Nesting Multiple Notebooks / Creating Sub-Notebooks

[cswsteve 85]

I think Evernote is a fantastic product, especially with the iPhone integration. I currently use a program called UltraRecall because of it's heavy use of subfolders. This makes organizing my data very logical. I was wondering if Evernotes has a way to create subnotebooks under existing notebooks to help group numerious notebooks together?

Example Notebooks:

Work

Clients

Customer1

Customer2

Customer3

Customer4

Personal

Electronics

Web Clips

[mtanne 9]

On 1/5/2016 at 1:20 PM, JMichaelTX said:

Using Tags as Pseudo Notebooks

My knowledge of how to use Tags continues to evolve.  This has been largely due to limitations Evernote has placed on Notebooks.

So, the question is:  How does one make the best use of the tool they have?

Notebooks (NB) are limited to 250.  Tags are virtually unlimited at 100,000.    Tags can have a hierarchical structure of Parent Tag / Child Tag, much like the folders that you see on your computer.

 

So, if we can model NBs as Tags, then we can effectively have unlimited NBs and sub-NBs.  One of the most appealing features of Notebooks (and folders) is how they visually appear.  But what if we can do the same visual layout with Tags?  Stay tuned to learn how.

 

I use tags in two fundamentally different ways:

1. Pseudo Notebooks -- use in place of where you would normally use a notebook.  This includes sub-notebooks.
2. Note Categorization -- traditional use of tags to categorize the entity, which can have multiple tags.  Can be used across Notebooks, or in this case, across pseudo NBs.

Using Tags as Pseudo Notebooks

 

Tags can be organized in hierarchies (meaning Parent-Child relationship).  So we can achieve the appearance of Notebooks and sub-notebooks,

 

Without going into a lot of detail at this point, I have created a number of Tags which serve as pseudo Notebooks.   Note that all of the pseudo NBs, actually tags, all have a prefix of ".NB.", which makes it easy to identify which tags are pseudo NBs, and will cause them to appear at the top of the Tag list.

 

One great advantage of using tags as pseudo NBs, is that you can assign multiple pseudo NBs to the same Note.  Can't do that with actual NBs.  Each Note can belong to only one NB.  So this allows me, for example, to assign multiple pseudo NBs of .NB.IT, .NB.Business, and .NB.Personal to the same Note, which is the asset record for a new Mac, used in both business and personal activities.  Now when I search or filter on any of the 3 pseudo NBs it will find the asset record of my Mac.

 

I now have all of my pseudo NBs that appear at the top of my Tag list, and the pseudo NBs can, and do, have sub-pseudo NBs.  Here's an example:

 

 

As a result, I now have a need for ONLY 3 main Notebooks, plus any Notebooks needed for sharing or mobile offline use:

 

 

Please feel free to post any questions or comments.

 

EDIT:  Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 12:36:27 PM CST

For more discussion on pseudo notebooks, 

see Do you find lots of notebooks or notebook stacks useful?

Agreed.  Technically as you've described a "pseudo notebook" is simply a label.
In fact, technically, any folder hierarchy is simply a set of labels in a directory.
The only difference is that labels/tags permit multiple membership. so in the end Tags is a much more flexible mechanism.

You can "move" a whole set of notes to a different notebook by retagging them, OR have them show up in a different notebook by adding a new tag.

Some people visualize best as folders others prefer to search for a tag. I do both.
See ALL the notes in a category and know it's all of them (archival)
Fastest path to my note on a topic. (targeted search)

Gmail is an excellent and widely understood implementation of "folders as labels" that demonstrates these principles well, and has implemented search, folders and tagging quite effectively.

[mtanne 9]

On 2/16/2018 at 9:55 AM, Kaeren said:

Our brains all think in different ways. Some of us are visual learners, some kinesthetic, and others auditory. Some of us are lateral thinkers, others linear thinkers. What's my point? Humanity is diverse, and discrimination in work methods is 19th century. I need the notebook hierarchy! To me, everything is centered around notebooks, and I have 187 of them, most of them in stacks of some sort. Scrolling through my list of notebooks is tedious (yes, I can search, but sometimes scrolling is more straightforward). And what is going to happen to me when I reach that limit of 250 notebooks? 

Please, Evernote, bring in stacked notebooks for those of us that need to work this way.

True. The fundamental problem is a failure to see the abstraction between information organization and information representation.  As @DTLow and @JMichaelTX and others have pointed out, the underlying implementation of any organizational mechanism is labeled objects. A Directory is set of labels to files, and if the structure of the labels allows only one parent, it is a TREE. If the structure allows more than one parent it is a GRAPH. Period. That's it. It's that simple. First year CS class teaches you this. 

Without an abstraction between the underlying implementation and the way information is presented, we all get stuck in this unresolvable vortex of ideas. 

WITH an abstraction, the implementation can focus on data integrity, back-up, performance, security (still an important matter - I don't want MY tagged notes showing up in YOUR tag search).

And the presentation layer can be anything people need. You can change the UI without calling on the back-end developers, whose jobs are overwhelmed solving those much harder problems.  Third parties can change the representation layer.  So we can have folders, hierarchical folders, colored folders, tags, stacks, notebooks, nested notebooks, or whatever kind of representation works for all the people who, as you've rightly pointed out, think differently.

I used to work in accessibility.  Try thinking of all the problems we've discussed about Evernote, from the perspective of a blind user who's SOLE interface is to the have the title of each notebook read to them, and then either enter or move to the next, and you will appreciate that YES people have DIFFERENT NEEDS.

[Feanor33 1]

Great summary of the problem @mtanne! 

Evernote could even give users a choice of the number of notebook levels they want in the settings. That way, people who like the current three levels don't have anything to worry about, and everybody's happy. There is a way to sort out this 10-year-old issue.

[DTLow 5,736]

17 minutes ago, Feanor33 said:

That way, people who like the current three levels don't have anything to worry about, and everybody's happy.

Three levels?  I'm only seeing Stacks > Notebooks

>>Evernote could even give users a choice of the number of notebook levels they want in the settings.

I'd go with the above request; nested notebooks/subnotebooks; i.e. an infinite hierarchy

[Feanor33 1]

20 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Three levels?  I'm only seeing Stacks > Notebooks

I think of it in three levels, Stacks > Notebooks > Notes. However you count it, we're talking about the same thing.

So the point of my post doesn't get lost: Evernote could give users a choice of the number of notebook levels they want in the settings. 

21 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I'd go with the above request; nested notebooks/subnotebooks; i.e. an infinite hierarchy

Sure. That could be an option in settings. But some people seem to like the current setup (as this thread shows), so why not keep them happy?

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

1 hour ago, mtanne said:

In fact, technically, any folder hierarchy is simply a set of labels in a directory.
The only difference is that labels/tags permit multiple membership. so in the end Tags is a much more flexible mechanism.

Perhaps it is a matter of semantics, but in the macOS, tags, and before them, labels, refer only to the object(s) that have that tag/label. Deleting a tag has no effect of the object it was assigned to.  Whereas actions such as delete and move of the folder will affect all items in that folder.  Most systems do NOT have tag hierarchies like Evernote.  In Evernote, if I do a search on a tag, it returns only the Notes that have that tag.  The search results do NOT include Notes that have tags which do NOT have that tag, but do have child tags of that tag.

Folders (Notebooks) are containers.  So if I delete, or move, a folder, it applies to all of its contents down to the lowest item in the hierarchy.  Whereas, if I delete a tag, nothing happens to the object which has that tag.  The folder, and all of its contents continue to exists.

Regardless of whether it is how the UI is constructed, or how the underlying data structures are defined, the notions of "folder" vs "tag" have long been quite different.

As you noted, an object can have many tags, but only one folder.  This is a very important distinction.  So folders have two very important differences from tags:

1. They are containers of every object (subfolders and files) within them.
2. An object can belong to one and only one folder.

As I have said many times, we need both folders and tags, or for Evernote, we need both Notebooks and Tags.  Each serve a vital purpose that cannot be 100% fulfilled by the other.

[Shellah 9]

1 hour ago, JMichaelTX said:

As I have said many times, we need both folders and tags, or for Evernote, we need both Notebooks and Tags.  Each serve a vital purpose that cannot be 100% fulfilled by the other.

The other vital feature for hierarchical thinkers, along with the need for many (many) levels of nested folders is the ability to reorder the sequence of folders and notes, preferably with drag and drop.  Right now Evernote forces sorting alphabetically or by date created or by date modified, etc.  Without that, the user has to craft and constantly modify some naming scheme like 1a-First Note, 1b-Second Note, 1c-Last Note, 2a-Do Later Note, 2b-A Reference Note to order things in the way he/she is thinking of the sequence.

[Shellah 9]

On 3/2/2018 at 4:41 PM, Leo Gong said:

You should definitely ask but I dare not give you an answer...  Beyond we're working on it. It's going to take a while though. First step is looking into Spaces for personal...

