missdipsy

You can select multiple tags, just press Ctrl whilst clicking on the tags!

You're right, it's not me that needs to understand, it's the developers, but I'm here having this discussion and they're not. Hopefully, though, they'll read this, and they might change their minds if you can present a persuasive argument. I was trying to help clarify what it is about the subnotebook metaphor that you think works better than tabs, in the assumption that if you can convince those of us who don't get it, you can probably convince the developers too. Call it playing devil's advocate if you like! It seems from what the developers have said so far that they don't get it either, so if you feel strongly then it's clear that you need to make them understand your point of view. To those of us who use tags as handy little multi-purpose labels/folders/categories/whatever it's difficult to see why you can't just use tags. I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right, just that it isn't obvious to people who don't share your point of view. The Evernote developers no doubt have a lot of features they keep getting asked for, in addition to the "road map" they will have planned out for Evernote, so they can't just implement every feature they get asked for (as someone else said, it could just be a vocal minority asking for this). I'm sure they could be convinced, however, if you can address the arguments against this feature request. Also, I'm here because I'm actually very interested in how other people use Evernote. I read these forums to get a variety of perspectives and hopefully pick up some new ideas, perhaps even have some of my own ideas challenged. Funnily enough you don't tend to get that if you only ever talk to people who agree with you completely! @Crane: Thanks for your explanation. I used to use Evernote 2 as well, although less than I use Evernote now. I suppose I always thought of the categories as being like tags... but then I don't make much distinction between the idea of tags and folders anyway, to me they are just different metaphors for categorising things. In "real life" I'm forced to use physical location (folders, notebooks, shelves etc) as the main means of categorising things, which is rather restrictive since an item can only be in one place at a time, whereas in Evernote something can be in many places at once (using tags). I'd just have a tag for "Research Problem X", although I completely agree that it would be better if you could automatically apply selected tags to new notes, as you can with notebooks. It would make the workflow just that little bit smoother when you're working on a project. It can get rather tedious to repeatedly type in the same tags (although I have a habit of having a text file permanently open on my PC which I sometimes use as a kind of clipboard for things like that, but it would be nice if I didn't have to!)

Actually, not everyone is arguing for sub-notebooks; I don't really see the point when we have a perfectly good method of organisation in the form of tags! I've tried very hard to understand why you all seem to want subnotebooks and I haven't really seen a pursuasive argument yet that made it clear why subnotebooks would be better than the existing methods of organising notes. The only advantage I can see to using notebooks as the main means of organising things is that you can work "within" one notebook and have all your notes made during that session go to that notebook. If a similar feature was added for tags (which woud be pretty useful - i.e. whatever tag(s) is(/are) currently selected automatically gets added to any notes made) then this argument would be redundant and I wouldn't be able to see a single reason why subnotebooks would be necessary. I use tags for pretty much all of my organisation in Evernote; the only reason I have multiple notebooks now is to allow me to share them (e.g. my recipes & other food notes are in a separate public notebook so I can share them with other people). At first I started off with more notebooks but I actually found it more of an inconvenience because notes can only be in one notebook, whereas they can be in multiple tags. Justin (jameyer) used the example of having separate notebooks for each university class; well, I'm a student too and I actually found this method far too limiting - I had notes that related to more than one subject area (and also to more than one semester or year), so tags worked much better than notebooks. I'm not saying that there AREN'T any good arguments for having subnotebooks, just that I haven't seen any that have persuaded me so far, and I'm guessing the same is true of the Evernote developers. If you believe so passionately that subnotebooks are much better than tags, then I think you need to give a comprehensive list of all the things you could accomplish with subnotebooks that can't be accomplished with tags. If you can manage that then the Evernote developers may take more notice. At the moment, to those of us in the "tag camp" it looks like you're all thinking a little too narrowly about tags; that may be totally unfair, but that's just how it looks to someone with a different perspective. Maybe if you can all explain your arguments more fully then the developers will be persuaded too!

I don't really understand this "tags are for taxonomy, not organisation" argument. What's the point of taxonomy if not for organisation?! Why on earth would you spend time categorising data if it weren't for the purpose of organising it? It only takes a very subtle shift in thinking to use tags in virtually the same way one might use sub-notebooks or folders. And tags offer many advantages such as being able to add multiple tags to an item, to search for a specific combination of tags, more finely-grained categorisation etc. I agree that the current functionality of tags could be improved, especially in the way that the hierarchy works (to be more like Evernote 2 was, with the ability to treat nested tags as a group and therefore select them all by selecting the "parent"). The only really valid argument I can see here for sub-notebooks is that notebooks behave in a slightly different way to tags; if you are "in" a particular notebook, you stay in that notebook, so any new notes are added to that notebook and any tag you click on will only bring up items in that notebook. Perhaps a more fruitful line of attack for getting the functionality you want would be to focus on getting tags to work more like subnotebooks. So perhaps have a way of being able to select one or more tags and have them automatically applied to any notes that are created while those tags are selected. A bit if creativity in how you use tags can help overcome the "messiness" that some people associate with them; I use a kind of syntax to organise my tags, so all of my main "projects" (i'm talking "uber projects" here rather than GTD style projects) are prefixed by an "*", and all of my "action" tags are prefixed by an "!" (e.g. "*househunting", "*family", "!read/review" etc). This sorts the tag list in a logical order & reduces mistakes in forgetting tags (if I know I need to add an "action" tag I just type "!" and autocomplete brings up a list of all of these tags - very easy!). All tags without a prefix are more general categorisations of the topic of the note (e.g. "food", "psychology", "money", "law", "advice" etc.). I think the asterisked tags serve a similar function to your subnotebooks, but allow me a great deal more flexibility by being able to assign things to more than one project (the lack of an ability to do this is one thing that I've found very frustrating in some other tools). I actually use notebooks very little as I find them too restrictive - surely there are some things that could go in more than one notebook? With tags there's no need to make a decision between two categories, as they can go in both! I tried to use my notebooks only for very discrete projects with absolutely no overlap with other projects, but I kept finding things that could go in more than one of them, consequently I only have one separate project notebook now and I'll probably get rid of that soon! Apart from this I just have one main notebook, one public notebook, and one for "my thoughts" (which is where I put random ideas that pop into my head, to avoid cluttering up my main notebook with these things). My system also simulates some of the other features that people ask for in notebooks, like being able to associate certain tags with only one notebook - I simply put these tags in the hierarchy under the relevant project tag, so they're all grouped together and easy to find. @mwg147 - your beer tasting notes shouldn't "pop up by accident" if you're using the current notebook feature to separate personal notes from work notes. If you select your "work" notebook, only notes in that notebook will pop up.