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How to make only the boxes that are checked searchable


Katie006

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I am planning to create multiple notes in the exact same format.  The notes will have a checklist of 15 items.  I want a search to return only the notes that have a check mark in the box next to the word.  The word "Library" will be in every note with a check box in front of it.  Only 10 notes out of 100 have that box checked.  If I search for Library my search will result with all 100 when I only want to see the 10.  Is it possible to search in a way that will return only the 10 that have a check in that particular box?

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Try a search for "library todo:true" to return the notes that contain the word and the checked box.

 

The problem with this search is that it will return all notes which have ANY checkbox checked, not necessarily  associated with "library"

 

For example, I could have two checkboxes:

  1. Library
  2. Something else

If I had checked the box by "Something else", but NOT "Library", your search would still return this Note.

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The search returns any note containing text beginning with "library" in its content, titles or tags, and containing a checked to-do. The original search asked for an alternative to just searching for "library". Gaz's search improves on that somewhat; unfortunately, in terms of search, that's about the best that Evernote can do given the initial conditions, since you cannot search for a todo checkbox next to some piece of text using the Evernote search language.

 

The search could possibly be improved , but only by changing the initial conditions, but probably not much if the requirement of 15 separate checkboxes per note stays; you could get into replacing the checkbox (in its two states) by the text "checked" and "unchecked" and then have a search for "library checked" or something like that, but that's pretty awkward. If Evernote supported searching for arbitrary Unicode characters, then you could use the Unicode ballot-box characters (☑ and ) but that doesn't appear to work in the Windows client (dunno about the Touch version or other clients). Similarly,using text-only "[x]" and "[ ]" don't work either, as the brackets are punctuation (well, "[x] Library" kinda sorta works, but that's because the "[]" characters are removed in the search, so you get a match on "x Library". Maybe [y]" and "[n]" would be more palatable, but as far as I can see, it's pretty much a well of awkwardness all around.

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I am planning to create multiple notes in the exact same format.  The notes will have a checklist of 15 items.  I want a search to return only the notes that have a check mark in the box next to the word.  The word "Library" will be in every note with a check box in front of it.  Only 10 notes out of 100 have that box checked.  If I search for Library my search will result with all 100 when I only want to see the 10.  Is it possible to search in a way that will return only the 10 that have a check in that particular box?

 

In order to achieve what you want,  in addition to checking the box by the item of interest ("Library" in your example) you would also need to either:

  • Assign a corresponding tag (like "Library") to the Note
    • Then you could search for "tag:library" to find all notes where you had checked the box by "Library"
  • OR
  • Modify the Item that you checked.  For example, change "Library" to "Library_c"
    • then you could search for "Library_c" to find all Notes where you had checked the box by "Library"

Actually, checking the box by the Item would be irrelevant -- it would just be done for a visual cue.

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Sorry for a duff steer there - it seemed like a good idea at the time.  A couple of further thoughts on this - 

  1. If you're making 15 lists,  how about having 15 tags instead so "library" and its check box occupy a note on their own,  linked to the other items in that 'list' by a tag that says 'list01' - to find all the items in the list,  search for "tag:list01" - then my original search works.  Or - 
  2. We all might be overthinking this - why not have your list in plain text and add your check mark to the word as text - rather like JM explained above - Library becomes LibraryX - then just search for libraryx to get the 'ticked' boxes...

Let us know what you eventually decide to do!

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