Thanks for the input re: more notebook hierarchy. They're noted, we'll definitely have to reconsider the limit on notebooks for instance. For business users, with Spaces we've tried to increase / remove limits. E.g. There used to be a 500 joined NB limit - NBs you have access to via a Space are excluded from this limit for instance. We'll look into other limits as we roll out more parts of the roadmap.

The other vital feature for hierarchical thinkers, along with the need for many (many) levels of nested folders is the ability to reorder the sequence of folders and notes, preferably with drag and drop.  Right now Evernote forces sorting alphabetically or by date created or by date modified, etc.  Without that, the user has to craft and constantly modify some naming scheme like 1a-First Note, 1b-Second Note, 1c-Last Note, 2a-Do Later Note, 2b-A Reference Note to order things in the way he/she is thinking of the sequence.

[jeffsf 10]

On 3/3/2018 at 9:45 AM, DTLow said:

Confirmed, tag hierarchies are not represented in IOS, and also don't appear in all menus on Win/Mac.

I suspect it will be the same if a notebook hierarchy is implemented.

Still, I find the tag hierarchy page (Mac) useful for organization my tags.

Yes, I also find tags useful. The main utility of tags is for cross referencing and to make searches easier. However, the nested tags can add another layer of utility. The issues with that are [1] the afore-mentioned failure to implement them on iOS and [2] the laboriousness of organizing them. With folders, one creates a folder inside another folder and puts the desired info in it. With tags, one creates a tag in the master list, then drags it across all the other tags to the appropriate master tag, then does a search for appropriate notes, which may be hard to find because they are not yet organized, then tags them. It's doable, but much less convenient. If one uses tags as a cross-reference and search tool, there are likely to be many of them, making them harder to browse. Also, there is no hierarchy in the pull-down menu at the top of the notes list, as there is for stacks and notebooks. One has to switch from notes to tags to browse the tags, so one goes back and forth, back and forth. All this churn makes Evernote more difficult to use. If there were hierarchical folders built into the interface, life would be so much easier. 

All that said, it is enormously encouraging to see a sign that Evernote is no longer stonewalling on this issue. So we can live in hope.

[jeffsf 10]

On 3/5/2018 at 5:17 PM, mtanne said:

Agreed.  Technically as you've described a "pseudo notebook" is simply a label.
In fact, technically, any folder hierarchy is simply a set of labels in a directory.
The only difference is that labels/tags permit multiple membership. so in the end Tags is a much more flexible mechanism.

You can "move" a whole set of notes to a different notebook by retagging them, OR have them show up in a different notebook by adding a new tag.

Some people visualize best as folders others prefer to search for a tag. I do both.
See ALL the notes in a category and know it's all of them (archival)
Fastest path to my note on a topic. (targeted search)

Gmail is an excellent and widely understood implementation of "folders as labels" that demonstrates these principles well, and has implemented search, folders and tagging quite effectively.

Good explanation. I have done much the same, and then, because the remaining tags are still many in number, I have organized them into alpha master tags. All the tags that begin with the letter A are under a master AAA tag, those that begin with B under a master BBB tag, and so on. Your approach is creative and, as you say, makes the best use of the tool we have. Still, one can hope for a future when the hierarchy is built into the system rather than created by the users as an add-on.

[Eldorado 26]

On 18.8.2008 at 12:37 AM, engberg said:

... you can organize tags into a hierarchy. ...

Nice to hear from an Evenote Employee - does this mean that this feature will be available in Business environments soon? ;-)

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, jeffsf said:

All that said, it is enormously encouraging to see a sign that Evernote is no longer stonewalling on this issue. So we can live in hope.

 

1 hour ago, Eldorado said:

Nice to hear from an Evenote Employee - does this mean that this feature will be available in Business environments soon? ;-)

I'm not sure where you're getting your information from.  I've seen no indication from Evernote that they're interested in implementing a Notebook hierarchy.

Evernote did implement tag hierarchy (Win/Mac/Web) for Personal Accounts, but not on the Business side.

 

[Flier 19]

5 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I'm not sure where you're getting your information from.  I've seen no indication from Evernote that they're interested in implementing a Notebook hierarchy.

 

See Leon Gong's response to you last week (3/2).

[DTLow 5,736]

On 2018-03-11 at 12:34 PM, Flier said:

See Leon Gong's response to you last week (3/2).

It would have been nice if you added a link.  I found the post Here

Leon, an Evernote employee stated that Evernote was looking into adding some additional levels similar to the Stacks feature.  They've actually.implemented Spaces.

[jefito 5,589]

On 3/5/2018 at 9:10 PM, Feanor33 said:

Sure. That could be an option in settings. But some people seem to like the current setup (as this thread shows), so why not keep them happy?

Why would this be a setting? People who don't want nested notebooks (me, for one) just wouldn't nest them. Is there a Windows/Mac/Linux setting that limits the depth of your file system? This would just be wasted & confusing UI.

[jeffsf 10]

On 3/11/2018 at 12:26 PM, DTLow said:

 

I'm not sure where you're getting your information from.  I've seen no indication from Evernote that they're interested in implementing a Notebook hierarchy.

Evernote did implement tag hierarchy (Win/Mac/Web) for Personal Accounts, but not on the Business side.

 

See https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/96180-nesting-multiple-notebooks-creating-sub-notebooks/?do=findComment&comment=496455

[dawa68 0]

Yes Directory like structure would be great - at least 2 subdirectory Levels and not one

[DTLow 5,736]

3 hours ago, dawa68 said:

Directory like structure would be very good - at least one more level

 

3 hours ago, dawa68 said:

Yes Directory like structure would be great - at least 2 subdirectory Levels and not one

This implementing of levels seems like a bandaid solution.
- Note: Evernote already implemented one level (Stacks).  
Before long, users request another level; how long before requesting another level; then another level; then another ...

The implementation should be a parent/child hierarchy.  
- Note: Evernote already implemented this for the Tags feature (Win/Mac/Web)

[chrisalbertyn 0]

Clearly some find tags adequate. I like them, but they don't meet the need for sub-notebooks. The absence of sub-notebooks is my only continuing frustration with the otherwise excellent product. I don't understand the reluctance to allow this improvement. Those who are content with their tags will be unaffected. The large group of us who want the sub-notebooks will then also be contented.

[DTLow 5,736]

On 2018-03-25 at 8:03 AM, chrisalbertyn said:

I don't understand the reluctance to allow this improvement.

Welcome to the discussion.

Adding a notebook hierarchy requires an overhaul of the database design

Evernote seems reluctant to take on this workload.  Instead they implemented the Stack feature; which is only a 2 level hierarchy.

>>tags ... don't meet the need for sub-notebooks.

I'm not seeing proof of this, just that some users need the tags feature be called something different - like folders.  I think they would then find the feature more acceptable.

[Flier 19]

13 minutes ago, DTLow said:

 ... I'm not seeing proof of this ...

Maybe I missed reading the rule book.  Are others required to prove to you that their viewpoints are valid?  FWIW I am not seeing any proof here that your endlessly repeated tag workarounds to the folder problem are anything but that:  workarounds.  And clumsy ones at that.

[DTLow 5,736]

3 hours ago, Flier said:

Are others required to prove to you that their viewpoints are valid?

It's not a requirement, but works well to convince others, and Evernote.

>>tag workarounds to the folder problem are anything but that:  workarounds.  And clumsy ones at that.

Not clear on the details for the "folder problem".  In Evernote, notes have two attributes, notebooks and tags.  If it helps, use either attribute as the folder

There are  none so blind, as those who will not see.

 

[Shellah 9]

4 minutes ago, Flier said:

Yeah.  Agreed.  I don't know which is more impressive, his arrogance or the amount of free time he has available to spend on posting the same comments, over and over.  and over.  and over.

Re "I am not interested in boohoo posts."  Is that also a requirement , that your highness be interested in every post?  Or that someone cares whether you are interested or not?  ROFL.

[DTLow 5,736]

3 hours ago, Shellah said:

I don't know which is more impressive

Thanks for the recognition.  I'm one of the group helping the userbase in these forums.  I've had much experience with computers as a programmer/developer and have been using Evernote from the beginning.  I started with Windows devices, then switched to Macs.  I'm retired so I have more time for helping and answering questions.

>>posting the same comments, over and over.  and over.  and over.

It does get repetitive as new users come on board asking the same questions.  I can understand if you don't wish to participate.

[gazumped 11,652]

It's probably been mentioned here before,  so sorry if this old news but Evernote is widening the goalposts a bit with 'Spaces' -

ONLY available in Evernote Business Beta so far,  but with (they say) intentions to spread to other packages - and 'spaces' can contain notebooks,  notes,  pinned announcements... 

A lot of very general information is available via their post,  but it may be that this is Evernote's (partial?) answer to hierarchies.  Actual practical use unknown as yet until we all get a chance to play with the nuts and bolts of the operation,  and it sounds like a typical Evernote feature in that 'spaces' are open to be used in whatever way best suits your situation;  there's no (AFAICS) pre-defined structure.  Your spaces are what you make of them. 

