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(Archived) Another Question About Nested Tags


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Reading through the forum on the issue of the lack of hierarchal notebooks, I've seen several suggestions to use nested tags instead. One person even said "just replace the word notebooks with tags and there's your answer". OK, so here is an example of a typical folder type structure for me:

  • [*:2niicbe5]Projects

    • [*:2niicbe5]Project A

      • [*:2niicbe5]Invoices

  • [*:2niicbe5]Project B

    • [*:2niicbe5]Invoices

In the above example there are obviously two *different* sub-folders named "Invoices". My beginner question is, how am I supposed to use nested tags to do the same thing as nested notebooks/folders, when you can't have more than one tag named "Invoice"? Am I supposed to give each of my invoice tags different names??

Thanks in advance for all answers.

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OK, so upon further research it looks to me like the user needs to create tons of slightly differently named tags with different prefixes or suffixes. Sigh. Looks like I'll be sticking with OneNote. Haven't been here for about 2 years, I'll stop back in another 2 years to see if EN has implemented the apparently monumental task of letting users have more than one level of notebook. :D

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  • Level 5
Am I supposed to give each of my invoice tags different names??

I've got 9,000 notes and use Evernote with just 7 notebooks. I don't see any problem with lots of specific and well-defined tags.

One solution. Tag structure:

  • Invoice
    • Inv-Proj-abc
      Inv-Proj-def
      Inv-Proj-ghi

I would use a different setup

  • Projects
    • Proj-ABC
      Proj-DEF
      Proj-GHI

and

  • Invoice

For a note on the invoice for Project DEF, I would tag it with "Proj-DEF" and "Invoice"

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Thanks a lot. I am really struggling with my frustration over the lack of this feature with the fact that I otherwise think the software is wonderful and love the fact that I could access it from any device, whereas with OneNote I am more limited, but when I am on the PC it at least does (near) everything I want. So I am trying to see if I can make EN work. Unfortunately when I have tried to implement workarounds in software for things it won't do, I have usually found myself giving up on it and just sticking with something that has the important feature I need.

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I've got 9,000 notes and use Evernote with just 7 notebooks. I don't see any problem with lots of specific and well-defined tags.

The biggest problem I see is that it can be very onerous to have to define a lot of information in a tag or a file name. That's why folders are used on computers, and why document management systems apply metadata in place of folders (not telling you anything you don't know, just observing). For example, if I have 100 projects over a few years, several of them will have similar names. That's easily handled with folders, whereas if you have to give every project a distinct tag much less so. I don't doubt it works well for you, I'm just not sure if it will for me. I actually love using tags, I'm a heavy delicious user just not in this way. Speaking of which, the FF and IE implementation of the Delicious extension is IM*O* the best implementation of tagging that I have ever seen. If EN had that I might not even care about a folder type structure.

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  • Level 5*

Tags are not notebooks. This is a simple result of the architecture; notes can have multiple tags (and tags can apply to multiple notes), whereas a note belongs to exactly one notebook. You cannot use nested tags to do the same thing as nested folders. That they're hierarchically organizable doesn't turn them into folders, since, as you point out "Invoices" can't exist in two places in the Tag tree, which is allowed in the file folder scheme. So ultimately, you cannot navigate your notes using tags as you would do in a file folder tree.

However, there's nothing stopping you from using notebooks and tags to work together. You have 250 notebooks to play with; maybe you can partition your projects into separate notebooks, and tag invoice notes with "Invoices" and so forth.

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However, there's nothing stopping you from using notebooks and tags to work together. You have 250 notebooks to play with; maybe you can partition your projects into separate notebooks, and tag invoice notes with "Invoices" and so forth.

Yes, I'm thinking about that too. What I have to look at is whether being able to nest notebooks only one level deep, in combination with tags, would work for me.

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  • Level 5

You could eliminate nested tags all together and use Stack notebooks for the Projects:

post-16734-1319060724_thumb.png

And throw everything pertaining to a project in the appropriate project subnotebook:

post-16734-131906072398_thumb.png

A search for

notebook:Proj-DEF tag:invoice

would pull up the 4 invoices for Proj-DEF:

post-16734-131906072399_thumb.png

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Thanks jbenson, in reading through the forum I notice that you offer a lot of helpful replies to people. If I make the jump to EN, I think this is definitely the approach I will take, a combination of nested notebooks with tags used on the secondary level. What I need to experiment with is how comfortable I am with being able to use the single stack of notebooks. I actually prefer not to nest things very deep at the project level, but on the other hand I always start by nesting this such as Personal>Projects>Project Name>Project Categories. So while I'd actually never nest my projects more then one level deep, they themselves would be nested under personal or professional. So if I make projects the top level of my nest than I'd have to start with something like Personal Projects and Professional Projects at the top level. It'll absolutely work, the only thing is then I'll need to implement lots of top level notebooks, maybe 20-30 for all the info I track in addition to projects. Whereas with my normal structure in OneNote there are only two levels, personal and professional, and then they all get broken down from there.

Based on the above, if you have any further things I should consider I am all ears.

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  • Level 5*
You could eliminate nested tags all together and use Stack notebooks for the Projects:

etc.

Thanks for fleshing out what I had hinted at in the post just above yours. :lol:

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Well in spite of my groaning above about not having more than one level of stacks, I decided to persevere and I'm hopeful that using a combination of stacks and tags is going to work for me. Other than the lack of multiple stacks I am quite blown away by the product. The ability to snap a pic or make a voice recording from a mobile device and instantly have it be available across all platforms and devices is nothing short of amazing. This is the one thing OneNote never did, and it was a huge limitation for such a product. Sure, they are trying to address that now with OneNote on Skydrive, but it's a faint imitation of the EN experience.

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