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Nesting Multiple Notebooks / Creating Sub-Notebooks


cswsteve

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8 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

For the same reason there are no nested notebooks, there will be no nested stacks.

One view at the data structure, and this is clear to anybody who has a basic understanding of databases. Changing this would mean rewriting backend and all clients.

Oh, I'm sorry. I don't have access to the Evernote data structure. I have seen some documentation, but it did not include stacks. I'd love to see a more up to data structure. 
Yes, it would require changes, but not a rewrite. But I'm not an expert. I just work with SQL-databases 🙂


But I have understood that you do not have a need for it, and that totally ok. For me it's a raeson for looking a other tools to replace what I have been using for 12 years. 
I would love to see Evernote in a place where it's keeps outperforming that younger products on the market 🙂

But I see a lot of the formers Evernote evangelists switching to get a more modern features set. 
 

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Just watching as another user on what I get:

Notes to notebooks is n:1

Notebooks to stacks is n:1 again 

You follow me ?

This means the structure is quite simple: Notebook is just a field in the notes metadata, stacks is just another field in the notebooks metadata.

If they would go nesting, they would get a complex tree, and probably need intermediary tables to avoid long loops when reading through all of the levels.

Either way, loops or extra table means a complete rewrite of clients and backend. Plus as a one timer a rebuild of the complete search index, both serverside and on all clients.

You still follow me ?

That‘s why I think without any inside knowledge that we will never see deep nesting of notebooks.

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2 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Just watching as another user on what I get:

Notes to notebooks is n:1

Notebooks to stacks is n:1 again 

You follow me ?

This means the structure is quite simple: Notebook is just a field in the notes metadata, stacks is just another field in the notebooks metadata.

If they would go nesting, they would get a complex tree, and probably need intermediary tables to avoid long loops when reading through all of the levels.

Either way, loops or extra table means a complete rewrite of clients and backend. Plus as a one timer a rebuild of the complete search index, both serverside and on all clients.

You still follow me ?

That‘s why I think without any inside knowledge that we will never see deep nesting of notebooks.

Time will tell 🙂

As stack are most likely just an id on a notebook referring to a stacks table, it might be quite "easy" to expand with a parentID on stacks. But if we don't ask, we will never have it 🙂

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6 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Just watching as another user on what I get:

Notes to notebooks is n:1

Notebooks to stacks is n:1 again 

You follow me ?

This means the structure is quite simple: Notebook is just a field in the notes metadata, stacks is just another field in the notebooks metadata.

If they would go nesting, they would get a complex tree, and probably need intermediary tables to avoid long loops when reading through all of the levels.

Either way, loops or extra table means a complete rewrite of clients and backend. Plus as a one timer a rebuild of the complete search index, both serverside and on all clients.

You still follow me ?

That‘s why I think without any inside knowledge that we will never see deep nesting of notebooks.

The Dunning Kruger effect, synopsized:  Those who know the least about a subject are the most certain of their opinions.

To an extent, @PinkElephant is probably right.  The underlying code is old and Evernote has probably evolved away from it's original design features.  It's always a little scary to contemplate major changes to old code.  But that said, EN is going to have to bite the bullet some day and slide an SQL database under the UI.  When?  How?  No way of knowing.

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Parent ID still needs to be read out by UI, search, indexing, etc.

Currently stacks are „nacked“ entities, so maybe even just a field in the notebooks header.

Notebooks can’t be, because there are properties like sharing and default.

When taking stacks into a structure, this situation stops, and they just get „super-notebooks“, an entity with own properties (child-parent relation). And there the problem starts, the current code can’t handle it.

But there is no problem at all: The main tool to organize notes are tags - which works much better - and nobody really needs nested notebooks.

P.S. From what I see it already is a relational database. But the tool does not make changes necessarily easier.

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8 hours ago, Bill D. said:

Evernote folks - Your product is great. I've been using it to organize projects and research and now that I've had additional responsibilities thrown my way, I've been leaning into EN even more. Please add this feature and move your product from great to excellent.

Hi.  We're (mostly) Evernote users,  but not actually Evernote folks;  and while the conversation here gets a bit emotional from time to time,  it is a fact that Evernote did not include a folder hierarchy in their Legacy or the new versions. 

To simulate the same layout,  use tags.  To use a hierarchical folder layout,  use other software. 

No matter how impassioned the arguments,  Evernote are unlikely to introduce this a deeper hierarchy feature anytime soon.

For more from Evernote folks - try Support.

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Evernote - GIVE US MULTIPLE LEVELS OF STACKING IF WE WANT IT!!!  If you have pages of posts where people are asking for this year after year, just do it! Your tag system is not that great!  You have to remember what names you used to tag everything.  It doesn't even auto populate! After awhile, you get too many tags to follow, with duplicates for slight differences.  For a company that sends updates what seems like every other day, just spend the time to give your customers what they want!