Sorry that's vague - read the blurb and see what you think!

[olek3a 2]

On 21.02.2018 at 5:58 AM, DTLow said:

>>if I want to organise notes for writing a novel, I could call the main notebook 'Novel', and then have sub notebooks called 'characters', 'theme', etc.  Within 'Character'  I could then have sub-notebooks like 'David', 'Sarah', etc containing notes about those characters.

A work-around is to use a standard naming convention; for example

This workaround makes the list of notebooks or tags look a bit too crouded and messy for me, i whould need another search engine to search through it.

I have tags 'Novel',  'David' and 'Sara' which are nested:

• Novel
  • David
  • Sara

And in windows app I can click on 'Novel' tag and list all notes with nested tag. My question is how I can search through all notes related to the Novel, i.e. tagged with 'Novel', 'David' or 'Sara' without adding tag 'Novell' to all 'David' and 'Sara' tagged notes too.

[DTLow 5,736]

On 4/7/2018 at 10:07 AM, olek3a said:

My question is how I can search through all notes related to the Novel

Windows has a search-child-tags setting.  I'm not a Windows User, but I understand the setting is: Tools > Options > Note and checking "Automatically select child tags."

On a Mac, I can achieve this using a script for searches; set theTags to every tag whose parent is equal to parentTag

If you had prefixed the sub-tag names, you could use a wildcard; tag:Novel*
I prefer the prefix approach.  Tagname "David" sittling in the tag list isn't that useful

[CalS 5,280]

On 4/7/2018 at 10:07 AM, olek3a said:

This workaround makes the list of notebooks or tags look a bit too crouded and messy for me, i whould need another search engine to search through it.

I have tags 'Novel',  'David' and 'Sara' which are nested:

• Novel
  • David
  • Sara

And in windows app I can click on 'Novel' tag and list all notes with nested tag. My question is how I can search through all notes related to the Novel, i.e. tagged with 'Novel', 'David' or 'Sara' without adding tag 'Novell' to all 'David' and 'Sara' tagged notes too.

You can do as @DTLow suggests and search tag:novel, or you can do an All Any search with the three tags.  This will return any note that contains one of the three tags.

EDIT:  Mistyped the parameter the first time.

Edited April 15, 2018 by CalS
Oops.

[olek3a 2]

On 07.04.2018 at 10:03 PM, CalS said:

You can do as @DTLow suggests and search tag:novel, or you can do an All search with the three tags.  This will return any note that contains one of the three tags.

I wanted to avoid listing all three tags, because I have already specified that they are nested, and searching this way I will not be able to find notes having novel or any child or grand child tag and notification which is not complete. 

[CalS 5,280]

2 hours ago, olek3a said:

I wanted to avoid listing all three tags, because I have already specified that they are nested, and searching this way I will not be able to find notes having novel or any child or grand child tag and notification which is not complete. 

My bad on the first post, it should have been the Any parameter.  IAC, in windows.  You can check Automatically select child tags in Tools - Options - Navigation.  When you select a parent tag, at whichever level, this will search for any notes in the parent tag and any of its child tags.

[Eldorado 26]

I do not think that folders are blacklisted because of pride. But they are probably very very very hard to implement (based on the current internal data structure they use over many years and versions).

Within EN Business there are Spaces available - something between simple stacks and free folders. They help to maintain folder permissions (read/write access to specific team members). 

But: With EN Business they removed support of nested tags :-(
This is (in my opinion) because tags are managed outside the "normal" internal data structure and they didn't succeed to add management features for nested tags in admin console. Moreover there are global and user-local tags available that cannot be managed globally.

All in all: Their development is strictly limited because of compatibility reasons to older structures. In parallel they seem to loose experienced developers and are forced to offer nice features involved from marketing (sorry - another :-( )

[DTLow 5,736]

9 hours ago, x9sim9 said:

I think its clear at this point that someone within the Evernote organisation has simply refused to add this feature a long time ago and now its blacklisted.

It's clear that Evernote never implemented a hierarchy for the Notebook element.
The only element with a hierarchy is the Tag element (Mac/Win/Web)
I don't know about "blacklisting", but these are the basic building blocks of the Evernote database structure.

I'm able to work with these elements, regardless of the names.
Other users find this impossible; no real reason,  they simply don't like xxxxxx.  These people should think about using a different product that delivers what they like.
With over 200 million users, Evernote is not impacted by this negativity.

>>I don't like tags,

You don't have to "like" tags; and you don't have to use them.
I see the benefits offered by the tag feature, and make use of them.

>>...I like stacks, give the customers what they want...

Evernote implemented Stacks after customers needed a method to organize Notebooks
It looks like this will be replaced with the new Spaces feature.

[gazumped 11,652]

Evernote (AFAIK) have never 'refused' to entertain any feature request.  They proceed at their own pace,  and some developments take much longer than others because they're not just adding a final detail to an overall picture - implementing one small additional step means a whole section of code has to be rewritten and upgraded to work across all supported operating systems,  then rolled out to 220M users who will be a little upset (see other threads here) if even the slightest detail goes wrong.

Individual developers have suggested that the web client is being upgraded with the new Spaces feature,  which seems to answer several frequent requests - 'pinnable' notes,  shareable notebooks stacks,  and variable notebook collections.  When all those things get rolled out,  it's possible that any argument here will become moot - Evernote will have dealt with this feature request along with several others.  But developing something new* takes time.

*And I know sub-folders aren't a new concept,  but they're new to Evernote...

[gazumped 11,652]

20 hours ago, rocketguy said:

just letting the product team know that it is affecting your bottom line.

That may be the case,  but 1)  a new feature called Spaces is (allegedly) about to launch,  which may solve the issue,  and 2) at 220M users and counting,  I think Evernote was learning to cope without a folder structure,  at least until now...

[DTLow 5,736]

6 hours ago, x9sim9 said:

Create virtually nested stacks ... is stored in the backend as a single stack with the string: Stack1 :: Stack 2 :: Stack 3

Name prefixing also works with Notebooks and Tags.  
It's not hard to do, and does simulate "nesting" but sometimes the names get overly large.
The best benefit is the names sort together in an alphabetic list, so as you posted, you get the effect even if the client app doesn't support hierarchy.

[jefito 5,589]

5 hours ago, x9sim9 said:

Just so you know there is a very simple way to implement this regardless of how the backend architecture of evernote was built, and would not effect backwards compatibility and would work easily across all platforms.

Create virtually nested stacks

Stack 1

-- Stack 2

-- -- Stack 3

is stored in the backend as a single stack with the string:

Stack1 :: Stack 2 :: Stack 3

older clients simply see this instead of nested stacks, and the newer clients see the stacks in a nested view

 

Its really not as hard as evernote seem to think it is...

I don't have any insight as to how hard Evernote thinks this is or not. Do you? I just know that historically they've not been interested in doing it, though that may change (there's a post elsewhere from an Evernote employee that claims that they are planning on adding nested notebooks; I'll try to find it and add the reference) .

You do need to use some sort of a user-enterable delimiter that doesn't conflict with existing usage, since ':, (as well as other punctuation characters) are already allowed in stack names. And likely some changes required to support stack searches as well (stack:MyStack).  Not very likely, but over 200 million users, definitely possible. Moreover, given nested stack trees A/B/C and 1/B/2, so is the stack 'B' the same one in both subtrees? Maybe that's not a problem. And search: if 'B' is a virtual stack as before, then a search string of "stack:B" should do..???

My take: stacks are already a hack (they're just a name attached to a notebook, and not separate entities). Your idea is clever, but it just compounds the hack, rather than Evernote just taking a big breath (and the development hit) and implementing nesting correctly.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

On 5/15/2018 at 6:16 AM, Eldorado said:

I do not think that folders are blacklisted because of pride. But they are probably very very very hard to implement (based on the current internal data structure they use over many years and versions).

Unless you are an Evernote developer, or have access to inside design documents, I don't think any of us really know how hard, or how easy, it would be to add hierarchical Notebooks to the current Evernote architecture.  However, it is unlikely to be super hard because we see this design in many other products.  OTOH, it seems to be very hard for the Evernote developers to design and implement a solid, robust Note editor.  So, who knows???  Just my 2¢.

[Dr Puneet Gupta 7]

I am new to the community.

But I think People organize Hierarchial notes using TAGS rather than Notebook.

Use the Full Power of Tags if that solves your problem.

[DTLow 5,736]

On 5/26/2018 at 4:12 PM, AlextheUnicat said:

There is no universal "right" way to take notes

For unlimited hierarchy, I can tell you Tags is the right way in Evernote.  It's the only element having the parent-child relationship; but only on the Mac/Win/Web platforms.

>>Hierarchy of notebooks/stacks should be a given.

