(Archived) Since the topic on the 250 notebook limit is locked

[RickyMaveety 0]

I've been an Evernote user for about 5 years.  I started using it and then stopped.  Recently I started using it again.  Since I had a Premium account, I thought I'd give it a second try, and now I remember why I stopped using it.  The dreaded 250 notebook limit.

 

It makes no sense to me that this particular limitation would have been kept in place this long.  Nice that they finally got around to notebook "stacks" which makes for better organization (yay), but I prefer not to keep all of my clients packed up in one notebook.  I don't even care to keep all of my shopping lists together in one notebook.

 

I'm trying to decide if I want to keep my account or drop it completely.  I realize that there are work arounds, however, if I'm paying to use a service, then the more work arounds I am faced with, the less likely I am to actually use the service.  So, I'm curious if anyone at Evernote gives a rat's patootie what their users think, or if it's just a matter of "tough, you don't think it's perfect, don't use it and don't suggest changes because we don't care."

 

Just curious. 

[jefito 5,589]

You're welcome to keep on requesting this feature (I can't remember why the prior 250 notebook thread was locked, but it wasn't because of any simple feature requests -- that's not the way things work here).

It's for sure that the Evernote folks care about what their users think; even so, they may not deliver features that some of their users want. So no, it's not a matter of "tough, you don't think it's perfect, don't use it and don't suggest changes because we don't care." -- as I said, suggestions are welcome, but in a sense, it is "tough" sometimes because they don't implement all suggestions. It's that way with a lot of software products, unfortunately.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I've been an Evernote user for about 5 years.  I started using it and then stopped.  Recently I started using it again.  Since I had a Premium account, I thought I'd give it a second try, and now I remember why I stopped using it.  The dreaded 250 notebook limit.

 

It makes no sense to me that this particular limitation would have been kept in place this long.  Nice that they finally got around to notebook "stacks" which makes for better organization (yay), but I prefer not to keep all of my clients packed up in one notebook.  I don't even care to keep all of my shopping lists together in one notebook.

 

I'm trying to decide if I want to keep my account or drop it completely.  I realize that there are work arounds, however, if I'm paying to use a service, then the more work arounds I am faced with, the less likely I am to actually use the service.  So, I'm curious if anyone at Evernote gives a rat's patootie what their users think, or if it's just a matter of "tough, you don't think it's perfect, don't use it and don't suggest changes because we don't care."

 

Just curious.

Hi. I don't know why there are only 250 notebooks, but that's the limit for regular and Premium accounts, and I haven't seen any indication that Evernote plans to change it. If you are a Business user, you can increase the number by taking advantage of the 5,000 notebook limit in the Library.

[mrgoerend 89]

250 hasn't been the number for that long, only a couple of years. It used to be 50. So maybe it'll grow again.

[kenorasis 4]

The notebook limitation just needs to go away, at least for premium users. EN just asked me to upgrade once again; I'm just here to tell them why I'm not upgrading (although the limited search functionality is also annoying and related now that I think about it -- if search were better, I could work around the notebook limitation, but alas...)

 

Maybe I'm underestimating the resources needed to accomplish this change, but technology changes over time and I think the more people demand the change, the more EN (or someone else) will devote resources to it. 

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

The notebook limitation just needs to go away, at least for premium users. EN just asked me to upgrade once again; I'm just here to tell them why I'm not upgrading (although the limited search functionality is also annoying and related now that I think about it -- if search were better, I could work around the notebook limitation, but alas...)

 

Maybe I'm underestimating the resources needed to accomplish this change, but technology changes over time and I think the more people demand the change, the more EN (or someone else) will devote resources to it. 

 

 

Well, it's easy for you to say that.  But you don't know why the limit is imposed.  (Nor do I.)  I do know Evernote does not randomly impose limits they pull out of the air for no reason.  And as has been discussed on the board a lot already, tags are the recommended tool to use rather than so many notebooks.  I have over 61,000 notes in my main account & have never reached the 250 notebook limit. I also find the search pretty remarkable for finding my notes.  Of course I use descriptive titles & keywords, too.  Probably less than half my notes even have any tags at all.  So yeah, the 250 notebook limit is feasible.

 

If this is a deal breaker for you, then you should find another app.

[kenorasis 4]

Second request to Evernote: I know these people are "not affiliated with Evernote," but they seem to part of some Evangelist program that you either sponsor or at least tolerate. If they are serving in some official capacity, please monitor them more closely (or just kill the program).

 

The comments I've seen so far are unhelpful and almost seem designed to elicit nothing but bad will.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

The notebook limitation just needs to go away, at least for premium users. EN just asked me to upgrade once again; I'm just here to tell them why I'm not upgrading (although the limited search functionality is also annoying and related now that I think about it -- if search were better, I could work around the notebook limitation, but alas...)

 

Maybe I'm underestimating the resources needed to accomplish this change, but technology changes over time and I think the more people demand the change, the more EN (or someone else) will devote resources to it.

