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Hierarchical organization on both desktop and mobile app, how?


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I'm trying to organize my notes hierarchically. First I tried with nested folders but it's not possible to do so as Evernote only allows one sub-folder level. After doing a search the answer people gave was to use tags as they are possible to nest this way. Great I thought, then I opened my mobile app, then I discover that it's not possible to get a hierarchical view of your tags on mobile the way you do in the desktop app. You only see Notebooks and their folder structure, you also can only set Notebooks to offline view not a tag.

So the question is, how do I get a hierarchical structure and overview on to work on both desktop and mobile? 

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Hi.  Not sure what you mean by the tag question - tags are the same whether attached to online or offline notes.  My suggestion would be to organise your notes by Table of Content as well as (or rather than) by tag,  provided that you don't have a huge database to deal with!. 

In the same way that you have a tag hierarchy,  create a 'home' page,  and tag it something suitable.  Save a search for that tag so you can find it quickly on mobile.

Depending on the size of your database you may need to create sub-pages for different branches of your hierarchy.  Use Copy Note Link to add those pages to the main tree.

At the bottom level you'll search for notes with that child tag attached and copy links to those notes into your lowest-level ToC page.

To add notes to this structure,  just edit the note,  then add its link to the appropriate page.

It's a good way to click (or tap) your way around a reasonably small database hierarchy,  and especially useful if you're sharing content with others.

How to create a table of contents with links to other notes

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While I appreciate the advice on a table of contents solution it's way more work and also not dynamically updated. If Evernote could just allow deeper nesting of notebooks this wouldn't be a problem. I hoped to be able to use tags instead to organize my notes in a hierarchy but they will not show up on iOS outside of a search and that defeats the purpose.

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6 hours ago, JoelArt said:

So the question is, how do I get a hierarchical structure and overview on to work on both desktop and mobile? 

As you pointed out, Evernote doesn't use a folder filing methodolgy
- and the tag hierarchy doesn't show on the iPhone/iPad

This hasn't bothered me - I rarely look at it.
What is your requirement?
My requirement is simply that I'm able to retrieve my notes when I need them
- I use search, and tags

To make it easier to find a tag, I use a prefix system
- all my who tags begin with ?
       my what tags begin with !
       my where tags begin with @
       my when tags begin with .
I did try longer more detailed prefixes but they get truncated in the views.

You might check the feedback forums and up-vote on feature requests.
For example https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/81192-request-tag-nesting-hierarchy-for-the-ios-evernote
There's also request for notebook hierarchy  https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/96180-feature-request-nesting-multiple-notebooks/

 

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43 minutes ago, DTLow said:

As you pointed out - the tag hierarchy doesn't show on the iPhone/iPad

This hasn't bothered me - I rarely look at it.
What is your requirement?

I believe that users want to navigate their tags much like you'd navigate a folder tree, seeing only the notes that have the current tag. It's sorta do-able on the desktops and Android; not so much on iOS, I guess. And this is what Evernote recommends as as alternative to notebook hierarchies for people who want some sort of hierarchical organization.

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39 minutes ago, jefito said:

I believe that users want to navigate their tags much like you'd navigate a folder tree, seeing only the notes that have the current tag. It's sorta do-able on the desktops and Android; not so much on iOS, I guess. 

Sir, you are spot on. This has become quite an annoyance as the number of notes has increased.

I want to organize my photos like this:

Photos
├ Travels
    ├ Countries
        ├ Sweden
        ├ Japan
        ├ etc..

This is not possible as Evernote won't allow me to build an hierarchy of notebook stacks thus forcing me to use tags instead. Apparently this does sadly not work on iOS. Even so there is still a problem with Offline viewing of "Sweden". I can't set a specific tag to offline and thus I have to set what ever folder, say Photos where I stora all photos from all countries, to offline but then ALL of my photos will sync and that would simply not fit in my phones storage. So I would have to specifically break out those tags and put them in another folder to be able to selectively set which tagged photos to show offline, it's doable but not elegant and requires extra unnecessary work.

Thus..

  • You can't organize notes hierarchically with notebookstacks/folders deeper than one level so you are forced to use MANY folder in a flat layout or...
  • Use tags for hierarchically organization, but that is not viewable on iOS, doh!
  • Also tags can't be can't be set to offline viewing, forcing you to again use notebooks instead to organize your notes but then again you can't because of limitations.
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1 hour ago, jefito said:

I believe that users want to navigate their tags much like you'd navigate a folder tree, seeing only the notes that have the current tag. It's sorta do-able on the desktops and Android; not so much on iOS, I guess. 

 

32 minutes ago, JoelArt said:

Photos
├ Travels
    ├ Countries
        ├ Sweden
        ├ Japan
        ├ etc..