Well, it's not a given in Evernote.  I'd suggest you should be reviewing a different service where it is a given.

[Shellah 9]

On 5/26/2018 at 7:12 PM, AlextheUnicat said:

>the only thing keeping from using Evernote...would prefer to use Evernote....hours and hours of experimenting...have tried tag hierarchy...the genius behind applications like Workflowy and Todoist...frankly the posts that are like "I can't see why you could possibly need this" frustrate me.....pros and cons, but that all would change if Evernote had notebook hierarchy...

 

1

AlextheUnicat, you've articulated precisely what I'm saying.  Nailed it.  Thx!  

[gazumped 11,652]

On 5/27/2018 at 12:12 AM, AlextheUnicat said:

the posts that are like "I can't see why you could possibly need this"

I don't think anyone has posted anything like that.  Some people seem wedded to hierarchical filing,  others are willing to adapt to tags.  Evernote -by their own choice so far- only does tags.  (Except - look at what 'Spaces' can do - that might be more your speed.)  If tags don't work for you,  it's possible you're using the wrong application. 

If anything the main argument here is like saying you love Pizza,  but you just wish they'd stop putting cheese and tomato on it because you hate the taste.  Best suggestion might be - stop buying pizza...

[jefito 5,589]

On 5/26/2018 at 7:12 PM, AlextheUnicat said:

frankly the posts that are like "I can't see why you could possibly need this" frustrate me

Frankly, there are very few posts that say anything like this. Me, I'd say that since Evernote currently only supports flat notebook organization (flat-ish if you include stacks), then if you require arbitrarily nestable notebooks, then you're currently out of luck, and Evernote isn't the tool for you  Feature requests are of course valid and welcome. Elsewhere in the forums, we're hearing the occasional peeps that nestable notebooks (or some equivalent) might be in the offing, but if I were basing my decision on that, I'd wait until they actually appear, in non-beta form, across all the platforms that Evernote supports.

[Mr.Pablo 0]

On 11/4/2016 at 9:02 PM, michael.freidgeim said:

Hopefully Evernote team reads this, it should be considered as beneficial new feature request.

I completely agree so sir. Evernote team should definitely CONSIDER this common-sense feature.  Sometimes it confounds me why such a brilliant people creating such a brilliant software forget their basic logic halfway through..  ?

[Mr.Pablo 0]

On 10/29/2016 at 10:49 AM, Pivo said:

I would like to use Evernote ask my "one stop" location to make notes at work.  I need to be able to create a stack within a stack...for example

Company Name (notebook stack 1)

> Committee 1 (notebook stack 2)

> meeting 1 (note)

> meeting 2 (note)

> meeting 3 (note)

etc....

>Committee 2 (notebook stack 3)

> meeting 1

> meeting 2 

etc...

Is this possible?  I have been trying and it doesnt seem to work.  

Thanks.

I reported this post so that @EVERNOTE TEAM sees it cause it's a common sense feature they need to add. NOW!

[Mr.Pablo 0]

HURRY EVERNOTE, we are paying and this feature is so crucial I cant believe you Evernoteee people haven't added it yet...!

[Mr.Pablo 0]

On 1/20/2018 at 9:57 AM, asowers said:

I just purchased the premium edition of evernote and I am extremely disappointed you can't organize like this. I need the exact same organization that Pivo describes above. One Note does this... I guess I should have just stuck with them. 

Hello, over the years I have become a savvy on note taking software, I would suggest using multiple note takings and ditch Evernote. Here are the ones I have found the best:  Apple Notes (best for folder management), Bear (terrible for folder management but good for bare notes), Simple note (Good and simple in general). 

[DTLow 5,736]

2 hours ago, Mr.Pablo said:

Apple Notes (best for folder management), Bear (terrible for folder management but good for bare notes)

Evernote has never supported folder management.  If folder management is your requirement, you're using the wrong product.

It's still tops as a data storage and retrieval tool. 

[tjw82 0]

Why not just add folders?

[DTLow 5,736]

On 6/23/2018 at 8:12 AM, tjw82 said:

Why not just add folders?

Evernote has never supported folders; only the notebook/tag methodology.

For me, this is a great improvement; I'll never go back to filing documents by folders.

 

[AlextheUnicat 6]

On 6/25/2018 at 11:12 AM, DTLow said:

Evernote has never supported folders; only the notebook/tag methodology.

For me, this is a great improvement; I'll never go back to filing documents by folders.

 

Ok, but we already know that they don't support that. That is why we are coming here to request it as a feature.

It's ok that it works for you. Great. But I don't really understand why you are commenting in this thread. I don't think this is the thread for you.

Frankly your comments feel derailing and gaslight-y.

[AlextheUnicat 6]

On 5/29/2018 at 1:01 PM, gazumped said:

I don't think anyone has posted anything like that.  Some people seem wedded to hierarchical filing,  others are willing to adapt to tags.  Evernote -by their own choice so far- only does tags.  (Except - look at what 'Spaces' can do - that might be more your speed.)  If tags don't work for you,  it's possible you're using the wrong application. 

If anything the main argument here is like saying you love Pizza,  but you just wish they'd stop putting cheese and tomato on it because you hate the taste.  Best suggestion might be - stop buying pizza...

It's more like we want pepperoni as an option on our pizza and evernote is not providing it. Some people are coming in and saying "we don't want pepperoni" even though they never never have to use pepperoni on their own pizza if they don't want and it literally affects them in no way whatsoever if other people have pepperoni on their pizzas.

[gazumped 11,652]

10 minutes ago, AlextheUnicat said:

It's more like we want pepperoni as an option on our pizza and evernote is not providing it.

Wouldn't you just look for somewhere that had the options you wanted?  There's no guarantee that the first pizza place will ever get around to adding the magic ingredient...

..But with 200+ votes and 12 pages of discussion,  the point has been well made - some users do want more folders.  Up to Evernote to decide whether it's technically and cost-effectively possible to deliver.

[DTLow 5,736]

4 hours ago, AlextheUnicat said:

That is why we are coming here to request it as a feature.

This request is for a Notebook hierarchy feature.
To indicate your support for the request, use the voting buttons in the upper left corner of the discussion.

>>But I don't really understand why you are commenting in this thread. I don't think this is the thread for you. 

You posted a question about adding Folders, I responded.

Take note that this thread is Notebook related, not Folders.
Are you sure this is the thread for you?

[DonkeyKong 1]

On 10/14/2017 at 10:10 AM, grdd said:

I don't understand why after almost 10 years this has not been implemented yet. Also, I don't understand why workarounds such as tags are considered a good solution.

Is it that complicated to add more hierarchy levels to the structure?

THANK YOU!!!

Tags are just awful!
Call me OCD, but I want to see everything nicely placed within folders and folders and folders

I've been requesting this feature from Evernote for years now, but to no avail...

I've even given up resisting at one point and tried giving the tag method a fair go
I COMPLETELY reorganized my Evernote so as to reduce my dependence on folders and start implementing tags

But it's just awful

Again, call me OCD, but I can't stand seeing all my notes jumbled together in a single notebook
Using only tags to sort them out...

It can't be that difficult to implement this
Even if we could just do ONE "layer" of double stacks would be incredibly useful

[DTLow 5,736]

7 hours ago, DonkeyKong said:

Call me OCD, but I want to see everything nicely placed within folders and folders and folders

You would need to  look at a different product for this; Evernote has never supported folders.

There's only two note organization options, Notebooks and Tags.

[estevancarlos 30]

1 hour ago, DonkeyKong said:

THANK YOU!!!

Tags are just awful!
Call me OCD, but I want to see everything nicely placed within folders and folders and folders

I've been requesting this feature from Evernote for years now, but to no avail...

I've even given up resisting at one point and tried giving the tag method a fair go
I COMPLETELY reorganized my Evernote so as to reduce my dependence on folders and start implementing tags

But it's just awful

Again, call me OCD, but I can't stand seeing all my notes jumbled together in a single notebook
Using only tags to sort them out...

It can't be that difficult to implement this
Even if we could just do ONE "layer" of double stacks would be incredibly useful

Well, from a more technical standpoint, Evernote's "tags" is just a term that describes some vague functionality. Commonly tags are used as non-hierarchical organizational terms. In other words tags often have a flat structure. That's how I assumed Evernote worked. However as we all know Evernote is discreet with their hierarchical tag feature. In other words it mimics the common "folder" paradigm. You want folders within folders? Well, you can put tags within tags. Same thing.

I think that's where the confusion is. Tags function in the same way folders are expected to function. For example I have a tag called "Engineering" and it contains a sub-tag called "electronics". This is typically what we expect from folders. The problem, as I see it, is that it's not obvious how to create sub tags. It doesn't fit within any easy workflow. You have to click on the tag button and then view this large window full of tags in order to find what you need. You quickly end up with too many tags but Evernote encourages creating tags as though they are flat structured, descriptive terms. It's not visually organized either. So it's one of those Evernote features that suffers due to a poor user experience.

