Avi Lambert

Excellent, worked, thanks @DTLow

Ah, good to hear you can do this with Windows. As a Mac user it's not available.

For my use-case running a business through Evernote, I would really appreciate being able to add specific Notebooks to Shortcuts, rather than going through the top-level notebook and then going into the folder. Doing so would save time, and increase my productivity. Currently, one can only save notes to the Shortcut menu. In other words, if the notebook could be added through right-clicking that would be fantastic.  

The switching costs of going to another application are too high. I just tried Nimbus Note, which does a fair job. But the things that Evernote has in my workflow just aren't worth switching to another app. Therefore it's very much a circumstance lock-in.

In which case, until Ian leads the development to make numerous sub-folders in stacks, I'll stay with Evernote. At which point hell might freeze over. 

Here are a three points where I'm confident Evernote creates value above the competition:

1. Encrypting text
2. OCR and Screencapture
3. Integration into OSx

A conversation I had on Reddit shows that the development debt is why we can't have second and third level notebooks. The following post on Reddit in the Evernote forum is added because of the clarity of the response.

I would prefer to stay with Evernote, but with so many openly talking about Notion and moving over to it, Evernote must do something about this before too long, or it will lose business users. Also it would be nice to not get the same catch-all answer "use tags". 
 

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Komatik

Second level notebook stuff is probably discouraged not because they hate the idea, but because Evernote's databases are all flat - for any one user, there's a single, flat list of notebooks and a single, flat list of tags. It's why you can't have multiple notebooks with the same name or multiple tags with the same name even if they're in different parts of the "folder tree" - the data actually isn't a folder tree. With tags, they can do some shenanigans, but with notebooks that wouldn't be so easy.

But one level of notebooks is not really enough, so back in the day they added a data field to the notebook database. It's the notebook stack the notebook belongs to.

Notice something? There is no such object in the database as a notebook stack. The UI just groups notebooks with the same "stack" field together. This is why you eg. can't have multiple notebooks with the same name even if they're in different stacks (they're just a flat pile in reality) which is what you'd expect out of a real folder hierarchy, and it also means stacking stacks is pretty much impossible since they don't actually exist as any kind of object you might be able to organize.

So when people understandably ask for some kind of hierarchy - nestable notebooks, stackable stacks, something - well, given the company's new mindset of actually improving their product it may happen someday. But it will be a big, big rebuild under the hood.

These kinds of data structure restrictions pop up all over the place. Why can't you share live views into single pages in OneNote the way you can in Evernote? Well, Evernote has a database for notes and a database for notebooks, so they have single note objects they can manage. A OneNote notebook, it turns out, is a folder on disk that contains subfolders to represent section groups, and .one files to contain section data. The pages themselves are stored in the section files and there is no individual page file to share and permission. You might notice that they could manage sharing permissions for individual section files since they actually exist in the filesystem, and 'lo and behold they happen to be working on sharing single sections.

A lot of the time when devs just ignore requests, it's not because they hate their users or because they're stuffy ivory tower jerks. It's usually that design decisions were made years and years ago (OneNote was released in 2003, before the cloud was much of a thing let alone central to Microsoft, Evernote was released in 2008. They're ancient), sometimes under a time crunch that gets some feature shipped in time but comes to haunt the devs later on when the app isn't as adaptable as it could be. The industry term for this is technical debt, and Evernote among others has a lot. The folders issue is one case of it.

Having a lot of technical debt doesn't mean they can't get rid of it or improve the app, but solving tech debt means a lot of work that is invisible to users before you can even start taking advantage of the new, better structure to start developing new features that the users would see. Some stuff they've already announced like the editor changes they're building now are work in this kind of vein.

The best thing is to keep reminding the company that you're willing to stay, that you want the debt solved and the features implemented. From a company POV, it needs stability and patience. Customer, similar deal, and they have to understand that the architecture work isn't stagnation, it's building a solid foundation and replacing all manner of ugly, finicky hacks.

 

Thanks DTLow, I was thinking about the discussion you posted. Moh.io is no longer in business from the looks of it now. 

I'm certainly not going to hold my breath about the M&A,  but we will see if this gets any feedback.

