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(Archived) Found my note, lost my notebook


redwoodtwig

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I have a shortcut to a todo note in one of my notebooks.  When I click on the shortcut, the note appears in the right hand panel. Good.  Same thing if I search. And the snippet shows up in the current sort context, but of all notes, not the notes in the notebook the found note belongs to.  Even worse, when I have a note link in my todo list to a note in a different notebook, same thing -- note shows up, but while I can see the notebook it belongs to, I can't get to that notebook.  And I can't even see what stack this note I found is in.

 

Hey, what's the point of having stacks and notebooks if I can't easily get from a note to the list of notes in the notebook that note is from?  Or the stack of notebooks relevant to that note?

 

The only way to navigate to a notebook is by scrolling in the left hand panel.  Why?  Why is there no way to easily click on something in the note to get back to it's parent notebook, like any normal hierarchical system provides?  i do like the new way of displaying the stacks when you click on notebooks and the right panel becomes a kind of map.  However, that does not solve the problem of what stack is the notebook in that has the note I want see in context.

 

And, though I have a nice count in a couple of places about how many notes I have, there doesn't seem to be any stats on how many notebooks or stacks I have.  I realize the focus is on notes, but why can't we navigate easier? 

 

I would really like to know why Evernote seems to consider more than two levels a bad idea?  A simple navigation problem like the above would simply not happen in a true hierarchical system.  If nothing else, use "breadcrumbs", please.  I'm actually very surprised you don't have breadcrumbs in the note header.  That seems to me to be a no brainer.  While it's nice to see the notebook name there, it strikes me as user hostile that in order to get to that notebook I have to go over and spend sometimes quite a bit of time scrolling through the left panel to get to it.

 

That new info drop down is the perfect place to put links to both the notebook and the stack.

 

And please reconsider having a few more levels.  Smugmug stuck with Category/subcategory/gallery for many years. Finally the most recent revision rolled out 7 levels because the vast majority of pro users need better organization than you can get with just two levels above the basic element of that application, the photo gallery.  I've seen a lot of requests for more levels in Evernote, and I would bet the percentage among premium users is pretty high, since we are looking for an organizational tools as well as slick way to clip from the internet and keep track of research or whatever.

 

Tags are not a substitute for organizing your thoughts or organizing a project.  They are very helpful for coordinating ideas, and doing mind maps, searches and similar things, but they are not an organizational tool.  

 

When i want to organize, and when most business organize, they want folders that can nest as deep as needed.  Like google drive folders.  I have no problem with warning messages popping up when I create 6th or 7th level stack telling me my performance is going to be hurt by going that deep. (if it will be).

 

 

 

 

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For a *l*o*t* of discussion about tags vs folders please search the forum.  This is where we are for the present - maybe Evernote will consider some additional stack-like features in the future,  but they don't share in advance.

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And please reconsider having a few more levels.  Smugmug stuck with Category/subcategory/gallery for many years. Finally the most recent revision rolled out 7 levels because the vast majority of pro users need better organization than you can get with just two levels above the basic element of that application, the photo gallery.  I've seen a lot of requests for more levels in Evernote, and I would bet the percentage among premium users is pretty high, since we are looking for an organizational tools as well as slick way to clip from the internet and keep track of research or whatever.

It's been over 4 years since I started using Evernote and participating in these forums; many have asked for more levels (a lot of people who ask are actually beginners at Evernote -- a lot of the experienced folks dispense with a lot of notebooks, though of course it's a spectrum); Evernote doesn't seem interested in providing it. That's never been a big issue for me; tags suffice for most organizational needs that I have. The addition of stacks was helpful mainly for allowing me to search across multiple notebooks, which you cannot do via the search grammar otherwise. They're fine for decluttering one's notebook list, but I just don't have that many notebooks to worry about that all that much -- my rule of thumb is create notebooks when you must (offline notes, local notes, and sharing, mostly), use stacks to declutter, and use tags for everything else.

No idea who Smugmug is/was, but there's a product called GMail that some folks use that offers only one level of organization. I'd take their email filters facility for Evernote in a second, though.

 

Tags are not a substitute for organizing your thoughts or organizing a project.  They are very helpful for coordinating ideas, and doing mind maps, searches and similar things, but they are not an organizational tool.

Not sure what the difference between "coordinating" and "organizing" is in this context, but tags are indeed a great way to of organizing your thoughts or projects; a lot of it just comes down to how you approach it. One thing that's way better than the strictly hierarchical approach is that tags allow for cross-indexing of your notes, across notebooks and stacks and other tag schemes. Sorry, but personally, I'm tired of navigating deeply nested directory hierarchies trying to find what I'm looking for (trees and trees of source code is usually my realm). I want to find the thing as quickly as possible; search and tags get me that; hierarchies do not. The thrust of information in Evernote is that notes do not need to live together to be related, and tags can give you the ability to organize and find those notes wherever they live.
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