AMA 41: Can I add custom metadata fields to a note?
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This week on Ask Me Anything about Evernote we have a question from Anne.
If you have a question you’d love an answer to then leave it in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list.
Anne asks
Can I add custom metadata fields to a note so I can store specific information for that note? For example, movie genre and year of release.
There aren't any specific boxes to add custom metadata to a note but Evernote does have an excellent tagging system which would do the job.
You could create a bunch of tags to reflect the metadata you want to store.
Using your movie example:
Horror
Sci fi
Action
70s
80s
90s
You find your tags at the bottom of the side bar or use ALT + CTRL + 7 on PC or ⌥ + ⌘ + 7 on a Mac to open the tag sidebar.
To apply a tag to a note head to the bottom of the note and click Add tag and then apply one or more of tags. For example, Sci Fi and 80s.
If you store all your notes about movies in a notebook called Movies you can then filter that notebook by one or more tags so you could find all Action movies from the 80s or 70s or the 70s and 80s. The choice is yours.
Evernote tags were built for this kind of work so have a play with them and let us know how you get on.
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Have a great rest of the week
All the best
Jon
Here's a more radical suggestion. Create your own field within the body of the note by prefixing it with an emoji. So a search for "📌 the" finds only a note containing the phrase "📌 the thing" despite the fact that the word "the" is in most of my notes!
I've tended to look at tags as a system-wide tool, and have kept my use of them to a bare minimum in order not to let them become too complex and difficult to remember. This AMA, however, has got me thinking about using tags for a specific notebook (or stack?) where the content might be something like the suggested movie database. I'll have to think about are there sections of my Evernote system that would be fit from this approach. Thanks as usual for an informative AMA