I'm lost here

[OrbWeaver 83]

All I'm trying to do is search my notes for any that have a particular dollar amount in them. Something like "$12.29" as a search term shows me everything with a 12 or a 29 or a 12-29. It says it finds "$12.29" in several notebooks but when I look at the notes, that just is not there at all. A date "2016-12-29" seems to match but that's the closest I can see to that string, and that doesn't have the dollar sign. Is there some special syntax for telling it to find EXACTLY $12.29 (Dollar sign one two point two nine)

This is using the latest (for me anyway) Windows version 6.5.4.4720 (304720) Public

 

 

[DTLow 5,736]

18 hours ago, OrbWeaver said:

All I'm trying to do is search my notes for any that have a particular dollar amount in them. Something like "$12.29"

One thing you should know is that the search feature ignores special characters (I don't know why)
So, your search is for all notes having 12*29 with * being any special character or space
More details here       Evernote Search Grammar

[OrbWeaver 83]

But it said I should use quotes if I wanted an exact match for a string. That implies that inside the quotes there are no such things as special characters. Otherwise, nobody could locate currency values or even notes containing an  IP address. There must be a way to locate something as common as a dollar value in notes but I have looked and looked and it still won't find the exact string I want.

[OrbWeaver 83]

Let me be more precise. It does find the string "$12.29" but it also finds anything with a date like "2016-12-29" or a time like "12:29". Can it limit the search to the exact string I entered and not also give me a hundred other notes that don't contain that exact string?

[jbenson2 2,147]

I feel your pain. 

Here are my search results.
"$12.29" found 77 notes
"12.29" found 77 notes

Many of these notes contained images - maps, Chinese restaurant menus, pdf files with an image. Reviewing them individually, I could not find the 12.29 in many of these notes or images.

I also tried filtering out the images
"$12.29" -resource:image/* found only 43 notes
And these notes were still getting fooled by 12/29 dates and 12:29 times. Grrrr!

In my opinion, Evernote search won't be very helpful for a search using two sets of numbers only 2 digits long (12 & 29). I'd love to see a rebuttal from an Evernote employee. I'm going to create a Support Request and see what their response is. (support ticket #2054010)

By the way, to improve search accuracy, I use tags to narrow the possible choices. 
"$12.29" tag:walmart
 

[OrbWeaver 83]

Using the tag won't work too well for me as out of perhaps 700 notes, there would only be 3 that wouldn't be tagged "Amazon". I suppose I could go through them all and create a tag for "$0.01", "$0.02", "$0.03", up to "$9999.99" but that's a ton of typing. Nope, that won't work.

I could demand that all vendors modify their invoices to spell out the values. Instead of 12.29 they would switch to one two point two nine. Nope, that wouldn't work either. Some might spell it "twelve point twenty-nine" and other variations. And getting things to line up underneath each other would be a pain not to mention modifying all those billions and billions (apologies to Carl Sagan) of calculators out there. And then there's the language issue. All amounts would need to be in 147 languages here in Canada to avoid offending anyone. Forget that.

Maybe Evernote could treat things between quotation marks as literals. There's an idea! Imagine if all searchers treated things between quotes as literal. Huh? They all do already? It's only Evernote that doesn't? You mean even Google does? Maybe Evernote should approach them or Bing or DuckDuckGo to search the notes. Yea, there's an idea. Start storing all our notes on Google so Google can search them properly. As an added bonus, Google would recommend products based on note content. If it sees we are complaining of an upset stomach it can direct us to stomach remedies. Huh? They already do that? Rats. I thought I was onto something.

Oh, well. As far as searching in PDF files, that's the reason I spent the "Premium" bucks. So I could search for invoices with amounts of $12.29, and now you tell me I can't even do that. I could always hire a local kindergarten class to do the searches of paper records. Five-year-olds could likely recognize "$12.29" and the kids would work for candy. Much cheaper that Evernote Premium.

