How to locate a tag in a tree with many tags

[islandboatman 1]

If you have thousands of tags, then it would be nice to locate the tag in the tree. e.g. with a right-click on the tag, and a button in the context menu. (See red text below.)

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks!

[DTLow 5,736]

6 hours ago, islandboatman said:

How to locate a tag in a tree with many tags ... Is there a better way to do this?

I roll with a minimized sidebar and rarely use the notebook/tag trees (Mac/iPad/Web)
I use the tag filter button with it's find a tag search

Also my naming standard is to prefix tag names to reflect the hierarchy
For example Colour Colour-Red Colour-Blue Colour-Black
Tags are easy to find by scrolling down the list

 

[jefito 5,589]

I know of no easy way to navigate backwards from a tag to its location in the left panel tag tree in Evernote for Windows.About the closest I could come was to select "Copy" from the right-click menu, then Ctrl+Shift+T to open up the Tags View, and paste the tag name into the  "Search Tags" control. That filters the Tags View down to the tree that contains the tag; at that point, you can clear the "Search Tags" control, and the whole tag tree will return, but your tag will remain highlighted.

As I say, there's no way, easy or hard, that I know of, but that just means that Mr. Know-it-All @CalS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL5wei4phz0) will probably show up with the way to do it...

 

[CalS 5,280]

7 hours ago, islandboatman said:

If you have thousands of tags, then it would be nice to locate the tag in the tree. e.g. with a right-click on the tag, and a button in the context menu. (See red text below.)

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks

Never one to disappoint @jefito. 

On Windows anyway, if you check Tools - Options - Navigation - Scroll left panel item into view when the item is selected when you click the caret to the right of the tag in the note header the tag will appear in the left panel.  Don't know if the Mac has the same option.

Full disclosure, I typically don't use this as I my main view is with the left panel closed nor I don't have that many tags.  FWIW,

[jefito 5,589]

Hah -- I knew it!

Interesting feature, but of no use to me. The less I see of my tag bramble (= not a tree), the better...

[CalS 5,280]

10 minutes ago, jefito said:

Interesting feature, but of no use to me. The less I see of my tag bramble (= not a tree), the better...

Ditto.  Though not sure I have a bramble.  Tall weeds maybe.

[islandboatman 1]

6 hours ago, jefito said:

>>  "the closest I could come was to select "Copy" from the right-click menu, then Ctrl+Shift+T to open up the Tags View, and paste the tag name into the  "Search Tags" control. That filters the Tags View down to the tree that contains the tag; at that point, you can clear the "Search Tags" control, and the whole tag tree will return, but your tag will remain highlighted."

That works.

But it doesn't work if the tag is in a collapsed branch in the tree before you execute the above procedure. 

When there are a lot of levels in the tree, you can have many collapsed branches.

 

[islandboatman 1]

4 hours ago, CalS said:

>> "On Windows anyway, if you check Tools - Options - Navigation - Scroll left panel item into view when the item is selected when you click the caret to the right of the tag in the note header the tag will appear in the left panel.  Don't know if the Mac has the same option."

 

Well that worked.

thanks!

Out of curiosity why do all you guys not use hierarchies / taxonomies? What's the 2020 zeitgeist?

• When i first started Evernote, i made a million Notebooks.
• Then people told me i should use tags for hierarchies instead.
• So i converted everything over to tags
• But you guys dont like tags hierarchies / taxonomies?

Do you just let the notes float in a notebook, and use SEARCH to reveal them?

 

4 hours ago, CalS said:

 

 

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, islandboatman said:

why do all you guys not use hierarchies / taxonomies?

I make use of the tag hierarchy; it's a great tool for tag organization

I rarely use the tag tree in the sidebar.   
An example, tagging a note with !Budget-Food something   
I start typing !Bud and I see a filtered list of all my budget tags    
Looking for a tag, I use the alphabetical tag filter list

[CalS 5,280]

33 minutes ago, islandboatman said:

Well that worked.

thanks!

You are welcome.

33 minutes ago, islandboatman said:

Out of curiosity why do all you guys not use hierarchies / taxonomies? What's the 2020 zeitgeist?

• When i first started Evernote, i made a million Notebooks.
• Then people told me i should use tags for hierarchies instead.
• So i converted everything over to tags
• But you guys dont like tags hierarchies / taxonomies?

Do you just let the notes float in a notebook, and use SEARCH to reveal them?

I have created parent/child relationships for my tags, but strictly for organization of the tags not organization of notes.  I don't like tag hierarchies for notes, too restrictive in my view.  Doesn't mean it isn't the right thing for others.  My mind thinks in terms of tuples not hierarchies.

Top line my use case is paperless and my version of GTD.  I simply tag notes and use search to find things.  I keep my tags simple such that they say what they mean; $tatement for example, or the name of the company for a provider, or the model of a car.  A search for tag;Farmers returns all notes tagged with Farmers, a search for tag:Farmers tag:Car returns all insurance notes for Car.  I find this to be a simpler way for me to categorize and find things.