Here's how Evernote could fix it. Allow users to select tags in their notes AND place them as sub-tags in other tags while editing their note. Also if a user writes a tag that already contains sub-tags, the user should be able to click on it in order to view and select the proper sub-tag. I've attached one screenshot here with the tags "health" and "home". I am forced to write two separate tags. I want "health" to be a sub-tag of "home" but Evernote does not allow this in the Note editing window. THAT'S the problem. Once that UX matter is resolved you'll find that it's more intuitive to create organized sub-tags and the workflow will be easier. Once you get over the idea that they are "tags" and not "folders" the functionality will be all that matters.

 

[estevancarlos 30]

On 8/17/2008 at 3:37 PM, engberg said:

We don't have sub-notebooks, but you can organize tags into a hierarchy. This may allow you to set up the organizational scheme you're looking for.

The problem is the user experience. As soon as someone is writing a note, you require that all users use tags as though they are only flat structured. There is no way to write a tag and then write a sub-tag in the note writing window. You also can't write a tag and then select any of it's sub-tags. It's fine if the feature exists but there's no workflow that promotes the feature. So much so that I imagine most people don't know there are sub-tags.

Please consider allowing users to select sub-tags and create sub-tags directly in the note window itself.

[DTLow 5,736]

21 minutes ago, estevancarlos said:

In other words it mimics the common "folder" paradigm. You want folders within folders? Well, you can put tags within tags. Same thing.

This works for me; however there are two exceptions:

1. A note can be assigned multiple tags, whereas a note be restricted to a single folder.
2. Tag names have to be unique.  In a folder structure, the sub-folder names can be repeated

[estevancarlos 30]

1 minute ago, DTLow said:

This works for me with one exception: A note can be assigned multiple tags, whereas a note be restricted to a single folder.

Good point. I personally don't mind the approach of a file being within multiple "folders" at once but yes that is one conceptual discrepancy.

[DTLow 5,736]

36 minutes ago, estevancarlos said:

There is no way to write a tag and then write a sub-tag in the note writing window. You also can't write a tag and then select any of it's sub-tags. It's fine if the feature exists but there's no workflow that promotes the feature. So much so that I imagine most people don't know there are sub-tags.

Please consider allowing users to select sub-tags and create sub-tags directly in the note window itself.

Personally I don't rely on the Tag Hierarchy feature.
It's only available on select platforms, and in select menus.

I rely more on tag name prefixes
An example of my process is with my !Type tags.
When assigning tags to a note, I use !Type-aaaaaaaa
 

[estevancarlos 30]

12 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Personally I don't rely on the Tag Hierarchy feature.
It's only available on select platforms, and in select menus.

I rely more on tag name prefixes
An example of my process is with my !Type tags.
When assigning tags to a note, I use !Type-aaaaaaaa
 

Sounds like an interesting approach but it still draws attention to the fact that Evernote has a broken "feature". However I will consider your approach. It's similar to how I write some code.

[CalS 5,280]

3 hours ago, estevancarlos said:

allowing users to select sub-tags

You can do this, all tags, parent and child, act the same when being added to a note.

3 hours ago, estevancarlos said:

create sub-tags directly in the note window itself

Semantical point here, you can create the child tag, it's just that you can't place it in the hierarchy.

[estevancarlos 30]

36 minutes ago, CalS said:

You can do this, all tags, parent and child, act the same when being added to a note.

Semantical point here, you can create the child tag, it's just that you can't place it in the hierarchy.

Well, what I mean is that you can't select a sub-tag while being informed that the tag you've selected is a sub-tag. There is no visual indicator in the note window. And you should be able to create a sub-tag and place in hierarchy in the note window otherwise the experience encourages only the flat structure use of tags.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

On 4/7/2018 at 12:24 PM, DTLow said:

On a Mac, I can achieved this using a script for searches; set theTags to every tag whose parent is equal to parentTag

@DTLow, sorry to refer to an old post, but how do you turn that list of tags into a search for Notes?

BTW, I don't thing that is equivalent to the EN Win feature of:

On 4/7/2018 at 12:24 PM, DTLow said:

Windows has a search-child-tags setting.  I'm not a Windows User, but I understand the setting is: Tools > Options > Note and checking "Automatically select child tags."

You tag list would only be the immediate child tags of the specified parent tag, and would NOT include any child tags of the first level child tags. 

But maybe I'm missing something.  Perhaps if you could share your complete script it would be clear.

[DTLow 5,736]

On 7/11/2018 at 4:39 PM, JMichaelTX said:

how do you turn that list of tags into a search for Notes?

I'm using Applescript on a Mac to retrieve a note list based on a search
The code is

tell application "Evernote"
     set query string of window 1 to searchQuery
     activate
end tell

So it's just a matter if composing variable  searchQuery 
For multiple tags, it would be      any:   tag:Tag1   tag:Tag2 ...

>>You tag list would only be the immediate child tags of the specified parent tag, and would NOT include any child tags of the first level child tags. 

Good point
I do have a handler performing a recursive search

I also use a repeated-prefix naming standard
For example 
     Timeline
          Timeline-US
               Timeline-US/CivilWar
               Timeline-Us/RevolutionWar
           Timeline-Canada
           Timeline-Mexico

This allows child tag selection using wildcards; for example search tag:Timeline*
- bypasses the Tag Hierarchy that's only available on select menus on select platforms
- bypasses the scripting requirement

Edited July 19, 2018 by DTLow
Code moved to new discusion

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

43 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I'm using Applescript on a Mac to retrieve a note list based on a search

Thanks for the reply.  I started a new thread:

Using AppleScript to Process Tags in EN Mac 

[CalS 5,280]

3 hours ago, estevancarlos said:

Well, what I mean is that you can't select a sub-tag while being informed that the tag you've selected is a sub-tag

True.

3 hours ago, estevancarlos said:

And you should be able to create a sub-tag and place in hierarchy in the note window otherwise the experience encourages only the flat structure use of tags.

Not sure about that, encouraging any type of behavior.  Maybe. but  it can be a use case thing.  I have nested tags but strictly for organization of the tags, not the notes.  The Parent tags are seldom used in Notes.  And I got to about 400 tags.  My base of 350 was in place after a couple of years and I only add a handful a year now.  So I'm perfectly comfortable opening up the left panel once in a blue moon and moving new tags to their parents.  Again, a use case thing.

[hartman_md 11]

On 1/5/2016 at 3:20 PM, JMichaelTX said:

Using Tags as Pseudo Notebooks

My knowledge of how to use Tags continues to evolve.  This has been largely due to limitations Evernote has placed on Notebooks.

So, the question is:  How does one make the best use of the tool they have?

Notebooks (NB) are limited to 250.  Tags are virtually unlimited at 100,000.    Tags can have a hierarchical structure of Parent Tag / Child Tag, much like the folders that you see on your computer.

 

So, if we can model NBs as Tags, then we can effectively have unlimited NBs and sub-NBs.  One of the most appealing features of Notebooks (and folders) is how they visually appear.  But what if we can do the same visual layout with Tags?  Stay tuned to learn how.

 

I use tags in two fundamentally different ways:

1. Pseudo Notebooks -- use in place of where you would normally use a notebook.  This includes sub-notebooks.
2. Note Categorization -- traditional use of tags to categorize the entity, which can have multiple tags.  Can be used across Notebooks, or in this case, across pseudo NBs.

Using Tags as Pseudo Notebooks

 

Tags can be organized in hierarchies (meaning Parent-Child relationship).  So we can achieve the appearance of Notebooks and sub-notebooks,

 

Without going into a lot of detail at this point, I have created a number of Tags which serve as pseudo Notebooks.   Note that all of the pseudo NBs, actually tags, all have a prefix of ".NB.", which makes it easy to identify which tags are pseudo NBs, and will cause them to appear at the top of the Tag list.

 

One great advantage of using tags as pseudo NBs, is that you can assign multiple pseudo NBs to the same Note.  Can't do that with actual NBs.  Each Note can belong to only one NB.  So this allows me, for example, to assign multiple pseudo NBs of .NB.IT, .NB.Business, and .NB.Personal to the same Note, which is the asset record for a new Mac, used in both business and personal activities.  Now when I search or filter on any of the 3 pseudo NBs it will find the asset record of my Mac.

 

I now have all of my pseudo NBs that appear at the top of my Tag list, and the pseudo NBs can, and do, have sub-pseudo NBs.  Here's an example:

 

 

As a result, I now have a need for ONLY 3 main Notebooks, plus any Notebooks needed for sharing or mobile offline use:

 

 

Please feel free to post any questions or comments.

 

EDIT:  Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 12:36:27 PM CST

For more discussion on pseudo notebooks, 

see Do you find lots of notebooks or notebook stacks useful?