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On 12/4/2022 at 4:32 PM, Mdbwater@gmail.com said:

GIVE US MULTIPLE LEVELS OF STACKING IF WE WANT IT!!!

Hi. 

  1. You may want to delete your email address from the registration here - it's a public forum and someone,  somewhere is going to add you to a spam list.
  2. This is a (mainly) user forum,  so shouting at us won't get you anything.
  3. It's most definitely not a democracy - users can request features,  but Evernote decides what it is most inclined to add.  If the company makes bad choices,  you do have the option of using other software.  You do not have the right to "demand" anything...
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On 8/20/2022 at 10:29 AM, PinkElephant said:

Parent ID still needs to be read out by UI, search, indexing, etc.

Currently stacks are „nacked“ entities, so maybe even just a field in the notebooks header.

Notebooks can’t be, because there are properties like sharing and default.

When taking stacks into a structure, this situation stops, and they just get „super-notebooks“, an entity with own properties (child-parent relation). And there the problem starts, the current code can’t handle it.

But there is no problem at all: The main tool to organize notes are tags - which works much better - and nobody really needs nested notebooks.

P.S. From what I see it already is a relational database. But the tool does not make changes necessarily easier.

If it's a relational database just create another table to handle the hierarchical relationship.It's not that hard and it's really the UI that should do most of the work.

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@x9sim9 Blah blah blah - the disrespectful wording disqualifies the posting by itself.

Furthermore it shows a deep lack of knowledge about data models. It is unfortunately a fact that the whole software (back end and all clients) would need to be rewritten to adapt a nesting of notebooks into notebooks.

Sorry, poor attempt beside being exceptionally rude.

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On 4/22/2023 at 3:50 PM, martinfdc said:

Come on Evernote! please make this a feature ASAP!

Hi.  Welcome to the forums.  We're (mostly) not Evernote. And it seems unlikely they'll make this change after years of resisting it.  But by all means continue hoping - your plea has been filed along with the other 18 pages of requests here...

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I left Evernote years ago for this very reason, as they did not have this feature. I keep checking to see if Evernote has this feature, but for years I've been disappointed every time. It seems to me that there is a stubborn person sitting in the executive suite saying NO, NO, NO, NO I have to tell you how to organize your notes and there are no more than 2 levels of hierarchy, no matter if I lose millions of paying users, I will not give you more than 2. Ok as you say, then I just go to Notion ... 😛 My whole hope now is with Bending Spoons, please guys give us more than 2 chirarchy levels, or at least you would like to be able to choose it and then see how much levels people needed all these years and didn't get it.... 🙏

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52 minutes ago, fraktal said:

I left Evernote years ago for this very reason, as they did not have this feature. I keep checking to see if Evernote has this feature, but for years I've been disappointed every time. It seems to me that there is a stubborn person sitting in the executive suite saying NO, NO, NO, NO I have to tell you how to organize your notes and there are no more than 2 levels of hierarchy, no matter if I lose millions of paying users, I will not give you more than 2. Ok as you say, then I just go to Notion ... 😛 My whole hope now is with Bending Spoons, please guys give us more than 2 chirarchy levels, or at least you would like to be able to choose it and then see how much levels people needed all these years and didn't get it.... 🙏

I use EN minimally, waiting without hope for nested folders.  My guess is that to implement such a feature they would have to rip up and re-do some old code that no one understands and management is afraid to touch.  This is not a unique problem here.  Many applications were originally written based on expectations that did not materialize and the original code is not well-suited to the market they have found.

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1 hour ago, fraktal said:

 My whole hope now is with Bending Spoons, please guys give us more than 2 chirarchy levels, or at least you would like to be able to choose it and then see how much levels people needed all these years and didn't get it.... 🙏

I am convinced BS invested into EN just to throw away everything, front end, back end, data model, and code everything from scratch.

Because not having nested notebooks is deeply rooted in the data model.

  1. You can continue to hope the above will happen.
  2. You can finally learn and use EN the way it is designed.
  3. You can leave and use an app that is designed as you like it to be.

Pick your choice …

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Quote

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.

No thanks, I'll stick with Notion and G-Drive... Maybe if Evernote drops even deeper until sub-notebooks allow. But maybe it will be too late. It may have to be swallowed by someone bigger for something fundamental to change.

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6 hours ago, fraktal said:

No thanks, I'll stick with Notion and G-Drive... Maybe if Evernote drops even deeper until sub-notebooks allow. But maybe it will be too late. It may have to be swallowed by someone bigger for something fundamental to change.

