Mac (Applescript) and have access to parent/child info.

But is this available on all operating systems? Not so much. And at some point hacking a software just to make it do what it should after paying $100/year for it just doesn't make sense. 

That's like saying that OneNote supports tagging. Yes, it does, but its implementation is so terrible that maintaining more than a dozen tags becomes impractical. Same with Evernote's "nested" support, which is limited at its best and useless at its worst. 

• you can nest tags, but child tags are not aware of their parents and vice versa. It's basically a visual organization that Evernote itself is unaware of. 
• you can nest notebooks, but only to 1 level. 
• you cannot nest notes within a notebook, so you have to go through a brain damage of creating naming nomenclature, creating additional unnecessary notebooks or stacks, or creating one-off tags that mess up your entire tagging structure. 

So saying that Evernote "supports" nesting is a bit disingenuous, as you, as a "Guru" must know full well. 

Try Mohio, it's a 3rd party app that lets you organize your Evernote notes in a mindmap.

They finally implemented a drag and drop function, so you can click on a number (in an ordered list) or a bullet (in a bulleted list) and move the line (and it's children) to a different place. If we get a keyboard shortcut assigned to this, it would be amazing. 

Here is a quick workaround to split a long text note into several. 

1. Select the text you want to split out to a new note (remember, you can use Ctrl+Shift+End to select all text from the current cursor position to the end of the note / helpful when splitting out the note in order) 

2. Press Ctrl+C or Ctrl+X (depending on whether you want to keep a copy of the text in the current note or delete it)

3. Press Ctrl+Alt+V  (this will create a new note in Evernote with your selected text) 

Note that if you filter your original note by Tags (in the search bar or by pressing Alt+Shift+T), your new notes will inherit those tags (so you don't have to re-tag all those new notes again).