A major hurdle to this approach is the inability to browse / filter "child" tags with the mobile (iPhone) app (version 8.14).  From the "All Notes" screen, the tag icon can be touched to bring up the "Filter" screen.  From there a "parent" tag filter can be applied and tagged notes viewed, but I don't see the ability to select a "child" tag at all!  The inability to use the hierarchical structure allowed with tags from the mobile app makes this a non-starter for me.

Please let me know if I'm missing something here.

[hartman_md 11]

On 8/17/2008 at 5:37 PM, engberg said:

We don't have sub-notebooks, but you can organize tags into a hierarchy. This may allow you to set up the organizational scheme you're looking for.

Just one major hurdle to this approach is the inability to browse / filter "child" tags with the mobile (iPhone) app (version 8.14).  From the "All Notes" screen, the tag icon can be touched to bring up the "Filter" screen.  From there a "parent" tag filter can be applied and tagged notes viewed, but I don't see the ability to select a "child" tag at all!  The inability to use the hierarchical structure allowed with tags from the mobile app makes this a non-starter for me.

Please let me know if I'm missing something here.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

3 hours ago, hartman_md said:

A major hurdle to this approach is the inability to browse / filter "child" tags with the mobile (iPhone) app (version 8.14).  From the "All Notes" screen, the tag icon can be touched to bring up the "Filter" screen.  From there a "parent" tag filter can be applied and tagged notes viewed, but I don't see the ability to select a "child" tag at all!  The inability to use the hierarchical structure allowed with tags from the mobile app makes this a non-starter for me.

You are correct that EN iOS (and I think EN Android) do NOT support hierarchical tags -- they show the tag list as one flat list.  This is one of the many reasons I don't use any of my iOS devices for any major Evernote work.  It's all done on the Mac.

In EN Win, you have the option of doing a search with a Parent tag that includes notes with any of its child tags.  But we do not have that in EN Mac.  It has been a feature in EN Win for about a year now, I think.

So, EN nested tags do NOT work like OS nested folders, which is what most of us would expect IF we had EN nested Notebooks.

So, you end up either moving to a different Notes app/system, or making Evernote work as best you can.  You choice.

BTW, you do not need to repeat your posts.  You can quote as many other posts as you like, and then just provide one reply.  And when you do quote another post, please just select the key part of that post you want to reply to.  It will provide you with a "Quote Selection" popup.  Thanks.

[jefito 5,589]

On 7/11/2018 at 2:58 PM, estevancarlos said:

Well, from a more technical standpoint, Evernote's "tags" is just a term that describes some vague functionality. Commonly tags are used as non-hierarchical organizational terms. In other words tags often have a flat structure. That's how I assumed Evernote worked. However as we all know Evernote is discreet with their hierarchical tag feature. In other words it mimics the common "folder" paradigm. You want folders within folders? Well, you can put tags within tags. Same thing.

I think that's where the confusion is. Tags function in the same way folders are expected to function.

Stopping you right there.

From a technical standpoint, Evernote's tags are simply labels, i.e., just pieces of text, that you can apply to a note. You can search your note collection for notes with specific tags or tag prefixes.  Nothing vague about that. Beyond that, those tags can be organized in hierarchies, and in that sense, it's similar to GMail's "label" organization (though user interactions are different), but it's important to note that tag hierarchies organize tags, they do not organize notes. In most cases, a note with tag "A" bears no intrinsic (i.e. hierarchy-based) relationships with notes containing a parent or child of "A".

Evernote tags do not model folders, at least in a very important sense: you can apply multiple tags to a note, while you typically cannot put a file into multiple folders (yes, I am excluding hard links and such esoterica). Conceptually (and related to their physical analogue),  notes contain content (text, images, etc.), and always reside in exactly one notebook, and moreover can have zero or more labels applied. That's pretty much it.

How you use tags in Evenote, how and why you might want to create tag hierarchies, all that's up to you. Some usages are better supported than others. But they are not like folders, except that they may be organized in hierarchies. In order to use Evernote effectively in a way that works for you, it's important to know how these pieces all fit together.

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, jefito said:

From a technical standpoint, Evernote's tags are simply labels, i.e., just pieces of text, that you can apply to a note.

Notebooks also "simply labels, i.e., just pieces of text, that you can apply to a note", from a technical standpoint .

The "vague functionality" comment caught my attention too.
Perhaps user defined functionality is better wording

[jefito 5,589]

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

Notebooks also "simply labels, i.e., just pieces of text, that you can apply to a note", from a technical standpoint .

Sure, but the technical standpoint is actually not a great way to approach this (and I should have perhaps emphasized that my comment was more conceptual in viewpoint). Notebooks, tags, and notes are technically a bunch of related bits sitting in some database, itself sitting in some file sectors on disks somewhere.  Not very useful.

That's why it's generally better to stick to the user-facing model when talking about this stuff: Evernote notebooks are conceptually containers, according to a familiar and physical analogue: a note belongs to exactly one notebook at a time. In the standard (non-business) Evernote, a note always has a notebook that it belongs to, whereas it can have zero or more tags. If you want to stretch the notion of "container", you can also say that a note is contained by each of its tags, but I'd guess that that's a less-familiar notion to most folks, due to lack of (or less) physical analogue. And were Evernote to have nested notebooks, then you could also say that a note belongs to any notebook that contains its actual notebook, but this starts to get awfully quibblesome when the Evernote model is really pretty simple.

2 hours ago, DTLow said:

The "vague functionality" comment caught my attention too.
Perhaps user defined functionality is better wording

Well, as far as behaviors go, the rules for notebooks, tags, and notes are pretty straightforward. Some of the client-specific behaviors differ around working with these components can differ. And of course, how you use them is up to the user, so long as you follow the rules, and behaviors on your client(s).

[phault 0]

Another "me too" post.

I know that can be used to create a hierarchy.  However, the iOS app does not display the tag hierarchy.  Having folders (or stacks of stacks) is the better solution.

[DTLow 5,736]

10 hours ago, phault said:

Another "me too" post.

I know that can be used to create a hierarchy.  However, the iOS app does not display the tag hierarchy.  Having folders (or stacks of stacks) is the better solution.

Voting buttons are at the top left corner of the discussion.

Evernote doesn't support the folder filing methodology.
There are two fields for assignment to a note: Notebook or Tags
For some uses, either field can be used for the same purpose.

Notebooks can be organized into Stacks
I use a prefix naming standard for my notebooks/tags.  For example Colour-Blue, Colour-Red

                                          Skeuomorphismism is dead

[jefito 5,589]

On 9/28/2018 at 7:50 AM, phault said:

However, the iOS app does not display the tag hierarchy.  Having folders (or stacks of stacks) is the better solution.

Or maybe updating he iOS application to reflect the tag hierarchy that actually already exists in Evernote is the better solution, rather than adding a whole new facility and thereby needing to update all of the Evernote applications (this is not a true either/or thing, by the way, but the former task -- i.e., implementing the tag hierarchy in iOS -- would likely be the easier, and it really should be done anyways).

[x9sim9 7]

I notice the people still keep stumbling on this thread hoping things will change, they won't! The decision was made years ago, and we are unfortunately just wasting our breath. Its incredibly frustrating but its not going to change, ever!

[DTLow 5,736]

4 hours ago, x9sim9 said:

I notice the people still keep stumbling on this thread hoping things will change, they won't! The decision was made years ago, and we are unfortunately just wasting our breath. Its incredibly frustrating but its not going to change, ever!

This is not a breathing exercise.  
There is a feature request posted at the top of the discussion.  To indicate your support, use the voting buttons at the top left corner of the discussion.

imho  

• Evernote recognized the organization hierarchy requirement; they addressed it with the Tag feature
• Evernote recognized the need to organize notebooks; they addressed it  and with the Stacks feature; with no further actions indicated
  An employee did mention adding another level, but there's been no other word on this

[Guest]

I would find an Evernote that adds this requested feature horrible to use. Evernote has always been the the pioneer of shifting the paradigm of nesting sub-folders into sub-folders . Evernote always wanted to give us a tool that we could quickly find things in by search or by its simple and flat organizational hierarchy.

I am actually very happy, that Evernote never added sub-levels.

The recent move to add Spaces (shared stacks) to Evernote Business was a good move, since it too something that was great already and made it better.

[jefito 5,589]

50 minutes ago, EnricoNahler said:

I would find an Evernote that adds this requested feature horrible to use.

Fortunately, it's unlikely that they'd force you to use sub-notebooks...

[DTLow 5,736]

22 hours ago, OVPdev said:

I believe there are two categories of people: those who work on projects using Evernote, and those who don't.
And the last ones sincerely don't understand why is the feature they don't need is needed for anybody.

I work on projects.  I'm not clear on how this relates to nesting/sub notebooks.

Hierarchical organization is a great featiure.  I  use it on Evernote/Mac to keep my tags (350+) organized.
I have minimal notebooks (6) so organization isn't a big issue for me.  The Stacks feature works well.
Hierarchy within note contents would also be useful.