I'm not that concerned where I put the note, more how do I find it as quickly as possible.  I have six notebooks plus Scans and Inbox, 400 tags and almost 46,000 notes.  I could dumb it down to three notebooks (one synced, one synced for offline with IOS, and one local) plus Inbox and Scans.  I have opted not to do that since it makes backup ENEX files bigger than may be wise. 

You can find the notebooks vs tags discussion on many threads in the forum, which leads to the hierarchical tags hack..  Hey if works for folks more power to them.  Not for me though.  FWIW.

 

 

[jefito 5,589]

1 hour ago, islandboatman said:

Out of curiosity why do all you guys not use hierarchies / taxonomies? What's the 2020 zeitgeist?

• When i first started Evernote, i made a million Notebooks.
• Then people told me i should use tags for hierarchies instead.
• So i converted everything over to tags
• But you guys dont like tags hierarchies / taxonomies?

Do you just let the notes float in a notebook, and use SEARCH to reveal them?

Simple answer: For me, a tag represents a category or property, and many of my notes belong to more than one category or property. A tree is generally not enough to represent that kind of system. So trees pf tags are pretty much useless to me. Think of books: there's history, there's fiction... and there's historical fiction, and so on. I do use search rather than navigating tag trees to find my Evernotes; if residing in a notebook is "floating", then sure, my notes float in a notebook, whatever that means.

Technical note: the term taxonomy refers to systems of classification, and those systems can be hierarchical, but not all taxonomies are hierarchical. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(general), for more.

So I have a fair number of tags, but not much hierarchical organization of those tags. I don't have a lot of notebooks, either.

 

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Tags are my main tool to group notes together. Find all notes that may be relevant for my tax declaration is looking for the tags 2019 and tax. It is then easy to create a table of content, and work it down from there. I use ScannerPro as a tool to import many things as PDFs. It has workflows, and every workflow has an own set of standard tags. By this a lot of my scans come ready with tags, simply by choosing the workflow.

Since Tag hierarchy is not supported on iOS, it is pretty useless for me to create deep tag structures. I have around 150 tags, and the number is slowly growing. Every 3 month I review my tags. Rarely used ones are weeded out (by retagging the notes with something more useful, and then deleting the seldom used tag).

Notebooks are there just for a basic structure of the notes, and then for special issues like sharing or defining which ones are offline on my iPhone. This is pretty flexible, since many shares are only temporary, there is an on and off again of notebooks. The tags stay on the notes, even when they rest in a new notebook for a period of time.

 

[gazumped 11,667]

...And I use Titles as tags (kinda) - my evolved practice is to use <date> - <type> - <source> - <keywords> as a standard format. 

Lots of reasons but the outcome is that I can find the email <type> I had last month <date> from my internet provider <source> about a faulty router <keywords> with very little effort.  That's leveraging intitle: searches too,  obviously.

Where my searches generate false positives I might edit titles or add tags to help resolve my positive hits more quickly.

It used to be that 99% of my notes (excluding only shared or local notes and some work in progress) were in one notebook.  I've recently moved however to a system where the <source> defines a notebook - so all my interactions with that ISP are in one place.  Since the notes are all listed by their dated titles,  this pretty much halves the search term I need to create.  Plus if I select that notebook,  there's a short enough list of notes that I don't need to even search.

With over 49K notes now,  and over 100 notebooks (I'm nearly finished creating new ones) I still only see an average of around 150 notes in most notebooks.  That's enough for a quick eyeball search a lot of the time,  which is often much faster than creating a bespoke search for a specific item.

However: while this suits my lifestyle (I have this 'laziest person' ideal in mind) and the way my mind works,  it may not work for you.  If whatever you have works for you - don't 'fix' it!

[DTLow 5,736]

On 2/27/2020 at 8:07 AM, gazumped said:

And I use Titles as tags (kinda) - my evolved practice is to use <date> - <type> - <source> - <keywords> as a standard format. 

That would be Note Titles; and no trees, no hierarchy, no tag list

I replicate tags as keywords in the title, but I continue to use the tags feature   
- it's Evernote's top feature for organization/retrieval 
I also replicate tags as keywords within the note contents

[CalS 5,280]

7 hours ago, gazumped said:

However: while this suits my lifestyle (I have this 'laziest person' ideal in mind) and the way my mind works,  it may not work for you. 

I don't know Gaz, with all that stuff in the title and 100 notebooks you may be straying from the laziest person ideal.  Slap one or two refining tags on it and let search do its work when the time comes.    

All kidding aside, for whatever reason just about all my searches are from an All Notes context, there's some laziness for you.  I hardly ever use a specific notebook.  If it weren't for backup sizes and offline notebooks on IOS I would have Synced, Local plus the "temp" two, Inbox and Scans.  As we always say, horses for courses and EN let's you pick your course.  

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

On 2/26/2020 at 2:43 AM, islandboatman said:

If you have thousands of tags, then it would be nice to locate the tag in the tree. e.g. with a right-click on the tag, and a button in the context menu.

I agree.  For those of us to make great use of tags, we definitely need better ways of managing the tags.

Both the Tag Tree in  the sidebar and the Tag List need a major UI overhaul that will support thousands of tags, just like can be easily done with the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer.