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We have been using Evernote in my real estate business for several years.  When we get a new client, we create a new notebook.  Apparently we just reached the limit of 250 notebooks which I never knew existed.

 

What do I do?  How can you not create a new notebook for each customer?

 

 

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We have been using Evernote in my real estate business for several years.  When we get a new client, we create a new notebook.  Apparently we just reached the limit of 250 notebooks which I never knew existed.

 

What do I do?  How can you not create a new notebook for each customer?

 

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/39440-since-the-topic-on-the-250-notebook-limit-is-locked/

 

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/34434-if-not-more-than-250-notebooks-then/

 

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/28516-250-notebooks-is-not-enough/

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We have been using Evernote in my real estate business for several years.  When we get a new client, we create a new notebook.  Apparently we just reached the limit of 250 notebooks which I never knew existed.

 

What do I do?  How can you not create a new notebook for each customer?

 

Hi. Welcome to the forums. There are several other limits I think you will want to have in mind as well. 

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=169

 

As you have probably already figured out, your current approach isn't going to work with Evernote. My suggestion would be to consider the use of tags. Alternatively, if you sign up for Evernote business, you can archive those notebooks in your Business Library. However, you can only have 250 notebooks in an account at one time and the library is not searchable, so the tag option is probably the best.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 5 months later...

I am also using evernote to organize notes and files for my rental customers.  I just hit the limit also.   The business account is also limited to 250 and the archived notebooks are, inconceivably,  not searchable.  I opened a second premium account but will rapidly reach the limit there as well and how do I know which account I have stored a particular clients notebook in.  Tags and saved searches do not work for a variety of reasons.  The solution is simple and has been requested by many users: eliminate the notebook limit.  This is a last request, of sorts, since I am actively searching for an alternative to evernote: something designed for enterprise.  Any possibility that evernote will change soon?

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@Roadrunner RV Rental:

I'm curious to know the reasons that tags don't work for you. Also, when you say that archived notebooks aren't searchable, what do you mean? How are you archiving your notebooks? If they're notebooks that are part of your account, then they should be searchable.

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@Roadrunner RV Rental:

I'm curious to know the reasons that tags don't work for you. Also, when you say that archived notebooks aren't searchable, what do you mean? How are you archiving your notebooks? If they're notebooks that are part of your account, then they should be searchable.

 

You can have up to 5,000 business notebooks. But, you cannot search them while they are in the Business Library. You can only have 250 notebooks at a time in your account, so there is a bottleneck here. 

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When I first heard of this I was also put off. The idea of using tags didn't appeal to me. But then i tried it and got used to it and i can see it works very well. You just need a notebook for 'clients' - or a stack with notebooks divided into types of clients maybe. Then add a tag with the client name to each note you generate. In the tags section you can also organise the client name tags so they are nested under the main tag 'client'.

 

Its a somewhat different way of thinking from traditional 'filing cabinet' method.  I don't really know why Evernote have 'forced' people towards this rather than creating as many notebooks as they want. But now i've got used to it I believe it actually is as effective - if not much more so than the filing cabinet approach.

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The solution is simple and has been requested by many users: eliminate the notebook limit. ?

It's really easy to say something is simple to change, when you're not familiar with the workings under the hood. As it is, no, this is not a simple change. Per Heather, a former EN employee, this is a database table issue & they would need to change the way they store data tables, which would require a rewrite of the service. It's not that it's not doable, just that it's not simply a matter of removing the limit, as so many seem to think. Have they been working on this since she said this a while ago? (Which is why I'm not linking to it, since it apparently was on the old board). I don't know, since EN does not publish their roadmap or ETAs.

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When I first heard of this I was also put off. The idea of using tags didn't appeal to me. But then i tried it and got used to it and i can see it works very well. You just need a notebook for 'clients' - or a stack with notebooks divided into types of clients maybe. Then add a tag with the client name to each note you generate. In the tags section you can also organise the client name tags so they are nested under the main tag 'client'.

