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Tag Inheritance


bthall

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Many moons ago the topic of inheritance in tags (from subgroup up to "header" tag) was mentioned strongly as a requested feature from EN2 to EN3.

Can the "powers" give me any type of update on this request?

Many thanks!

BarryT

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The tag hierarchy is purely for organization ... if you have a lot of tags, it may help you find a particular tag. Tags are assigned to a note if you assign them. The tree organization does not imply a semantic relationship between parent and child tags.

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Dave:

The tag hierarchy is purely for organization ... if you have a lot of tags, it may help you find a particular tag. Tags are assigned to a note if you assign them. The tree organization does not imply a semantic relationship between parent and child tags

I think 99% of the people on this forum already KNOW everything you say in your reply. And actually our education was not my goal. It is my strong believe that the same 99% would benefit from tag inheritance for a whole multitude of reasons.

So again, if I may, I would like to ask you ***IF*** we will eventually see it happen, as was implied to us so long ago. I don't mind waiting, I would just like some reassurance.

Thanks again,

Barry

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  • 1 month later...

+1 for tag inheritance when child tag is added to a note. I was about to request this in another thread before I found this.

I just don't see the point of tags NOT being inherited. Lets say you are trying to seach for everything related to "work". but the tag "work" has 15 other tags associated with it (hierarchical).

With the current scheme, I wont find everything I'm looking for unless: 1) I have dragged Both the specific tag, AND the "work" tag to each and every note that has anything to do with work, or 2) I create a search for all 15 subtags, plus the parent tag.

Both of these options are very cumbersome, and reduces the extant to which I use evernote. There has to be a better way. Tag inheritance does it. Please, please, please let us know when this will be added.

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Staff of Evernote,

I have a specific note taking situation that I would like your help with, as far as organization. They way my mind works, tag inheritance seems to be neccesary for this situation, but maybe you have another solution. Maybe you can help me organize my system in a way that makes sense with the current features. Or maybe this will give you some ideas of how your customers want to and are trying to use your product, and what features we need to accomplish this.

In my "journal" folder, I'm trying to track my progress on certain goals I have set for myself, and also capture websites and ideas that apply to specific goals.

Here's my desire for organization:

First organize by a goal's type:

I.E. Work, Family, Health, Personal,

Then organize by a goal's timeline:

for me, 4 tags make sense : Short term (within a month), mid term (withing a year), long term (more than 1 year), life-long.

Then, organize by goal itself:

I.E. climb everest, do the Ironman, get Doctorate, complete landscaping, Europe vacation,

Then organize by the content type of the note associated with the goal:

ideas, examples, websites, people,

My hope in importing items to my database, is that I can keep the front-end organization to a minimum. I would hate to have to manually add 4 tags to each note I add to my system, just so that I can track it properly later. If that were neccesary, I would not be likely to use evernote as often as I would like to.

Maybe the solution is hierarchical tags. maybe the solution is subfolders in notebooks. maybe you have other suggestions?

I doubt I'm the only one looking for a way to organize this type of information with evernote. Maybe other users have some input on this as well?

Anyway, Ithank you for all the hard work you have already put into this product. I hope it can evolve into the last system I have to migrate my information to (at least for a very long time)

Thanks for putting up with my ramblings :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

Tag inheritance is the biggest and immediately visible missing thing in Evernote.

Though the Evernote staff is stating "this is not a bug, it's a feature", I don't see the point of hierarchically organizing tags but not the associated notes when searching with tags???

If this would not have beend stated as a "feature" I would have definitely believed this to be a bug :D

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Evernote Staff:

Please please please work to improve the tedium involved in added multiple tags to a new note. If you are absolutely determined that tag inheritance is not needed, despite the requests of many of your (willing-to-be) paying customers, at least consider adding a "copy tags, paste tags" feature. If I add a new note, and 4 tags apply to it, then at least i can copy and paste the tags from a similar note, with 2 actions, instead of the absolutely RIDICULOUS 4x drag-and-drop or 4x typing-enter actions.

I will state again, I'm willing to pay for the evernote premium service, even though I don't currently use the bandwidth that requires it. I believe in supporting companies that look for ways to help their customers. I will be a paying customer as soon as, and only when tag management is VASTLY improved, and when I can sync Entire notebooks to my iphone.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I would like to add my vote for inheritance of some type within Evernote 3.x. I would like it to be done using Tags, but recognize that the Folders option might be another way to get the same functionality. Inheritance is just natural.