Thanks also for noting that you use mind mapping. I find that using mind mapping allow for seeing new connections and ideas with information, which is why I want to use it for my notes. 

In essence, without a large change in the app in a decade, having a mind map for Evernote for premium and business users that already use one is low hanging fruit.

https://www.capterra.com/mind-mapping-software/

Creating mind maps is one of the most consistent questions by Evernote users. I would love to be able to find new ideas from the notes I have created and kept. Using a well established map making service would get this done. Which is why I suggest Evernote to acquire through M&A 'The Brain' if they are willing to sell. I haven't been using it for a long time, but I can see that it's a seamless experience on par with Evernote, and get the company to meet the customer goal for mind mapping without internal development and other assets and priorities already on the roadmap.

The company The Brain also has been around for over a decade which is a good sign and it also has an established user base.

https://thebrain.com/

Just shared this on Twitter with the goal of increasing the votes up so it will be taken seriously and acted upon. Just used Adobe Cloud and was able to configure third and fourth level folders without trouble. This should not be an issue for the development team IMHO. Share this in your community to get it voted up also. 

Quoting from "Looking Ahead: Evernote’s Priorities for 2019" by CEO Ian Small

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But inventing the future requires being able to stand on a solid foundation. And whether I look at Evernote from the inside out, or listen to many of you from the outside in, it is clear that we have some work to do on those foundations. The loyalty that you continue to show Evernote demands that we be honest in return. And honesty requires us to state—straight out—that we can do better with the product you have today than we are currently doing. In fact, we can do better than we have been doing for some years.

 

The above quote from the CEO Ian Small, about loyalty and the goal of honesty act as a springboard for this feature request. 

A public roadmap offers a way to build trust with the Evernote user base. It provides users with the ability to see which feature requests are being worked on and it's an asset that can be touched on in the inside Evernote videos. It's part of opening the kimono, to regain lost trust by loyal users. 

Many companies use Trello, Asana, and other kanban-based planning tools to manage projects among local and remote workers. In other words, I'm confident that Evernote uses Jira or something similar, that has roadmap data that can be added to a publicly viewable asset. Making some part available to the public is low hanging fruit.

31 minutes ago, DTLow said:

As you  posted, Notebooks have special features.  They identify notes as

• Sync'd/local
• private/shared
• offline
• default (Inbox)

>>Also, in terms of organization tags are messy, while notebooks are clean, in my view.

In terms of organization, notebooks and tags are two fields assigned to a note.  They are interchangeable.

Please explain how field2 is messy, and field1 is clean

In reply to your query, the issue is not about field2 or field1. The missing feature is second level organization. The attached image explains was I am looking for, with the OSX/Linux operating system. I have also attached a short of my own Evernote account to show that I use Notebooks primarily and stay away from tags. I have used tags in the past, and I've been using Evernote for over a decade. 

Evernote would do well and be smart to update the Notebook feature for premium and business users. Ian the CEO and the team are more user focused than previously which is good, but the features, long asked for by users like second level notebook organization are still behind what they could be.

Hi Engberg, thanks for your feedback. But again, the use-case I am looking for simply does not work for tags.

Tags are not Notebooks.

Notebooks work much better for my use case, specifically because of the actions that can be used within Evernote with notebooks. More to the point, you can't share an item, idea, picture, our audio to a tag, in the same way you can to a notebook. Also, in terms of organization tags are messy, while notebooks are clean, in my view. It is for that reason that I do not find the tag workflow as worthwhile as the notebook workflow. And, from the negative votes on your post, and the length of the comment thread on this post, it would be smart for Evernote to look to implement this in the feature roadmap. 

Thanks, Steve, I noticed the other post and saw the depth of posts on it. Apologies for the duplication. Regarding tags, that's not a good use case from my perspective for what I'm using. I used tags before, and it became far too complex and overly un-organized. 

It would be outstanding if I could add a third-level stack organization in my Evernote Premium notebook organization. My specific use case is for independent information for files related to each project, and business process without getting too detailed. I'm certain this would be popular as more organization offers more productivity. 

Currently I can only create a notebook and drag it into another notebook, so perhaps this feature request is for stacks within stacks. 

Thanks

I have the same issue and it's certainly a concern as previous versions did not require this asset.