It must be nice not having any real competition. If MS got off their butts and fixed OneNote it would provide an incentive for EN to pay attention to users. It's nice that there are 999 ways to modify search criteria but could we have one more? Please? Allow stuff between quotes to be searched for exactly as entered. Or maybe a modifier so I could type...

"$12.29" -SearchModifier:ThisIsADollarAmountSoSearchForItExactlyAndDontIncludeTheDatesAndTimesOrOtherStuff

You know, something simple like that.

[jbenson2 2,147]

I have 40,000 notes and tags are immensely helpful in finding stuff.

 

All my notes are sorted by Created Date and that helps narrow the range if I have a rough idea when it occurred.

 

Actual date searches also help.

created:day = today
created:day-1 = yesterday
created:week = this week (since Sunday)
created:week-1 = last week (since last Sunday)
created:month = this month
created:month-1 = last month
 

To enhance my search accuracy for $12.29, I rely on some other search tips.

• Title prefixes are date coded  [YYYYMMDD]
• Title is consistent and structured [date location subject person]
• Tags all lower case to avoid confusion or dupes
• Tags have no spaces to avoid using " " [hewlett-packard]
• Keywords and spelling variants added to notes for improved search results
• Random search code to link a group of similar notes together

Some things might seem easy and obvious to the customers, but I've learned that Evernote's internal clock beats to a different drummer than mine. I've stopped tilting at deaf ears in the windmills of Evernote. But I will post Evernote Support response when it arrives.

[gazumped 11,656]

If it's any help I have a process partly copied from accounting software.  I have a note called 'scanning admin' which lists the last item from each scan or clip of a given supplier document.  The last one for Amazon (sadly for them) was a while ago - 

20151117 receipt - Amazon Kindle - The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike Book 1) - personal books

If I buy another Kindle book I'll overtype the date and (obviously) change the title,  and copy/ paste that into my note title.  If I need to reconcile an item in my accounts I can find it by a number of intitle: searches.

Searching for amounts normally works for me,  because I just use intitle:receipt 66.99 

Appreciate that's no help whatsoever for a bunch of existing Amazon notes.  If you can get to use a Mac,  there are a number of scripting whizzes around here who might be able to suggest some other options,  but -in this one respect only- Windows is not,  sadly,  as good.  

[OrbWeaver 83]

When I browse the forums I am constantly amazed at how ingenious people are. Some of the workarounds in forums are truly inspired. Unfortunately, most are workarounds for things that shouldn't require workarounds. Like this search issue.

I figured I was going to post my silly problem and a ton of people would reply and say something like I'm not typing it properly, or I should be using RPN for numeric terms. I never dreamed that EN just wasn't able to do such a basic thing as search for a string.

I had a problem earlier where I couldn't find a particular item so I had the idea that I would stick the total price (item + shipping + taxes) in the note and if in the future I needed to reconcile a bank statement, I could just do a quick search for the value and there would be my item. Perhaps more than one but certainly not in the hundreds. So I spent literally days going through all my notes, looking up the invoices, entering the total for each note, and feeling that I was finally getting somewhere.

Then the first time I need to find out what that $12.29 was for I discover all that work was wasted because EN can't search for such a string.

I must be explaining myself incorrectly. I just can't believe this is not possible.

What I am trying to do is search through my notebooks and find every occurrence of the string "$12.29". dollar one two dot two nine

The problem I have is that it also finds any note that contains "12-29" (as in a date "2017-12-29") or "12:29" (as in the time) . I only want the search to succeed if there is a dollar sign followed directly by the numbers 1 and 2, followed by a period, followed by the numbers 2 and 9. No spaces, dashes, slashes, commas, colons, or other characters. Just those 6 characters in that order.

Is that really not possible?

[jbenson2 2,147]

42 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Searching for amounts normally works for me,  because I just use intitle:receipt 66.99 

Yes, the intitle: search command is an awesome way to improve the search results. I use it often.