There are 10 types of people; those that understand binary numbers, and those that don't.

[OVPdev 6]

5 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I work on projects.  I'm not clear on how this relates to nesting/sub notebooks.

Hierarchical organization is a great featiure.  I  use it on Evernote/Mac to keep my tags organized.

Read my post. It's clear you haven't read it. You just replied.

[DTLow 5,736]

21 minutes ago, OVPdev said:

Read my post. It's clear you haven't read it. You just replied.

I read your post, and I commented on the "two types of people" concept
I'm also in support of hierarchical organization.

[OVPdev 6]

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

I work on projects.  I'm not clear on how this relates to nesting/sub notebooks.

Hierarchical organization is a great featiure.  I  use it on Evernote/Mac to keep my tags (350+) organized.
I have minimal notebooks (6) so organization isn't a big issue for me.  The Stacks feature works well.

it's hard to believe you, you act like you never work like that.

so you are telling me that using tags you can make a big, deep hierarchy for working on big enough projects.

Imagine you have a project with 50+ notes and nesting 7+ levels, how would you navigate? 
You click on a tag to see 3 notes inside, and what would you see? A mess, notes inside all nesting tags, 20 - 30 notes instead of only 3 that actually inside. 
How would you reach the target note?

[jefito 5,589]

22 hours ago, OVPdev said:

believe there are two categories of people: those who work on projects using Evernote, and those who don't.
And the last ones sincerely don't understand why is the feature they don't need is needed for anybody.

It's really nothing to do with working on projects or not - hint, I've used Evernote happily for many projects, large and small at work for 10 years, and I know that many other folks have as well. Note that I don't use tags as a navigational hierarchy; I use them as a descriptive language that allows me to find things pretty easily via search. My tag tree (Windows client) is almost always kept closed, and I spend little time organizing them. By now my mini tag language is pretty stable, though new projects at work tend to get their own tags. I can and do make table-of-content notes, with direct link to tie related notes together if need be.

I do understand that people want, maybe even need this, and it's certainly fair to ask for it. Let's face it; this topic is itself ~10 years old, and the issues have been pretty roundly discussed, including your points. It may happen some day, and hopefully that will make it easier for some folks to work better with Evernote. Good luck.

[DTLow 5,736]

16 hours ago, OVPdev said:

it's hard to believe you, you act like you never work like that.

so you are telling me that using tags you can make a big, deep hierarchy for working on big enough projects.

Not just projects; on a Mac, we can create a hierarchy for organization  (also Windows)
- 2  notebook levels
- unlimited tag levels

>>Imagine you have a project with 50+ notes and nesting 7+ levels, how would you navigate?   ...
How would you reach the target note?

For navigation, we can display the notebook and tag trees in the sidebar
The screenshot shows the tag tree with  with 7 levels.

The notebook tree is similar but less effective; we can only have two levels. Hence  the above feature request

 

edit: To navigate, click on the appropriate name/level.  This filters the note list to the specific notebook/tag.

[x9sim9 7]

On 10/17/2018 at 5:30 AM, OVPdev said:

I believe there are two categories of people: those who work on projects using Evernote, and those who don't.
And the last ones sincerely don't understand why is the feature they don't need is needed for anybody.
in my opinion, http://theguide.sourceforge.net/ had the best hierarchical structure view and the user experience for working on projects.

When you write a note, at some point you might need a deeper structure, so you create a note inside a note, and each of them has a content.

Differences compare to tags:

• notes don't change the order based on recency or name, only by user explicit actions. hence a user can leverage visual memory for better navigation
• only one parent, so I don't need to remove the old tag, assign the new one, and it's not possible to make a mistake during these actions 
• I can see all the notes inside a parent in the same view, so again I can use my visual memory to the fullest extent
• any parent can have a content, so you can start with the main idea and detail it with child notes
• Evernote parent tags contain everything that children and children of children contain, therefore I have to click on all the tags lower on the hierarchy, remember all the notes and compare what I've remembered with what Evernote shows me to finally find out what are the actual children.

Tags are really bad for this purpose. I use a note with structured references instead. 
Don't get me wrong, tags are good but not for that.

The better solution for adding this type of view is to make it as a separate database or hidden note with information about references and structure. When you turn it on it's empty, regardless you already have notes. and then you can move notes in that view. 
So this feature won't affect you if you don't need it, and you can use it selectively.
Differences compared to a note with internal links:

• it's always at the navigation panel
• you can use drag and drop
• a note in single hierarchical view can have only one parent and you can't accidentally duplicate references
• it has an ability to create or remove notes right from the view.

 

I would definitely buy a Premium if Evernote had a good hierarchical structure view.

The problem is that the Evernote team don't see the significant limitations of a tag based hierarchy system. While tags are useful in certain circumstances they are significantly flawed in others. As a power user I find Evernote too restrictive to my needs as do pretty much every organisation that I have worked with. But try as we might things are not going to change, look when this thread was opened...

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, x9sim9 said:

... the significant limitations of a tag based hierarchy system. While tags are useful in certain circumstances they are significantly flawed in others.

What would those "significant limitations" / "significantly flawed"  be?
imho  It's that the tag hierarchy is only presented on select menus, on select platforms.  For example, no tag hierarchy on my iPad.
           I would also like to see a relational organization (multiple parents)

My preference is for multiple tag assignments to a note
                           instead of the sdnificant limitation of a single notebook assignment
 

[OVPdev 6]

10 hours ago, DTLow said:

Not just projects; on a Mac, we can create a hierarchy for organization  (also Windows)
- 2  notebook levels
- unlimited tag levels

>>Imagine you have a project with 50+ notes and nesting 7+ levels, how would you navigate?   ...
How would you reach the target note?

For navigation, we can display the notebook and tag trees in the sidebar
The screenshot shows the tag tree with  with 7 levels.

The notebook tree is similar but less effective; we can only have two levels. Hence  the above feature request

 

You didn't answer the question:

How would you reach the target note which is near the root level using tags, if there are a lot of notes in children tags?

[gazumped 11,652]

7 hours ago, x9sim9 said:

The problem is that the Evernote team don't see the significant limitations of a tag based hierarchy system. While tags are useful in certain circumstances they are significantly flawed in others. As a power user I find Evernote too restrictive to my needs as do pretty much every organisation that I have worked with

The Evernote team may or may not agree with you about the 'significant limitations' of tagging - they've not actually expressed any opinion one way or the other,  which is entirely their normal practice in not discussing whether or when new or revised features will be released. 

The most important factor at the moment AFAICS is: tags is all you got.  So either work out a way to use them,  or find something other than Evernote which more closely suits your needs*. 

Unless the company has already secretly been in development for a long time,  the time scale for any possible change is years rather than months.  I don't know what under-the-hood factors might affect the creation of a hierarchy (and please don't speculate for me - I don't really care..)  But I would imagine that if it were that easy,  the company would already have done it.

* and speaking as a bit of an Evernerd,  I use Evernote a lot - alongside

• Workflowy - collapsing outlines
• Excel - calculating pretty tables
• Freeplane - mind mapping
• Treepad - hierarchical folders
• plus others for photograph storage,  backups etc which don't relate to visual memory or indexing/ tagging.

- Because there is no software made that does everything I need in one package.

[DTLow 5,736]

5 hours ago, OVPdev said:

You didn't answer the question:

How would you reach the target note which is near the root level using tags, if there are a lot of notes in children tags?

I tried to answer the "how would you navigate?" question
I showed you screenshots of the notebook and tag trees.
More explanation; I can navigate by clicking on the appropriate name/level.  This filters the note list to the specific notebook/tag.

As to "lots of notes", I use descriptive names in the note titles.

[jefito 5,589]

18 hours ago, OVPdev said:

Imagine you have a project with 50+ notes and nesting 7+ levels, how would you navigate? 

First, your question presupposes that there are levels of nesting associated with a project that are required for finding things. What do they represent? If your question isn't just rhetorical or hypothetical, then more information would be needed as to what the levels entail. Hierarchy might not be necessary for your use case, despite your assumption that it is.

For me, the first step would be to create a project tag, and apply it to the 50+ notes. If there wasn't one already, I'd create a project summary as well; that would be my starting point into the project. So right there, you can now easily filter your note database down to that set of notes, across any notebook structure you care to construct; one likely possibility is that you' dedicate a single notebook to the project. That would make sharing with other users easier.

Quote

You click on a tag to see 3 notes inside, and what would you see? A mess, notes inside all nesting tags, 20 - 30 notes instead of only 3 that actually inside. 
How would you reach the target note?

I think you may have a mistaken assumption here: Selecting a tag doesn't automatically show you all of the notes that have tags that are children of the original tag, unless they also have the original tag (note that the Windows Evernote client _does_ allow you do do this as an option, but I thought that it was awkwardly implemented, and not particularly useful to me).Again, more information would be required before I would say whether doing that was a good idea or not.

