(Archived) Simple Feature Request - More "Merge" Functionality

[daveseemonster 13]

I use Evernote mainly on Mac and iOS but this would be a great feature across the board.

Currently when you merge notes, the title of the newest note becomes the new title and all other titles become headers within the merged note. There is no way to choose the order of notes or to create a new title of your choice without creative ways to work around the current functionality. All action is also permanent, in that sense the merge is destructive.

I propose adding these options:

• drag and order notes into any order which you choose - then merge preserving that order
  
• all notes titles become headers, the merged note gets a new title
  
• that merged title disappears when it is merged yet again with another note. This preserves each notes original form
  
• each time any notes were then merged, they would preserve their titles and could be reorganized.
  

Stop here if you follow - if you need more here is an example, I apologize if it appears to be convoluted. I have some coding experience so I think about this problem in that programming/problem solving sort of way. Here is how I make sense of it and how I would outline its functionality before coding the function. I hope this helps:

• You want to merge notes A+B into C, and D+E into F.
  
  • The new note C has a "merged title", whereas A and B have regular titles that will now become headers in note C.
    
  • Likewise, the note F has a merged title while the titles of D and E are now headers within F.
    
  • to recap: C=A+B and F=D+E
    

  [*]Now you want to merge C+F into G, but you want every note within G to be organized a certain way, in this case, alphabetically.

  • Traditionally C+F=G would be equivalent to G=D+E+A+B but the title of G would be the title of F and the title of C would be a header after E and before A.
    
  • Confused? You should be. Thats why this needs to be fixed!
    

  [*]With this improved method, the titles of C and F would disappear, and A,B,C, and D could be organized anyway you like.

  • You could now make a note like this:
    
  • G = A + B + D + E
    
  • G would have a new title. The original titles of A, B, D, and E would appear as headers with no additional headers in between. Clean and simple. (on the user end!)
    

Really the functionality very nearly resembles a notebook with the graphical interface of a note. It is in essence just a list of notes disguised as a note. It may be best implemented as a new construct without having to change any coding within Evernote (besides replacing current merge functionality). It could get intensive with "n" number of notes being a fairly large number (e.g. n=1000), but I think most people only use this function for 10 notes or less. Ideally a merged note construct would be non-destructive to the point that it could at the click of a button be broken down into individual notes in a notebook. Like it never happened. How beautiful! How simple!

Thanks for reading!

Best regards,

-Dave

Note 3.html

Note 3.pdf

[jefito 5,589]

Currently when you merge notes, the title of the newest note becomes the new title and all other titles become headers within the merged note. There is no way to choose the order of notes or to create a new title of your choice without creative ways to work around the current functionality. All action is also permanent, in that sense the merge is destructive.

The Windows client, as best I can tell, puts the original notes into the merged note in the same order as they are picked. Also, the original notes are put into the trash, so you can recover them if the merge doesn't go the way that you want it to.

I propose adding these options: * drag and order notes into any order which you choose - then merge preserving that order

What context are you dragging and ordering these notes? Not in the note list, as that has no capability for order-by-drag, at least at this time.

* all notes titles become headers, the merged note gets a new title

How is the new title generated? Automatically?

* that merged title disappears when it is merged yet again with another note. This preserves each notes original form

Merges are atomic. I don't believe that Evernote marks merged notes specially, so it would be hard to differentiate between titles from previously merged or unmerged notes. Have a look into some exported noted; maybe there's something that I've missed.

* each time any notes were then merged, they would preserve their titles and could be reorganized.

Again, reorganized in what context? The note list? The merged note?

Really the functionality very nearly resembles a notebook with the graphical interface of a note. It is in essence just a list of notes disguised as a note. It may be best implemented as a new construct without having to change any coding within Evernote (besides replacing current merge functionality). It could get intensive with "n" number of notes being a fairly large number (e.g. n=1000), but I think most people only use this function for 10 notes or less. Ideally a merged note construct would be non-destructive to the point that it could at the click of a button be broken down into individual notes in a notebook. Like it never happened. How beautiful! How simple!

Hmmm, not so sure about that. Merged note content is like any other note content, as best as I can tell; I believe that Evernote would need to provide some further note structuring element to implement this, so that it could recognize previously merged content unambiguously. It's also not clear that all users would want the same behavior as you've proposed. That being said, I'd welcome better note structuring facilities in the UI, but more general ones -- this seems pretty specific.

[Giò 7]

I, too, would like to see that when notes with a particular tag are merged, the original notes aren't deleted. Restoring them from the trash is just a pain. I have my notes tagged with more than one tag, sometimes up to four or five. Having to restore the notes for each merge is tedious, especially since I have upwards of 60 tags and will have several thousand notes to be sorted and merged by the time the thesis I'm working on is finished.

[daveseemonster 13]

Jefito and Gio,

 

Thank you for your input! Gio, thats exactly the problem which prompted this post! Jefito, if I could give an example as to when you need notes to be ordered a certain way maybe it will make it more clear.

 

Say I made three notes called "meeting notes 1" "meeting notes 2" and "meeting notes 3" in that order... the most recent note would appear at the top of the merged note but that is actually the opposite of what would make sense - you may want "meeting notes 1" to appear first. You can easily overcome this yourself by manipulation, but a built in tool would be nice for much more complexed cases.

 

As an aside, I'm using the Mac client. They could be different but I doubt it so its possible I was mistaken. Either way, I can imagine a UI that would make this easier.

 

Yes you can retrieve notes from the trash but that can be difficult when the notes in the trash are several years old buried in hundreds or even thousands of other notes. A simple click to break down a merged notes into its components would provide an advantage here.

 

Your last comment is right on - but I think I addressed the same issue. It would in fact require "further note structuring" to implement. True, all users may not want this functionality but in product development a team would normally beta test to determine its worth. Many users leave features of a given program untouched without interfering with the rest of the program's features so this would likely not be a problem for those users. You're certainly right that this is very specific. This is but one solution which I imagined. A better UI is always welcome but with each improvement it gets harder to push the envelope. Id say its pretty good already!

 

Thanks again,

Dave

[Giò 7]

If anyone is still looking for this feature, I've found a non-destructive way to merge notes... and it's easy... When you have selected all of the notes you want to merge, select "email" instead of "merge." Instead of your usual email address, mail the notes to your Evernote account. Voila! They will turn up merged in your inbox (or other assigned notebook) and your original notes will remain intact. Hope this helps someone else!