 

Hi. Limited search capabilities? Have you seen the advanced grammar? Specifically, what kind of search would you like to do?  I would post a link to the advanced search page, but Evernote is (frustratingly) only feeding me Japanese pages and I am too lazy to change my language settings on the computer just to visit the site. I really wish web designers would stop force-feeding me pages... Here is a video:

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/40116-how-tuesday-evernote-advanced-search-syntax/?p=217127

Second request to Evernote: I know these people are "not affiliated with Evernote," but they seem to part of some Evangelist program that you either sponsor or at least tolerate. If they are serving in some official capacity, please monitor them more closely (or just kill the program).

 

The comments I've seen so far are unhelpful and almost seem designed to elicit nothing but bad will.

I'm sorry you feel that way. As I mentioned above, there is a (kind of) workaround using Business and I thought you might not have seen the advanced search grammar. That's the best I can do. Apologies for not being more helpful. Evernote support might be the best for you in that case (see the link in my signature).

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Second request to Evernote: I know these people are "not affiliated with Evernote," but they seem to part of some Evangelist program that you either sponsor or at least tolerate. If they are serving in some official capacity, please monitor them more closely (or just kill the program).

 

The comments I've seen so far are unhelpful and almost seem designed to elicit nothing but bad will.

 

I'm sure if Evernote thought we are unhelpful, they would discontinue the program. 

 

 

The fact that you don't like the answers provided does not mean the answers have no merit or are not correct.

[kenorasis 4]

Hi. Limited search capabilities? Have you seen the advanced grammar? Specifically, what kind of search would you like to do? ....

 

Thanks GrumpyMonkey. Here's an example: I don't know if you're familiar with GTD, but I have a notebook called Actions that has notes tagged with a Time (eg, Now, Next) and a Place (eg, Home, Office, Anywhere). I would like a saved search that returns notes in Actions tagged with Now AND either Office OR Anywhere.

 

Now I suppose I could put all the other Place tags to my Anywhere-tagged notes, but that's not ideal. I'm open to any suggestions -- including changing my process if it's simple enough.

 

BTW, I do appreciate the offer to help, even if there's no good solution. 

[jefito 5,589]

Thanks GrumpyMonkey. Here's an example: I don't know if you're familiar with GTD, but I have a notebook called Actions that has notes tagged with a Time (eg, Now, Next) and a Place (eg, Home, Office, Anywhere). I would like a saved search that returns notes in Actions tagged with Now AND either Office OR Anywhere.

 

Now I suppose I could put all the other Place tags to my Anywhere-tagged notes, but that's not ideal. I'm open to any suggestions -- including changing my process if it's simple enough.

The Evernote search functionality is certainly limited, it's no secret: no support for full Boolean search, no regular expressions, no infix search, one search scope operator per query (notebook, stack), etc., etc. All of these are well-known to forum-goers here. So the search / filter described won't work as is; it's just not expressible in the Evernote search language.

The troublesome bit would be the "Office OR Anywhere" term. There are ways to turn some OR terms into just normal tag searches using wildcards, but I don't think that this is possible here. So you'd need a single tag to add to any note that was tagged with "Office" or "Anywhere", (e.g. "OfficeOrAnywhere"). Then your search becomes easy. (notebook:Active tag:Now tag:OfficeOrAnywhere). That's about the best I can come up with for this case.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi. Limited search capabilities? Have you seen the advanced grammar? Specifically, what kind of search would you like to do? ....

 

Thanks GrumpyMonkey. Here's an example: I don't know if you're familiar with GTD, but I have a notebook called Actions that has notes tagged with a Time (eg, Now, Next) and a Place (eg, Home, Office, Anywhere). I would like a saved search that returns notes in Actions tagged with Now AND either Office OR Anywhere.

 

Now I suppose I could put all the other Place tags to my Anywhere-tagged notes, but that's not ideal. I'm open to any suggestions -- including changing my process if it's simple enough.

 

BTW, I do appreciate the offer to help, even if there's no good solution.

GTD can be tricky, especially when used in combination with TSW, which has a pretty specific set of features that need to work well (sometimes, updates to the app impact this kind of workflow, depending on your operating system). Jefito has the best workaround, I think. Perhaps one of our GTD users will weigh in here with their workflow.

I think you might be able to put something together with Spotlight on the Mac using the "or" operand, but I don't think it will recognize tags in Evernote, so you might need something like random character strings in your notes (I use these for organizing). You could search for "2340siue" and "fiodfl89w" (common words might produce false hits, but the random codes are unique, so they don't). The problem is that text (a random code) in a note is a lot less flexible than tags.

Again, no good solution from within the app for that particular use-case. Sorry.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I would like a saved search that returns notes in Actions tagged with Now AND either Office OR Anywhere.

Since as Jeff mentioned, EN does not do boolean searches, tags could be "Now - office" & "Now - anywhere". Then do an "or" search on both tags.