mattyf

Wow. That's not at ALL arrogant. It's funny how some people come here to help other users, and some people seem to come here just to tell other users how they're doing it all wrong. At any rate, one could make the argument that no user should ever click the "bold" button above the text editor. You're supposed to use CMD-B. Often times there is not a "right" or "wrong" way to organize something. It's a personal preference, and good software (I believe) gives people options to do things different ways depending on what just "feels" best to them. I tried switching over to tags a while back, but I made a mistake in the way I went about doing it. I already had a structure of NOTEBOOKS and STACKS, and I think what I SHOULD have done was tagged every single note I had with the notebook name, then placed them all into a single notebook and deleted all the old notebooks. Because I didn't do that, I tried to transition to tags in a kinda half *ssed way, which meant I was dealing with both tags AND notebooks as a filing mechanism, and it was just beyond confusing. I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on this and tell me how stupid I was for doing that. :/ I also could have SWORN that back when I first tried this, if you started typing a tag, and EN narrowed it down to one match, and you pressed return without fully typing the tag, then it created a new tag with just the letters you had typed. As I remember it, I was having to both type then point and click with the mouse. The software isn't doing that now, which would make tagging easier for me. I suppose it's possible I'm crazy or misremembering and EN never did that with tags, in which case I'll just add, "Hey idiot... everyone should ignore you because you're a moron who can't type a simple tag." Fair enough.

I have the Mac version, and can't seem to find that option in the View menu. Is it windows only?

One other question about that... when I click on a tag and get the list of matching notes, is there a way to see the text of the tag I clicked on at the top (instead of just the icon indicating "All Notes" have been filtered by tag)?

Ok, this actually may have really helped me. I had not put together in my mind that I could use nested tags to replicate stacks of notebooks. Even better I could make sub-notebooks as well, right? The only real thing I'd be missing would be the ability to make a new note by default with the tag I'm currently viewing. I could live without that... unless you had a clever workaround for that?

When I open a notebook stack, and see the notebooks contained in it, that actually helps me remember the process by which I am working on a project. For instance, I was working on a project where I was having to make legal filings for a Public Utilities Commission proceeding. I'm not a lawyer, and I had never made a legal document in my life. I kept stumbling though the mechanics of how to format pdf-a's, how to check the most current version of the service list, etc, having to re-look up the process each time. I was filing infrequently enough that I had completely forgotten that I had made evernote notes on how to do this. Yes, my memory is actually that bad. However, I finally broke those notes out into a separate notebook called "CPUC How To" and put it in the same stack. So now when I opened that stack to do work on the proceeding, I saw my proceeding notebook, and right under it, my "CPUC How To" notebook, and was like, oh yeah, there it is when I need it. I can't get that with tags. Tags only show me things when I type in the tag and search for it, and that would not have helped me in the above situation, because I would not have remembered I had a tag to type in in the first place.

Thanks for the quick reply, but I think I may not have expressed myself very well: While I understand the real world "notebook" analogy, I don't think a piece of software needs to limit its functionality just because the real world system upon which it is modeled has a shortcoming or limit. There are most definitely filing systems that allow the same file to be effectively "stored" in more than one place. Hard links, symbolic links, and aliases are examples. I was a big user of aliases... maybe that's why I'm wanting them here. I explained at the end of my admittedly long first post that while I understood the Copy Note Link method, it requires a lot of steps. Ideally, I wanted something that was as easy to execute as the "Copy to Notebook" command. The thing about this request is that Evernote could implement it without affecting users that don't want to use it. And I believe it would disproportionately aid newbies like myself. People who have already trained themselves to use tagging (all power to them, I wish I could) would still be free to use it. I suppose, in the end, I'll end up writing an Applescript/Keyboard Maestro combo to automate the "Copy Note Link" process, but I suspect that's going to have the side effect of cluttering up search results with duplicated hits. Regardless, I wanted to chime in here because I was a little puzzled about the intensity of the pushback the OP got for what seems to me a perfectly valid and understandable feature request.

I think this is a HUGE missing feature for a number of reasons: First, I'd argue that letting the same note live in multiple notebooks is a much better, less dangerous feature than "Copy to Notebook." I can't really imagine very many scenarios where one would actually want to carry duplicate notes that didn't update one another, with the exception of using a note as a template to start out a new yet unrelated note. Second, some people's brains work more visually than others, and tags don't work for these people. I'm one of them. I need to see notes visually in notebooks for me to be able to comfortably and quickly wrap my brain around this information. I also suffer from "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome, so I find it very useful to "stumble" on information when I open a notebook. There's just no way to easily do this with tags. Third, I believe Evernote is limiting its audience quite a bit by not including this feature. I certainly know this was true for me. For about 7 years I used the free tier of Evernote to log phone calls I made. Each company had its own notebook, and there was no overlap. But the complexity of setting up a good tagging system along with the fact my brain just didn't work well that way kept most everything else OUT of Evernote. I only recently took the plunge just because I was driving myself nuts by spreading out over different services, then having trouble finding what I needed. Now that I have so much more info in Evernote, I need to organize it better. I tried tags one more time, same (lack) of result. I even purchased "Evernote Essentials" thinking it would help me set up a workable tagging system, only to find that in the most recent version of the course, the author himself had abandoned tagging as an organization method because it was simply taking too much time to tag all the notes he was generating, relative to the benefit those tags provided. He also didn't like how the tagging system only works when the user is fanatically strict about tag naming conventions. Again, the way my brain works, I know I would fall prey to this problem. Fourth: Linking. This method would work for me, but the amount of effort it takes to name a new note that links back to the original is way too high. With "Copy to Notebook," you choose the option from a contextual menu, a search box opens where you can select the destination notebook, and you're done. With linking, you have to copy the link, manually go to the destination notebook, click create new note, paste in the link, then give it a meaningful title, which means manually typing in a title, or going back to the original for a copy/paste function. That's my pitch. Please add this feature. It would fit so nicely under Move to Notebook and Copy to Notebook. I also believe that adding it would help stop the polar icecaps from melting, reduce gun violence, and begin to heal a so badly divided nation.

Oh, and also a big me too on the awesomeness of this Applescript!!! Works like a charm in Keyboard Maestro!

This is a big me too!!! I've just started using Evernote, so not really sure what the backstory is on this, but this is really irritating! Why not just have the two options available via the menu bar with shortcuts attached? I don't get it....

It is unlikely, because this can be handled with other software. No sense re-inventing the wheel. Evernote has some other priorities they are working on. I disagree. In fact, the lack of this feature has been the primary reason that I haven't fully adopted Evernote. That said, however, I don't want to permanently alter the file size of images. I just want to be able to zoom out so I can see the whole photo at once, yet still retain all the original data. I use my iphone to take pictures of important documents, which I store on my computer for easy access. It's easier than a scanner. However, because of the resolution of the iphone 4s camera, the images are so HUGE in Evernote that I can't even tell what document the photo is storing! And Evernote's OCR for this function would be a no-brainer. Being able to zoom in and out is absolutely basic functionality that most every, if not every, image viewing software offers. IMHO, it's a sorely missing feature from Evernote, and is keeping at least one potential "Paid" customer in the "Free" column.