(Archived) Cosmetic Issue - All notes view

[RNash 0]

I usually keep my notes sorted neatly into relevent notebooks. I have some shortcuts and when I use those it finds the note in the 'All Notes' list somewhere in the huge list of notes. My problem is that in List/Snippet view it leave a column right in the middle of Evernote which is just a random disorganised mesh of notes and words, it's really distracting to me.

 

I could remove the column but you need it to navigate inside notebooks, it's really useful for that.

 

Does everyone have this experience or am I doing something wrong?

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I usually keep my notes sorted neatly into relevent notebooks. I have some shortcuts and when I use those it finds the note in the 'All Notes' list somewhere in the huge list of notes. My problem is that in List/Snippet view it leave a column right in the middle of Evernote which is just a random disorganised mesh of notes and words, it's really distracting to me.

 

I could remove the column but you need it to navigate inside notebooks, it's really useful for that.

 

Does everyone have this experience or am I doing something wrong?

Hi. I haven't found the center column distracting. You can sort it according to date updated, date created, etc. It's not random or disorganized at all. Could you post a screen shot (here or in a shared note) and explain it to us? We might be able to suggest a workflow or way of using Evernote that will be better suited to your needs.

[jefito 5,589]

There's no actual "All Notes View" in Evernote. There *are* various views that display your filtered note list in various ways; the Windows client has List View, Snippet View, and Card View. The Evernote views are never disordered; they are always sorted on some field in the Evernote database (e.g. note title, Created date, updated date, etc.). Filtering a note list can be done by various queries on the note list, but they all are displayed using the current sort criterion. Example filers are: by notebook (e.g. "notebook:MyNotebook"), by tag (e.h. "tag:myTag"), by text search (e.g. "sometextstring"), and so on, including combinations of the previous filters.

What you call "All Notes View" is simply a filter that has no criteria: it displays all notes in the current view (List, Snippet, or Card) using the current sort criterion. If you think that the result is disordered, you may be using a less than useful sort criterion. This is not a "cosmetic problem", nor any problem at all; it's simply the way that Evernote works.

[RNash 0]

I am sorting notes in alphabetical order, I find this most useful because it keeps the notes static in the notebooks (rather than sorting by date modified or something) and I can effectively pin important notes to the top using special characters. When I click a shortcut it goes to the list containing all my notes and it is still ordered in alphabetical order, but it now looks like a list of all my notes from all my topics throw together, which is why it looks disorganised and messy to me. I like how cleanly my notebooks work, I can click Travel, select Iceland etc. but having all the random notes throw together is more distracting than useful, at least to me. 

 

I would like it if clicking a shortcut displayed the note without seeking it out in the Note List at all, or even better if it found the note within it's notebook. I know that Evernote probably has no option for that. Maybe I'm using it strangely and other people use it by date/time.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I am sorting notes in alphabetical order, I find this most useful because it keeps the notes static in the notebooks (rather than sorting by date modified or something) and I can effectively pin important notes to the top using special characters. When I click a shortcut it goes to the list containing all my notes and it is still ordered in alphabetical order, but it now looks like a list of all my notes from all my topics throw together, which is why it looks disorganised and messy to me. I like how cleanly my notebooks work, I can click Travel, select Iceland etc. but having all the random notes throw together is more distracting than useful, at least to me. 

 

I would like it if clicking a shortcut displayed the note without seeking it out in the Note List at all, or even better if it found the note within it's notebook. I know that Evernote probably has no option for that. Maybe I'm using it strangely and other people use it by date/time.

I think I see what you are saying now. Of course, some people would prefer the note to be shown together with everything else, and others would prefer it in the notebook, so this is a case in which customization for the interface would be nice, but all we have is the default (the note outside of its notebook).

Personally, I use note links a lot, and I find those more useful than shortcuts. If you create your own personal wiki this way, you can't fix the notebook problem, but you can navigate smoothly from one note to the next.

Another option is to save a search like "notebook:travel tag:new-york intitle:131230" into your shortcuts. In this case (just an example), it will bring up all notes in your travel notebook with that tag and that date in the title. The cool thing about it (for you) is that it will only show notes in your travel notebook.

[jefito 5,589]

I am sorting notes in alphabetical order, I find this most useful because it keeps the notes static in the notebooks (rather than sorting by date modified or something) and I can effectively pin important notes to the top using special characters. When I click a shortcut it goes to the list containing all my notes and it is still ordered in alphabetical order, but it now looks like a list of all my notes from all my topics throw together, which is why it looks disorganised and messy to me. I like how cleanly my notebooks work, I can click Travel, select Iceland etc. but having all the random notes throw together is more distracting than useful, at least to me. 

 

I would like it if clicking a shortcut displayed the note without seeking it out in the Note List at all, or even better if it found the note within it's notebook. I know that Evernote probably has no option for that. Maybe I'm using it strangely and other people use it by date/time.

Making a shortcut to an individual note doesn't really work the way that I'd expect it to, i.e., it doesn't filter your note list to show exactly that note. I believe that that's why you may be getting confusing note displays. Selecting an individual note via filter (perhaps by using a unique string in the note title or note content), and then making a saved search for that and saving it as a shortcut would be a far more effective way of showing that note by itself. If you want to jump to that note in the list of notes from its notebook, I don't really know how to do that easily, if at all: there's no real way of associating a context (e.g. a notebook) with a single note shortcut, as far as I know. One thing that I did notice, though, is if you set your view notebook/stack by clicking on the selector at the top of the note list, and you jump to a single note shortcut that is contained in that notebook or stack, then the note list context doesn't change to All Notes as it does when you jump to a note outside of your current context, so you'd see your note in a context that's sorted the way that you like it.

Re pinning: In the Windows client, if you use either Snippet view or Card view, a good way (the best way, in my opinion) to 'pin' notes to the top of your note view is to set a reminder on them. These are shown at the top of the note list regardless of what sort order that you have chosen.

[RNash 0]

Thanks for your suggestions.

 

I think I can simply create a tag for a note and add that tag as a shortcut, that shows the note(s) alone without other clutter.

 

For pinning I use the pipe character "|" at the start, sometimes two or three for higher prority. It's a personal perference thing really.

[jefito 5,589]

A tag being just another filter candidate, yes, that works too. I would only rarely use a tag to mark a single note, however.

If you use a special character at the start of a note title, and always sort by title, then that suffices to pin a note. I almost always use sort by "Date Modified"/reversed, so that wouldn't work for me. Reminders are a lot easier for my use case, and they continue to work if I use a different sort criterion.

[RNash 0]

Doing this I've encouted something which seems strange to me. It works fine in most cases, however if I use a tag with the same name as a notebook stack weird things happen.

 

So say I have a notebook stack called "Sync" and I go to a note in a completely different place called "Cake". If I make a tag in Cake called Sync I get a normal individual tag. If I then make a shortcut from the tag I get a shortcut-tag called Sync with the note Cake inside, however it also comes with a drop-down for all notebooks inside the Sync stack with the same name.