 

Its a somewhat different way of thinking from traditional 'filing cabinet' method.  I don't really know why Evernote have 'forced' people towards this rather than creating as many notebooks as they want. But now i've got used to it I believe it actually is as effective - if not much more so than the filing cabinet approach.

Different strokes really, I suppose. But there are really two things going on here.

There is the notebook limit, which has nothing to do with the filing cabinet metaphor. The limit, I suspect, is in place partly to prevent serious performance issues if a database gets really large with lots of notebooks.... Even with the 250 limit in place this seems to occur. 

 

Then there is the limited "hierarchy", or the choice to go "flat" (Evernote) rather than "deep" (filing cabinet, Window's Exploere, OS X Finder). This is unrelated to the limit. Evernote could lift the limit and allow (theoretically) infinite notebooks, and still not offer a deeper hierarchy. Likewise, they could maintain the limit and offer a hierarchy. 

 

So the two things are unrelated. 

 

As for "should" Evernote remove the notebook limit, sure, I think so. CAN they remove it? Perhaps not until there are some significant moves made to ensure that performance is not seriously degraded. Indeed, as you point out, once you get into the flow of the flat organizational scheme, the limit becomes a bit less of an imposition. This can give a really heavy user some extra time before hitting that limit (upgrading to business could offer a bit more relief, but that's not a perfect solution because it has its own limits).

 

As for "should" Evernote offer hierarchy, this is a hotly debated topic in this community, and is ultimately a matter of opinion. Evernote seems to think that the flat method is perfectly acceptable. Personally I agree with this. At the very least I agree because almost every other thing out there is hierarchically structured. If I wanted hierarchy, I could probably just use folders in my OS to house plain-text files and website archives, all nicely indexed by my OS. No need for some specialized application. 

That being said both schemes, flat and hierarchical, have their merits, neither one is more natural than another (though one is clearly much more prevalent than the other), and they have their disadvantages and advantages. I'm personally fond of flat and non-mutually-exclusive, but I understand how people might prefer something deep and mutually exclusive. 

 

We'll see if the notebook limit gets increased or removed (well, it will not likely ever be removed, but raised to some impossibly high number), it would be a good move, when it isn't at the expense of performance!

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My take on this -- based on some history, and certainly some guesswork -- is that the notebook limit *is* at least somewhat related to the hierarchy issue. The prior notebook limit was 100, before stacks. Stacks were introduced explicitly to help to mitigate the UI problem of navigating a 100-member list (from a Dave Engberg forum post somewhere). This added a level of pseudo-hierarchy to notebooks without adding an actual true notebook hierarchy (i.e., arbitrary nesting of notebooks), which is apparently a bottom line "we have no plans to do that" Evernote architecture rule.  The notebook limit was later increased to 250, probably an arbitrary number, and even so, is still probably pretty awkward to manage in the UI as it stands.

 

In other words, no notebook hierarchy --> some fixed limit on notebooks, due to practical UI concerns. That's not to say that there might not be other reasons for either the hierarchy or the notebook limit, but this seems to be at least partially contributory.

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Not being very tech-savvy about these things I don't really understand why unlimited tags with unlimited nesting are not a problem but notebooks are. Both notebooks and tags would seem to be - when it comes down to it - a kind of meta-data/filtering device.

 

In fact - in managing projects and clients my tags page looks something a little like a hierarchical  filing cabinet (thought not quite)... In that there is a tag 'projects' and then nested tags for each client. There is also a tag 'projects 2014' and nested within that is a tag for each project worked on. ie 'job a'  'job b' etc. Each note gets tagged with client, year and specific job. When creating notes they all go into the INBOX and I bulk tag them with these 3 identifying tags. Takes about 3 seconds or so in a daily review.

 

When working on a project at the time I don't need to look at this navigational structure on the tags page - I just jump into Evernote and start typing the first few letters of the specific project tag and the search bar usually offers it up after about 3 letters. The tags page mostly provides a navigational-hierarchical structure in case I want to look back over past projects when I have forgotten what they were called. Using the tags page as a navigational tool was at first slightly uncomfortable until I found it also gave greater flexibility.

 

So since I do sometimes use the tags page as if it were a list of notebooks (albeit notebooks with greater horizontal flexibility)  its lost on me why this is not a drain on resources but notebooks somehow are. But maybe there is some kind of brick wall waiting for me that I don't know about.

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Not being very tech-savvy about these things I don't really understand why unlimited tags with unlimited nesting are not a problem but notebooks are. Both notebooks and tags would seem to be - when it comes down to it - a kind of meta-data/filtering device.

 

In fact - in managing projects and clients my tags page looks something a little like a hierarchical  filing cabinet (thought not quite)... In that there is a tag 'projects' and then nested tags for each client. There is also a tag 'projects 2014' and nested within that is a tag for each project worked on. ie 'job a'  'job b' etc. Each note gets tagged with client, year and specific job. When creating notes they all go into the INBOX and I bulk tag them with these 3 identifying tags. Takes about 3 seconds or so in a daily review.

 

When working on a project at the time I don't need to look at this navigational structure on the tags page - I just jump into Evernote and start typing the first few letters of the specific project tag and the search bar usually offers it up after about 3 letters. The tags page mostly provides a navigational-hierarchical structure in case I want to look back over past projects when I have forgotten what they were called. Using the tags page as a navigational tool was at first slightly uncomfortable until I found it also gave greater flexibility.

 

So since I do sometimes use the tags page as if it were a list of notebooks (albeit notebooks with greater horizontal flexibility)  its lost on me why this is not a drain on resources but notebooks somehow are. But maybe there is some kind of brick wall waiting for me that I don't know about.

I think you've got a really good scheme going on there with your tagging. Indeed you can do a lot with them and you can produce some loose hierarchy than can help highlight relations between notes.

 

As for the technical stuff, I'm not sure either, I think only EN developers could really shed some light on this. That being said, if I were to speculate, I would think that tags and notebooks are actually very different, technically. Notebooks are an actual object, a thing. Tags, on the other hand, are a property, an attribute that can be applied to a thing. Tags are not entities or objects in and of themselves. I don't know for sure, but my gut would say this is more than a trivial difference. Honestly for all we know, and as others have speculated above, the notebook limit could very likely be a totally arbitrary thing.

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I'm glad to see this thread resurrected because this still an Evernote newbie was not aware of the notebook limit. :wacko:  

 

So using my iPad app I checked the count and was rather surprised to see I already had almost 200 notebooks created and I've only been using Evernote for about 6 weeks now.

That caused some movement in my normally dormant brain cells, yep, all 3 of them.  Did some serious pondering about expanding my tag structure and then set about doing it.  Long story short I'm now down to 65 notebooks and up to 300 tags in my 400mb database.

Little by little things are coming together in my Evernote world. ;)

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I definitely think  Evernote can be criticised for  presenting the tool as 'use it any way you want/blank canvas' type of thing. Or that's the impression I certainly got at first.

In reality we all found out you really need to use notebooks as broad dividers with tags forming a more detailed  and flexible structuring. In a digital world where we don't have to mimic a filing cabinet this does seem to make more sense once you get used to it. But it might be better for them to be more upfront about this. That could save people going too far down the notebook generating path and then having to backtrack.

 

But who knows - maybe they did say this and we all just practised selective hearing..

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I definitely think  Evernote can be criticised for  presenting the tool as 'use it any way you want/blank canvas' type of thing. Or that's the impression I certainly got at first.

In reality we all found out you really need to use notebooks as broad dividers with tags forming a more detailed  and flexible structuring. In a digital world where we don't have to mimic a filing cabinet this does seem to make more sense once you get used to it. But it might be better for them to be more upfront about this. That could save people going too far down the notebook generating path and then having to backtrack.

 

But who knows - maybe they did say this and we all just practised selective hearing..

Don't know how they could be more up front about this....

on the homepage:

"NOTE: Evernote does not allow for strict organizational hierarchies"

or

"NOTE: Evernote does not mimic your filing cabinet"

or

"Evernote's flat organizational structure offers flexibility well beyond that offered by your filing cabinet"

or

"BEWARE: This application does not contain within itself, a filing cabinet"

 

 

Since it is free to try, most users will likely figure out that there is (essentially) no hierarchy available in a matter of minutes. 

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I guess it must be that selective hearing/reading thing then ^_^

 

I saw None of those statements myself. The quote nearest the front page that struck me was:

 

"Evernote lets you capture and organize information however you like: create multiple notebooks for different projects and areas of work and life, or use tags to organize notes for a work project, an upcoming trip, home inspiration, or gift ideas.

You might create a different notebook for each project, trip or collection of ideas."

https://evernote.com/introduction/organizing-notes

 

 

That's clearly sending a very different message from the quotes above - and that last sentence would seem to me to count as potentially bad advice. In fact it seems to have been that very kind of advice which lead to the problems mentioned at the beginning of this thread.

 

It took me having to purchase a separate kindle book to get me thinking outside of notebooks/filing cabinets  (Since someone saw a market for such a book it can't be purely down to my low IQ) :)

 

But anyway, for me, I've sorted it now and am happy with how I have things.

 

 

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No, evernote doesn't state that users are unable to organize things hierarchically, this is NOT a case of you having selective hearing/reading :). My post was, a bit facetiously, asking how such a disclosure be made "more upfront", because in my opinion, any way of being up front about such a thing would look absurd. 

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  • 8 months later...

It would be nice if  Evernote would add a count after "Notebooks" ... but in the meantime here

is what I use to figure out how close i am to disaster (the app i use is TapeCalc):

 

Pass 0: Set things up so "Notebooks" is displayed in the left column.

Pass 1: Count all the primary notebooks including stacks.

Pass 2: Open each stack and add the total notebook displayed within the open stack to the total ... then close it and move on to the next stack.

...

Pass n: If you have stacks within stacks, you just do Pass 2 again until all stacks are accounted for.

 

So the only question left is how close you are willing to let things get to 250 before disaster strikes.

 

 

 

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It would be nice if  Evernote would add a count after "Notebooks" ... but in the meantime here

is what I use to figure out how close i am to disaster (the app i use is TapeCalc):

 

Pass 0: Set things up so "Notebooks" is displayed in the left column.

Pass 1: Count all the primary notebooks including stacks.

Pass 2: Open each stack and add the total notebook displayed within the open stack to the total ... then close it and move on to the next stack.

...

Pass n: If you have stacks within stacks, you just do Pass 2 again until all stacks are accounted for.

 

So the only question left is how close you are willing to let things get to 250 before disaster strikes.

 

My iOS clients tell me how many notebooks I have on the home screen in the Notebooks section header... but it would be nice to have on desktop too.

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Well..I knew about the 100.000 note limit.

Hadn't seen there was a 250 notebook limit.

 

Kind takes the 'Ever' out of Evernote.

 

Here i was, thinking a deeper notebook structure is needed. A notebook inside a notebook feels very limiting.

Nevermind that, there is a friking 250 notebook limit.

*sigh*

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It would be nice if  Evernote would add a count after "Notebooks" ... but in the meantime here

is what I use to figure out how close i am to disaster (the app i use is TapeCalc):

 

Pass 0: Set things up so "Notebooks" is displayed in the left column.

Pass 1: Count all the primary notebooks including stacks.

Pass 2: Open each stack and add the total notebook displayed within the open stack to the total ... then close it and move on to the next stack.

...

Pass n: If you have stacks within stacks, you just do Pass 2 again until all stacks are accounted for.

 

So the only question left is how close you are willing to let things get to 250 before disaster strikes.

 

As luck would have it this popped up today (Now on Windows Client Beta):

 

update.PNG?dl=1

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  • 1 month later...

Hey, Evernote! Wake up and smell the coffee by taking off your rose-colored glasses and utilizing some of the huge sums of money from your funding raise of long ago more efficiently.

 

A 250 notebook limit? Are you effffing kidding us??????

 

It's 2015!! Get with it and remove the limit. Please inform your product architects and developers that their design and UX design "considerations & criteria" are FLAWED components. You didn't intend to develop and deploy a broken system when you invented this product. Why then are you acting as though this isn't important?? Do you listen to your users? Do you care about their input and feedback about this. After thousands of posts from users about this problem and flaw, apparently NOT. That sucks because it doesn't have to be that way. You could fix it and have happy users. Who wouldn't want that? Who doesn't do that? You? Apparently so.

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Hey, Evernote! Wake up and smell the coffee by taking off your rose-colored glasses and utilizing some of the huge sums of money from your funding raise of long ago more efficiently.

 

A 250 notebook limit? Are you effffing kidding us??????

 

It's 2015!! Get with it and remove the limit. Please inform your product architects and developers that their design and UX design "considerations & criteria" are FLAWED components. You didn't intend to develop and deploy a broken system when you invented this product. Why then are you acting as though this isn't important?? Do you listen to your users? Do you care about their input and feedback about this. After thousands of posts from users about this problem and flaw, apparently NOT. That sucks because it doesn't have to be that way. You could fix it and have happy users. Who wouldn't want that? Who doesn't do that? You? Apparently so.

 

Expanding one's horizons and delving into the following may placate one's need for more notebooks:

  1. A tag-based structure... where more and deeper most certainly applies
  2. Making use of an outliner for a nested folder-type effect (for lists) - WorkFlowy comes highly recommended 
  3. Dropbox and or Google Drive for some material

Usually #1 suffices.

 

I personally think a 250-notebook limit is a good one. It stops people from inadvertently and unnecessarily complicating their lives. 

 

I think there's a strategic decision behind those "rose-colored glasses". 

 

Often resorting to "workarounds" wakes one to the reality that one is actually wearing the rose-colored glasses oneself. 

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Thank you for making the time to review & comment on my copy.

However, your personal "opinion" is not relevant or of value in resolving my dissatisfaction with Evernote.

250 Notebooks is not complicating my life.

Not having what I need from a provider IS complicating my life.

"Workarounds" are not disciplined solutions unless you're inclined to settle for less than best practices.

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@john@familynation:

 
I have to agree with you that if one chooses to organize using Notebooks, a limit of 250 is extremely limiting.
For those that would argue with this, consider if you had a limit of only 250 folders on your computer OS.  Just wouldn't work.
 
The problem, John, is that although many of us have been requesting for many years that Evernote provide a hierarchical (sub-notebook) Notebook structure, they have declined to do so as of today.  So, if you want to make the most of Evernote as it is today, you may want to learn about how to use Tags. 
I know Tags are not the same, but that's mostly what we have to work with.
 
If you find this to be a deal-breaker, then you will need to explore other apps.  If you are using a Mac, DevonThink is a great alternative that provides unlimited sub-folders, which they call Groups.  I don't know of any good Windows alternates, other than perhaps MS OneNote.
 
But if you want to consider sticking with Evernote, take a look at this:
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Hey, Evernote! Wake up and smell the coffee by taking off your rose-colored glasses and utilizing some of the huge sums of money from your funding raise of long ago more efficiently.

 

A 250 notebook limit? Are you effffing kidding us??????

 

It's 2015!! Get with it and remove the limit. Please inform your product architects and developers that their design and UX design "considerations & criteria" are FLAWED components. You didn't intend to develop and deploy a broken system when you invented this product. Why then are you acting as though this isn't important?? Do you listen to your users? Do you care about their input and feedback about this. After thousands of posts from users about this problem and flaw, apparently NOT. That sucks because it doesn't have to be that way. You could fix it and have happy users. Who wouldn't want that? Who doesn't do that? You? Apparently so.

 

 

I personally think a 250-notebook limit is a good one. It stops people from inadvertently and unnecessarily complicating their lives. 

 

 

1. "I personally think a 250-notebook limit is a good one"

 

No you don't. If Evernote hadn't shipped with a limit of 250 notebooks, you never would have asked for a limit of 250 notebooks thinking it would be a better option.