Of course, if you're just setting up a straw man here, rather trying to work better in Evernote as it is today...

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

On 10/16/2018 at 5:30 PM, OVPdev said:

I believe there are two categories of people: those who work on projects using Evernote, and those who don't.
And the last ones sincerely don't understand why is the feature they don't need is needed for anybody.

@OVPdev, I see that you have continued to debate the need for hierarchical structure (i.e. sub-notebooks) with the naysayers.  Feel free to continue if you like, but I suspect that they will never change their opinion.  We have an old saying in Texas:  "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."  ?

Those of us that understand the need, already do so.  You don't need to convince the naysayers.  We only need to convince Evernote, and I don't know how we do that other than posting our request here, and encouraging all who need subnotebooks to up-vote at the top of this thread.

I think there is some hope.  After years of refusing to provide more notebooks, Evernote recently increased the limit from 250 to 1,000.  

[DTLow 5,736]

9 hours ago, JMichaelTX said:

I see that you have continued to debate the need for hierarchical structure (i.e. sub-notebooks) with the naysayers.

It's not clear what @OVPdev is debating; projects and navigating to notes with a misunderstanding of hierarchical structure.

edit: it turns out the point was "internal links", not related to the notebook/tag hierarchy discussion

>>Evernote recently increased the limit from 250 to 1,000.  

The notebook # increase makes this request (Nesting Multiple Notebooks / Creating Sub-Notebooks) even more important as a means to organize notebooks.

[OVPdev 6]

3 hours ago, jefito said:

First, your question presupposes that there are levels of nesting associated with a project that are required for finding things. What do they represent? If your question isn't just rhetorical or hypothetical, then more information would be needed as to what the levels entail. Hierarchy might not be necessary for your use case, despite your assumption that it is.

For me, the first step would be to create a project tag, and apply it to the 50+ notes. If there wasn't one already, I'd create a project summary as well; that would be my starting point into the project. So right there, you can now easily filter your note database down to that set of notes, across any notebook structure you care to construct; one likely possibility is that you' dedicate a single notebook to the project. That would make sharing with other users easier.

I think you may have a mistaken assumption here: Selecting a tag doesn't automatically show you all of the notes that have tags that are children of the original tag, unless they also have the original tag (note that the Windows Evernote client _does_ allow you do do this as an option, but I thought that it was awkwardly implemented, and not particularly useful to me).Again, more information would be required before I would say whether doing that was a good idea or not.

Of course, if you're just setting up a straw man here, rather trying to work better in Evernote as it is today...

that particular chain of replies started with this comment: 

 

@DTLow  tried to convince me that tag hierarchy is good for that type of problem, and instead of explaining how to actually navigate and find notes, he explained how to create structure.

and for some reason, people who don't face the problem repeatedly impose the same solution again and again without testing it at work.

My point is, that a note with internal links is a lot better than tag hierarchy for that type of problem

[DTLow 5,736]

On 10/18/2018 at 12:23 PM, OVPdev said:

@DTLow  tried to convince me that tag hierarchy is good for that type of problem, and instead of explaining how to actually navigate and find notes, he explained how to create structure.

You're posting in a notebook/tag hierarchical structure discussion  (Nesting Multiple Notebooks / Creating Sub-Notebooks)
I explained how to navigate and find notes for "nesting 7+ levels"
- I posted screenshots of the notebook and tag trees.

>>My point is, that a note with internal links is a lot better than tag hierarchy for that type of problem

You should start a new discussion instead of tacking on to this one.

For internal links, Evernote does support note links, allowing a master Table-Of-Contents note  How-to-use-note-links-to-connect-between-notes

There are requests posted for internal table-of-contents type links.
My solution is to use tags as anchors within the note contents;  not just at the note metadata level.  A search identifies the notes

[jefito 5,589]

5 minutes ago, OVPdev said:

that particular chain of replies started with this comment: 

 

@DTLow  tried to convince me that tag hierarchy is good for that type of problem, and instead of explaining how to actually navigate and find notes, he explained how to create structure.

and for some reason, people who don't face the problem repeatedly impose the same solution again and again without testing it at work.

My point is, that a note with internal links is a lot better than tag hierarchy for that type of problem

Sure, I understand. I read the discussion. I would take issue with the claim that "there are two categories of people...", as I do with those types of statements in general: life is often more of a spectrum, and less either-or; it's a gross over-simplification. "There are two types of people: those who believe in black-and-white, and those who believe in spectra." Yada-yada. But that's beside the point. It's not a matter of people who work on projects vs those that don't; as I said earlier; there are a lot of people who work on projects large and small in Evernote who really, really don't need nested notebooks, even though they understand hierarchical structures in great detail, and use them elsewhere. But to claim that there's some causal connection between working on projects and understanding hierarchies just seems naive. So I'll disclaim that bit. I will point out that there is no "best" solution for everyone, because, as you know, everyone is not the same (and maybe that's an argument in favor of adding nested notebooks; a way to rope in people who can't grok tags). Nevertheless, People do seem to successfully work on projects in Evernote with what's at hand.

So the problem is that some Evernote users want nested notebooks, and Evernote doesn't have them. And it's totally valid to request them. I'm not here to dissuade you from that, though pretty much all of the the pros/cons around that have been discussed pretty thoroughly here. Let me repeat: you're not wrong to ask for it.. But you can't change Evernote, and neither can I, and since Evernote doesn't provide nested notebooks, what then?

The options are to use Evernote or to use something else. I'm not here to convince to do one or the other; I have no stake in your decision. My feeling is that we should use tools that work for us.  If you use Evernote, and you're having trouble using it, I will try to help you if I can. Since you posed a question about how to handle a certain fuzzy, hypothetical, underspecified scenario, I assumed that you were sincere in trying to find the answer, or at least an approach, and I'd be happy to try to help (though you'd need to be more specific about what you're trying to do). If you're more interested in making a point rather than being helped, and making more arguments about why nested notebooks are needed, that's fine too, and again, I'll be just as happy to withdraw.

You're just trying to solve a problem with Evernote, as are we all.

 

[x9sim9 7]

On 10/19/2018 at 2:23 AM, OVPdev said:

that particular chain of replies started with this comment: 

 

@DTLow  tried to convince me that tag hierarchy is good for that type of problem, and instead of explaining how to actually navigate and find notes, he explained how to create structure.

and for some reason, people who don't face the problem repeatedly impose the same solution again and again without testing it at work.

My point is, that a note with internal links is a lot better than tag hierarchy for that type of problem

Hi Guys just wanted to weigh in here and cover the discussion up to this point. From a implementation perspective I have literally written a full programatic solution that would allow this feature to be implemented with full backwards compatibility for existing clients. From a development standpoint this feature is probably the most simple feature you could possibly add to evernote, much less complex than the tag system.

What is interesting here is the amount of passion and time people have spent on this thread pleading with evernote on this issue, its substantial.

And its a real shame to say this but evernote don't really care, its a big company we are a small majority of users and our voices just don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

Bare in mind not long ago evernote was in financial difficulty and I not even sure at this point the company is making significant profit.

In my opinion and feel free to disagree evernote could be amazing but it wont ever be as good as word, google docs, sharepoint... it could be but evernote have decided they want to keep this piece of software limited. There are so many great features in this forum that would bring massive revenue from the b2b sector but it will always be a limited software package.

Ok but not great, its a shame but I think its time this thread gets closed because people are just wasting there time posting here.

 

[DTLow 5,736]

15 hours ago, x9sim9 said:

Hi Guys just wanted to weigh in here and cover the discussion up to this point.

Which discussion are you covering?
You've quoted a post from a user discussing internal links and a Table of Contents 

Your previous post cited "significant limitations" / "significantly flawed" with the Tag feature without  providing details.

>>From a implementation perspective I have literally written a full programatic solution that would allow this feature to be implemented with full backwards compatibility for existing clients. From adevelopment standpoint this feature is probably the most simple feature you could possibly add to evernote, much less complex than the tag system.

Was this the "Create virtually nested stacks"
This would not a be simple implementation; there is no Stack entity, it's a comment in the notebook record
Adding a parent field to the notebook record would be less complicated; which is the discussion of this feature request.

The most simple solution would be to rename the Tag feature to "Folder"

>>And its a real shame to say this but evernote don't really care, its a big company

I think Evernote cares about many things and prioritizes the development work.

Where did you get the idea Evernote is a big company  edit: I found this reference https://craft.co/evernote

>>we are a small majority of users

A majority of the 200+ million accounts?  Try small minority.

[Avinatbezeq 0]

On 6/27/2018 at 8:52 PM, AlextheUnicat said:

It's more like we want pepperoni as an option on our pizza and evernote is not providing it. Some people are coming in and saying "we don't want pepperoni" even though they never never have to use pepperoni on their own pizza if they don't want and it literally affects them in no way whatsoever if other people have pepperoni on their pizzas.

AFAIK pepperoni isn't Kosher, so maybe that's the reason