But it still has trouble with the example mentioned by the OP.  I seem to recall a discussion a few years ago about Evernote ignoring special characters. It appears that the dollar sign and the period fall into that category.

intitle:"$12.29"
It found 23 notes that involved actions on the 29th of December for different years.Examples:

2016 12 29 USA ME - Maine power outages CMP

2002 12 29 USA MA Woburn - DWB and Jo invite

[CalS 5,280]

1 hour ago, OrbWeaver said:

Is that really not possible?

The only special character you can search is the underscore.  Any other special characters become blanks in your search.  

So a search for "12<any special character including blank but not underscore>29" will return the same results.  In essence the quotes just tells EN to find 12 and 29 separated by a blank.  It kind of is what it is unless/until EN decides to add special characters to search.  

[jbenson2 2,147]

4 minutes ago, csihilling said:

tells EN to find 12 and 29 separated by a blank

You nailed it. That explains exactly what was happening.

Thanks

[OrbWeaver 83]

Well, that pretty much kills EN for searching anything like order or invoice records or anything that might have a "special" character in it. The bulk of my stuff has these characters. Even things like Word files, PDFs, and ePub files all use them so searching these will be a problem as well. I've got to do some serious thinking now about how I'm going to file this stuff. OneNote doesn't have this issue but it's useless as far as syncing goes. Perhaps I can just do away with the syncing part.

Anyway, thanks for the assistance. I'll see if I can do my thing using something else. I really need the search ability now and since I already had everything in EN, I figured I was doing something wrong with my searching. Bummer...

[CalS 5,280]

1 hour ago, jbenson2 said:

You nailed it. That explains exactly what was happening.

Thanks

You are welcome.

[CalS 5,280]

1 hour ago, OrbWeaver said:

Anyway, thanks for the assistance. I'll see if I can do my thing using something else. I really need the search ability now and since I already had everything in EN, I figured I was doing something wrong with my searching. Bummer...

You are welcome.  Yeah, a PITA if you want to use the $ or whatever.  

My workaround has been to search for "12.29" and if too many results add a tag or text to the search.  Works well most of the time for me.  For example I did a search for "12.29" and got 399 results.  I added ikea to the search and got 9 results.  Easy to find at that point.  FWIW.

[gazumped 11,656]

34 minutes ago, csihilling said:

 I added ikea to the search and got 9 results.

I got some experience with big databases,  and this is the sort of management stuff (used to call it 'gardening' until someone suggested 'curation' was a bit more professional) that goes on all the time.  There's a variation on the TANSTAAFL princple (the free lunches thing) that says 'if you have lots of data,  there's no easy way to manage it..  you have to keep polishing..

[OrbWeaver 83]

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

I got some experience with big databases,  and this is the sort of management stuff (used to call it 'gardening' until someone suggested 'curation' was a bit more professional) that goes on all the time.  There's a variation on the TANSTAAFL princple (the free lunches thing) that says 'if you have lots of data,  there's no easy way to manage it..  you have to keep polishing..

Polishing databases? Been there, done that. Wax on, wax off (as Pat Morita used to say). Well I'm pretty waxed off that I spent all that time and never thought to check if EN was able to search for strings of my choosing. I guess I'll have to do a bit more research next time but for now I have to forget about EN. I knew it probably wouldn't allow regular expressions but I thought basic searches would be obvious. Learn something new every day. Hey Evernote. . . How about RegEx?

 

[jbenson2 2,147]

Answers in this user forum are much faster!

Whew! It took a lot of back and forth with Evernote Support (15 emails since March 24), but I finally got a confirmation. As I pushed for a specific answer, I began to wonder if the Support personnel actually use the Evernote program.  

After answering many of their questions and sending my activity log twice, my request stumped the 1st-tier support. They could not duplicate the issue. My question was elevated to the 2nd-tier support. Here is the latest response:

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I am part of the escalations team. After speaking with the development team, the search engine does not include the special characters in the search. This is why they are returning the same results or slightly different results.

I am going to forward this support ticket to our developers however as a feature request to implement it into the app.

If you have further questions, please let me know.
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