 

2. "It stops people from inadvertently and unnecessarily complicating their lives."

 

Good thing evernote is looking out for you guys. But the rest of us will be able to handle ourselves.

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1.  Well I could say 25 is a good limit, or 25,000, or maybe 2,500,000.  There's a good limit for all and they can think it if they like.  Somebody at EN thought 250 was good..

 

2.  People will inadvertently and unnecessarily complicate their lives without any help from EN in areas far more important than EN.

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Since none of us know the internal design of Evernote, it's hard to say why they chose a limit of 250 Notebooks.

The only limit I know of for PC file systems is the disk space and addressable range based on the language word size.

Since most OS today are 64 bit, the number of directories/folders is much greater that most could use.  But maybe back in the 32-bit days, there was some technical reason.

 

Is there any such limit in DropBox or Google Drive?

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I personally think a 250-notebook limit is a good one.

 

 

No you don't. If Evernote hadn't shipped with a limit of 250 notebooks, you never would have asked for a limit of 250 notebooks thinking it would be a better option.

 

 

What you didn't know is that 250 is currently my backup lucky number. Didn't see that one coming, did you?

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16 bit days, 256.  ;)    No relevance to anything, just fun.

 

LOL.

 

So maybe Evernote was conceived back in the days of 16-bit PCs, and no one at Evernote thought anyone could possibly need more.

Of course, Evernote Win is contained within a database, which really doesn't have that restriction.  

But stranger things have happened.

Once a design is in place, it is hard to change.

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16 bit gives way more values.

8 bit is 256.

 

Thanks for keeping us on the technical true course, Pexil.

 

I was a bit suspicious, but too lazy to calculate it  or look it up.

But now that you have prompted me:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16-bit

 

 

16-bit processors include the Intel 8086, the Intel 80286, the WDC 65C816, and the Zilog Z8000. The Intel 8088 was program-compatible with the Intel 8086, and was 16-bit in that its registers were 16 bits long and arithmetic instructions, even though its external bus was 8 bits wide.

A 16-bit integer can store 216 (or 65,536) distinct values. In an unsigned representation, these values are the integers between 0 and 65,535; using two's complement, possible values range from −32,768 to 32,767. Hence, a processor with 16-bit memory addresses can directly access 64 KiB of byte-addressable memory.

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  • 6 months later...

I have been using evernote for over 5 years.  I am a Real Estate Broker, and I use each notebook for a client so they can share what I have.  I have always reached the limit and have to go and save all the note and then delete the notebook, which I feel is defeating the purpose of Evernote.  I have had to change the way I think about it and use it just for synching with clients then save the information and delete it on evernote.  I would love to see note book that you can use for old files or archives that you can access but maybe not necessarily affecting the data processing speed.  or a place to dump them for future inquiries with the ability to create more notebooks.  

 

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Agreed, there are two compelling reasons to use Notebooks with the current Evernote design:

  1. To share a collection of Notes with others
  2. To create an offline store on mobile devices

It would be awesome if Evernote could allow sharing by tags.  This would open up a lot of possibilities, since they have refused to increase the NB limit even after years of requests by many, many users.

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  • 2 months later...

What a huge disappointment it is to learn that you can't have more than 250 notebooks. Evernote needs to address this and find a solution. I have wasted a lot of time and effort in designing my records around Evernote. I had no idea this was a lightweight application. 

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35 minutes ago, Watchman said:

What a huge disappointment it is to learn that you can't have more than 250 notebooks. Evernote needs to address this and find a solution. I have wasted a lot of time and effort in designing my records around Evernote.

I understand your disappointment and frustration.  But all is not lost.  All you need to do is convert your real notebooks into pseudo notebooks (tags), and you can have as many as you like, and you can have a hierarchical (sub-notebook) structure.

For more info see:

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1 hour ago, Watchman said:

What a huge disappointment it is to learn that you can't have more than 250 notebooks.

Are you aware of the tag feature.  In some ways they provide the same functionality as notebooks.  

I only use notebooks when I need their special functions; sharing an local

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