This is not possible as Evernote won't allow me to build an hierarchy of notebook stacks thus forcing me to use tags instead. Apparently this does sadly not work on iOS. Even so there is still a problem with Offline viewing of "Sweden". I can't set a specific tag to offline and thus I have to set what ever folder, say Photos where I stora all photos from all countries, to offline but then ALL of my photos will sync and that would simply not fit in my phones storage. So I would have to specifically break out those tags and put them in another folder to be able to selectively set which tagged photos to show offline, it's doable but not elegant and requires extra unnecessary work.

Thus..

  • You can't organize notes hierarchically with notebookstacks/folders deeper than one level so you are forced to use MANY folder in a flat layout or...
  • Use tags for hierarchically organization, but that is not viewable on iOS, doh!
  • Also tags can't be can't be set to offline viewing, forcing you to again use notebooks instead to organize your notes but then again you can't because of limitations.

I understand your organization desire, but its not currently possible in Evernote
Perhaps someday if they implement hierarchy in Notebooks

As you pointed out, the tag hierarchy is not shown on the ipad/iphone
Also, tag names have to be unique
If you use Sweden/Japan/etc. as a child of Photos, you can't use it anywhere else
- better to define Countries completely separately

Not sure what you meant by "tags can't be set to offline viewing"

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22 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Not sure what you meant by "tags can't be set to offline viewing"

Ah, because I can't use notebooks for hierarchy, I tried to use tags instead, but they can't be sett to offline like notesbooks. I can't organize my notes via notebooks if I want a hierarchical system and I can't set tags (acting as a notebook/folder) to offline viewing on iOS.

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I managed to view my tags in a hierarchy on my iPad.

This is how:

- I installed Firefox Web Browser from the appstore

- I browsed to evernote.com and logged-in using my account

- I switched to PC version of the web site

Then I could use the Web version on my iPad and that version shows tags hierarchy.

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15 minutes ago, FX Cormontagne said:

I managed to view my tags in a hierarchy on my iPad.

This is how:

- I installed Firefox Web Browser from the appstore

- I browsed to evernote.com and logged-in using my account

- I switched to PC version of the web site

Then I could use the Web version on my iPad and that version shows tags hierarchy.

While I appreciate a possible workaround, this functionality should just be supported naively by Evernote on iOS. I should not have to install a webbrowser when there is an iOS app.

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6 minutes ago, JoelArt said:

While I appreciate a possible workaround, this functionality should just be supported naively by Evernote on iOS. I should not have to install a webbrowser when there is an iOS app.

Agreed - the hierarchy feature is aveailable on the desktop and should be added to the IOS platform

Please visit this post and add your vote

 

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5 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I don't see any difference with tag use in offline mode

Offline viewing of tags is not the issue per say, you can't view tags as a hierarchy on iOS anyway. But if you could, you could use tags to organize your notes in such a structure, but then again you can't set a tag (acting as a notebook) for offline view  on the phone because only a real notebook can be set to offline view.

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1 hour ago, JoelArt said:

but then again you can't set a tag (acting as a notebook) for offline view  on the phone because only a real notebook can be set to offline view.

Thats true; Evernote has implemented sync/local/offline settings for notebooks - not for tags
It's a reason to use tags for organization instead of notebooks

You might visit the post below and add your vote

 

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1 hour ago, JoelArt said:

Ah, because I can't use notebooks for hierarchy, I tried to use tags instead, but they can't be sett to offline like notesbooks. I can't organize my notes via notebooks if I want a hierarchical system and I can't set tags (acting as a notebook/folder) to offline viewing on iOS.

Notebooks are containers; they are where your notes live (each note is in exactly one notebook). Notebooks can either be local or synced on the desktops. For mobile, they can be offline or not. Also, notebooks can be shared.

Tags are labels you stick on notes; you can have any number of tags on a note, so they can't be considered to be containers in the same way that notebooks are. They're just a means of describing notes. Tags apply to notes regardless of whatever notebooks they reside in, whether they're local, synced, offline, or shared. So there's no such thing as an offline tag, and it's unlikely that there ever would be.

One property of the tag hierarchy is that a tag name can appear in only one place in the tree, unlike with folders/files in file system. That is a tag subtree of, for example:

  • Photos
    • Countries
      • Sweden
      • Japan
  • Languages
    • Countries
      • Sweden
      • Japan

would be illegal in Evernote. That's why I say that tags "kinda, sorta" work as hierarchical storage; there are some gotchas. This means that you need to carefully consider the tag hierarchies that you set up. You need to first consider your notebooks, and set them up as collections according to whether you would want to use them as offline or as shared. That's your basic partitioning. Then work on your tag structure from there.

 

Generally, the way I use notebooks is to partition my notes according to how I want to share them and how I want them to be usable on mobile. I share certain notebooks with my work account. And I only need certain notebooks on my mobile devices (a different set of notebooks for each of my two devices). The rest of my organization is done using tags.

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