With regards to note hierarchy, the new Evernote Product Lead has said this within the last couple of weeks (emphasis mine):

Quote

A few other highly-requested features and updates that come to mind are a new note hierarchy, commenting, markdown import, and adding Outlook integration to our calendar feature. I’m really excited about the idea of reimagining note hierarchy. The way notes are currently organized is quite complex and we already have some ideas on how to make it simultaneously simpler and more powerful.

See: https://toolfinder.co/news/evernote-interview 

And has said this (emphasis mine):

Quote

I believe Directory > Space > Stack > Notebook > Note is kind of skeuomorphic but does not really scale well in digital realms.

Notion only has the note entity (and the block), which is not necessarily the best way to organize notes IMO, but a proof that you just really need one entity.

But we need to think this through very well, and for now we're 90% on sync, reliability and performance.

See: https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/145806-interview-bending-spoonskeep-productive/#comment-682669

Note the "does not scale well in digital realms" part.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes out of this -- but I don't believe they are thinking that deeper levels of notebooks are the way to go.

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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.

But can you write "in a tag"? Google Keep actually allows that (Keep has only tags btw): open a list of notes with a tag, write - and the new note will be assigned the corresponding tag automatically. Keep is great actually, with better search (to my taste) but is also regrettably lacking nesting of tags.

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16 hours ago, Maxgee said:

But can you write "in a tag"? Google Keep actually allows that (Keep has only tags btw): open a list of notes with a tag, write - and the new note will be assigned the corresponding tag automatically. Keep is great actually, with better search (to my taste) but is also regrettably lacking nesting of tags.

You are responding to a 15-year-old post.

To create new notes with a common set of tags either

  1. create a 'template' note and duplicate it as necessary
  2. save the tag list as "tag1,tag2,tag3,tag4,tag5,tag6" (without the quotes) and copy/ paste the whole list into the 'tag' field.  Evernote will create separate tags.
  3. copy and paste the set of tags from one note into the next
  4. create a series of notes and apply a standard set of tags by multi-selecting them
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Another problem with the tags hierarchy. It is actually only a tags hierarchy, it helps organize tags, but it doesn't provide a notes hierarchy. For example, I have a tag Family, then I have sub-tags Family_member_1, Family_member_2, etc. If I filter notes with the tag Family, notes that don't have this tag but only sub-tags (i.e. Family_member_1) don't get into the results. I have to assign the whole thread of tags to a single note every time if I want it to be returned on every level of the hierarchy. I was advised here to use templates with pre-assigned tags. To make it work I would need a template for every single sub-tag of the lowest level (or every level?). Other related features also don't work effectively: notes count (notes of lower levels don't add to higher levels), and sorting by notes count.

P.S. Sometimes EN feels like it is still in the proof-of-concept stage of development.

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6 minutes ago, Maxgee said:

Another problem with the tags hierarchy. It is actually only a tags hierarchy, it helps organize tags, but it doesn't provide a notes hierarchy. For example, I have a tag Family, then I have sub-tags Family_member_1, Family_member_2, etc. If I filter notes with the tag Family, notes that don't have this tag but only sub-tags (i.e. Family_member_1) don't get into the results. I have to assign the whole thread of tags to a single note every time if I want it to be returned on every level of the hierarchy. I was advised here to use templates with pre-assigned tags. To make it work I would need a template for every single sub-tag of the lowest level (or every level?). Other related features also don't work effectively: notes count (notes of lower levels don't add to higher levels), and sorting by notes count.

P.S. Sometimes EN feels like it is still in the proof-of-concept stage of development.

I think it's game-over for EN.  The code is apparently such a poorly documented mess that for years they have been terrified of touching it with a major improvement like folders.  The company has now been sold to an Italian company called "Bending Spoons."  There has been the usual chest-thumping but my guess is that it was a desperation sale and Bending Spoons will simply harvest the EN revenue for as long as it is attractive.  Then RIP Evernote.

There will never be an EN folder system.

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@Flier You are probably right with one statement: There will never be a deep folder structure with EN. The reasons (facts, not blabla) have been posted in this thread multiple times.

The rest of your post is empty hearsay, pointless assumptions, or plain malicious.

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1 hour ago, Flier said:

The code is apparently such a poorly documented mess that for years they have been terrified of touching it

? The app was rewritten 3 years ago and has been extensively overhauled by the new owners. There have been sync , reliability and speed tweaks, and AI services are now included.  I think your information is mainly fake news.

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I see there's a lot of conversation here back and forth about reasons for, reasons why some don't care, reasons why folks speculate it'll never change....

Well, Just count me in among the folks who want something useful like nested notebooks and stacks.  Using tags for what essentially amounts to folder organization isn't really intuitive for most folks.  

Nesting just provides a nice basic visual mode that most of us are more wired for cognitively speaking than something abstract, like tags, which are used for a different kind of indexing purpose entirely by many of us.