If I managed a region of the country, and wanted to one click add a document or note that would be assigned to each zone, then it would take one assignment, if the document was at the top level of the heirarchy.

However, if I placed the same document (tag) in a child item, then this item would only be assigned at the child level and parent level. For example, If I manage zone's A, B, C and D and add a note IMPLICITLY to Zone D (tag), then a search of the database would only show this note in the Parent Folder (Manager Tag) AND the the Zone D (tag). However, if I remove the note from Zone D's tag and IMPLICITLY add this same note to the Top Level Manager tag, then this same note would be inherited by all of the children of the Manager tag.

There are times, when notes implicitly added to a child item, should not be inherited by its siblings, however a parent Tag should at all times know about notes within each Child Tag.

This is the behavior that I'd like to see in a future version of Evernote.

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Yes, we should have tag inheritance. Org Mode in Emacs has tag inheritance (http://orgmode.org/), and it's wonderful.

I am still using EN 2.2 because I like the way it works much better (I have a high volume of notes that I dump into EN, and I need the Automatic Keyword Categories).

I consider tag inheritance and a new function for something akin to the Automatic Keyword Categories to be the two most important elements that need to be added to EN3 for serious users like myself to take an interest.

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Not really sure if I should have posted this here or the long runnning nested notebooks.

Anyway, I’m afraid I’m on the “we want nested notebooks” band wagon. As we cannot have nested/hierarchical notebooks. I decided that I’d set up a hierarchical TAG system (as suggested), after adding a lot of notes and tags I realised that within the TAG hierarchy you can only have unique objects.

So, I have five notes with keywords like:

Note1 = Vehicle,Car,blue

Note2 = Vehicle,Car,red

Note3 = Vehicle,Car,green

Note4 = Vehicle,van,blue

Note5 = Vehicle,van,white

Note6 = Vehicle,van,blue,white

They are all in one notebook.

This is the TAG hierarchical we get:

Vehicle (6)

  • Car (3)

    • Blue (3)

    • green (1)

    • red (1)

  • Van (3)

    • white (2)

But I wanted to see:

Vehicle (6)

  • Car (3)

    • Blue (1)

    • red (1)

    • green (1)

  • Van (3)

    • Blue (2)

    • white (2)

So, I wanted to navigate a hierarchy and see an inherited list – like “Vehicle = Van = Blue = 2” but can’t as blue is unique and already assigned to “Vehicle = car”. In theory this is actually an incorrect way of using tags but it would have got round the fact that I can’t navigate nested notebooks. Any thoughts please?

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  • 4 weeks later...

I, too, vote for tag inheritance.

In the meantime, here's a trick I've come up with for tagging multiple items with multiple tags. Say you have tag="Red Sox" and subtags "Ortiz" and "Varitek." Now, if you have created a bunch of notes tagged with Ortiz and/or Varitek, they will not have inherited the parent tag "Red Sox." Here's how you can quickly tag them all Red Sox. First, select any one of the notes tagged with Ortiz and/or Varitek and tag it with "Red Sox." Then select all the Ortiz and/or Varitek notes with the select all (using Ctrl+click, search + select all, or whatever method). Now click on "Tags" (or use kbd shortcut). When the tags box pops up, you will see that any tag that applies to *all* the selected notes will have a check mark. But any tag that applies to only *some* of the notes--such as "Red Sox" in this case--will instead have a box filled in with green shading. Now, if you click the box next to "Red Sox," the shading will turn to a checkmark, and "Red Sox" will be applied to all the selected notes. This is a helpful trick in some other instances, such as when I'm working on a certain topic and quickly clip a whole bunch of notes. I tag the first note right when I clip it, then, when I'm done with the topic, I go in and use this trick to extend the original tag(s) to all the relevant new notes.

It's just a workaround, but I find it useful on many occasions. Also, my description is based on the Windows application. Not sure if/how it can be used on other platforms.

Happy New Year.

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It's just a workaround, but I find it useful on many occasions.

Thanks for this. It is a workaround, but does save some time.

I really hope Evernote will come out with an "official" response for tag inheritance. I get the feeling that tag inheritance is more likely to happen than sub-notebooks, but what do I know? (my guess is that getting tags to match the display of parents is relatively simple - when a child tag is selected/checked, you could trigger the selection of the parent. After all the environment is already displaying them differently, so it "knows" one is a parent...)

I am betting on tag inheritance. It's just gotta happen! I can live without sub-notebooks if tag inheritance were implemented. That's a big deal. I'm a folder structure guy! Seriously, if you read through the whole sub-notebook discussion, I honestly think that tag inheritance would solve many of the issues the "folder crowd" is bringing up.