People are cognitively accustomed to space and objects in a virtual mode, text is an evolutionary overlay that some work quite well with, but most people find offputting. Just because evernote has a majority (according to some users here) of people who use tags, it doesn't mean that tags are more popular for organization, it just means that evernote has artificially excluded the vast majority of people whose minds work a different way.

Evernote was adopted early on by people who were already tech savvy for the most part, already think differently, are wired differently than the mainstream population. Evernote is convenient for them, and folks like me somewhere in the middle, but we are not representative of the general population. Those of us who are text reliant in this mode of organization are actually pretty dramatically neurodivergent, in a really cool way in some respects yes, but I'd rather be inclusive than exclusionary with tool use. 

And I am as I said halfway between you all that prefer tags, and the general population that would prefer a visual mode. Can I figure out tags for that? Most days yes, but when I'm having autoimmune flareups, that affects brain, cognition, and I cannot figure out those text based hierarchies, that symbolic system that is such a recent development and overlay.  Certainly I can still read, words still function in a linguistic sense as they are meant to, but in the hierarchical sense you all have described above, that becomes like learning a foreign language as an adult. Can be done, but most people will never be fluent.

I know I'm all over the place throwing metaphors and changing thoughts midway through in an effort to get a point across, as I'm in the middle of one of my episodes now. I apologize for that, but a lot of folks I know don't like software packages of this nature and won't use them precisely because the visual icon organizational mode is insufficiently developed. the people who do use the systems are the ones comfortable with it, but we are in no way representative of the general population that would LIKE something like this designed for more neurotypical minds.

It's funny that though I'm autistic, I'm just slightly too neurotypical to make use of the functionality of tagging described here in a comfortable way. Again, can I do it, yes, the majority of the time. DO I have any desire to sort through a text based organization system rather than a nesting, visually organized system? No.

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The new Head of Product indicated in a recent interview that he likes an outline structure in notes,  so (my conclusions from here on...) nested paragraphs might become a thing - but he also said that they're concentrating on speed a reliability issues for the moment,  so nothing seems likely to change this year...

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Hello, fellows of organized notes and productivity lovers! Today, I want to delve into a love story (or is it a tale of heartbreak?) that began way back in October 2008. Yes, a time when cat memes were just a glimmer in the internet's eye.

What's the scoop? The magical function of grouping notebooks and sub-notebooks in Evernote that, seemingly, has been 'coming soon' since then! With a whopping 638 upvotes and 1.8k replies (yep, not bots, actual real-life people!), this wish has been as elusive as a mythical unicorn for the user community.

In a world where phones unlock with our faces and cars drive themselves, who would've thought that grouping notebooks would be the Philosopher's Stone of Evernote? 🤔

Evernote might be the perfect tool to remember that forgotten birthday or that secret cookie recipe your grandma kept under lock and key, but grouping notebooks? That's more intricate than decoding encrypted Egyptian hieroglyphs.

If you've ever wondered what it feels like to witness a slow-motion evolution, welcome to the Evernote enthusiast club patiently awaiting the arrival of this much-requested feature. The time train keeps chugging along, but the 'group notebooks' feature seems stuck in an eternal pause!

Evernote, the app that's been keeping us on the edge longer than your indoor plant has gone without water! 🌱💦

Well, as they say, hope springs eternal, right? In the meantime, let's continue taking scattered notes and turning our wishlist of features into a bestseller about eternal anticipation.

So long, dear Evernote! Don't keep us hanging any longer...


Dear Evernote Team,

We've been waiting patiently for the grouping notebooks feature since 2008. With 638 votes and 1.8k responses at this point, the community is eager for this functionality. We hope this message adds a humorous touch to the plea for a feature that would greatly enhance our productivity. Please, let's make this long-awaited dream a reality!

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Just some food for thought -- coming from someone who was halfway between notebooks and tags...

I recently migrated from a hybrid notebook and tags model to a mostly 100% tags model. I have 4 notebooks now: Personal, Personal Blob, Work, Work Blob. Blob notebooks are for notes with larger attachments that I don't need offline on my phone. I can save space on mobile easily with this setup. Exporting my notebooks one at a time is easy (where in v10 that's the only way to export notes vs exporting 100 notes at a time). I can nest tags as deep as I want. Plus I can assign multiple tags to an individual note -- i.e. it can live in more than one place at a time.

There is another long running thread with a similar small chance of implementation: https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/80084-control-which-image-shown-in-a-notes-thumbnailsnippet-view

In reference to that thread, the often seemingly-randomly-selected thumbnail appearing in my list of notes used to bug me to no end, and then I realized I should start using the list view vs the snippet view. Now I never see the thumbnail anyways and life with Evernote is just as good (and a bit less frustrating).

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