I know for me it would. And I would have considered myself a staunch supporter of sub-notebooks. Yes, it is a different way of thinking and approaching organization. But in the sub-notebook discussion, many of the responses from folks using tags were along the lines of "why not just use tags to achieve a similar effect?" Go back and read those responses, but imagine that tag inheritance was part of tags. Makes more sense, doesn't it?

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Go back and read those responses, but imagine that tag inheritance was part of tags. Makes more sense, doesn't it?

Yeah, except for the fact that you can clip notes into a notebook automatically, i.e., select the notebook you want, clip away, and they all go into the right place. Even with a decent tag hierarchy, I would have to remember to tag my notes after clipping :(

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Oh yeah, I know that tags won't solve every notebook/folder hierarchy problem. But having a true parent-child tag system (with inheritance) would go a long way.

I think you were the first in that thread to remark that the concept of parent tags without inheritance rendered them pretty much useless. And I agree. From a UI perspective, I just don't agree with (or even understand) showing a user a collapsible parent-child relationship where the child is completely independent from the parent in all functional aspects. I think it's a design flaw. My opinion, of course.

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Yeah, except for the fact that you can clip notes into a notebook automatically, i.e., select the notebook you want, clip away, and they all go into the right place. Even with a decent tag hierarchy, I would have to remember to tag my notes after clipping

If you clip using the firefox scriptlet you can specify the tags at clipping time.

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I can live without sub-notebooks if tag inheritance were implemented

I think inherited tags allow you to do the same thing as sub-notebooks and more.

Tags are more flexible than sub-notebooks because they can handle classifications that are not hierarchical as well hierarchical classifications. Sub-notebooks can only handle hierarchical classifications.

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Go back and read those responses, but imagine that tag inheritance was part of tags. Makes more sense, doesn't it?

Yeah, except for the fact that you can clip notes into a notebook automatically, i.e., select the notebook you want, clip away, and they all go into the right place. Even with a decent tag hierarchy, I would have to remember to tag my notes after clipping :(

The additional feature that is needed to make the whole issue of organization more efficient would be automatic tagging similar to EN 2.2 which could "assign filters to any category, effectively turning it into an Auto Category."

But that is only the efficiency issue of getting things tagged. This, combined with the ability to have a Tag hierarchy when desired, would be truly a huge improvement.

There are several things that make the various flavors of Evernote great: Clipping (in both, but EN3 is more flexible); synchronizing to the web (EN3), searching (EN3 is a bit better); Categories (EN2.2); AutoCategories and filters to create them (EN2.2).

To maintain its greatness, Evernote needs to get these all working together. Tons of clips and notes that can't be organized the way we think isn't the best solution to information overload. And we all work and think differently. Evernote needs to be flexible enough to support a larger group.

Maybe Evernote 4.

--

Marty

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I can live without sub-notebooks if tag inheritance were implemented. That's a big deal. I'm a folder structure guy! Seriously, if you read through the whole sub-notebook discussion, I honestly think that tag inheritance would solve many of the issues the "folder crowd" is bringing up.

I couldn't agree more. Although I also agree with Crane that it wouldn't solve the problem of not being able to automatically clip to a particular tag... now, if they introduced both features...

I'm a tag gal myself but I do think these are the two main flaws in tags: lack of true tag hierarchy & not being able to preselect a tag (or tags, ideally) to assign to the notes you create. These features would make Evernote an awful lot more intuitive for everyone to use, and would go some way towards placating the subfolder crowd.

I don't think you'd even have to change the current behaviour to introduce a kind of tag hierarchy; it could function like the categories in Evernote 2 where you could do something like single click on a category to select just that category, and double click to select that category and all of it's children. That way everyone's happy :D ...sort of.

I'm less bothered about the the auto-assigned tags personally, since I've now got a good tagging system that is easy to remember and type quickly, but I think for those people who aren't quite as geeky with their tags as I am it would be a huge help and would reduce the need for subfolders. And it would make my life just a little bit easier too.

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  • 5 years later...

Tag inheritance is the biggest and immediately visible missing thing in Evernote.

Though the Evernote staff is stating "this is not a bug, it's a feature", I don't see the point of hierarchically organizing tags but not the associated notes when searching with tags???

If this would not have beend stated as a "feature" I would have definitely believed this to be a bug smile.png

1 more vote to tag inheritance

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  • 4 months later...
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