AMA 52: Why do Evernote seem to favour notebooks over tags?

A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

This week on Ask Me Anything about Evernote we have a question from William.

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.

William asks

Generally, Bending Spoons seems to favour notebooks over tags. E.g. you can sort tasks by notebooks but not by tags and pin notes to the top of a notebook but not to the top of a tag list. Am I missing something?

The old notebooks vs tags question discussion.

Back in the old legacy Evernote software days, tags had a bit more functionality. You could do more sorting, see more tags on the page and folks who were heavy tag users enjoyed these features.

When Version 10 of Evernote came out in Summer 2020, some of that functionality went away, possibly down to the fact the old team needed to push the software out quickly, it had been in development for a long time.

When Bending Spoons bought Evernote almost three years ago there was hope some of the old legacy functionally would be bought back, some of it was, but not so much with tags.

Why is this?

I think a lot of tag development is down to priority and the number of people who use tags.

The last time I heard numbers was a few years ago under the old Evernote team and they said less than 5% of Evernote users use tags. This probably means development of new features and functionality around tags will be slow.

Now, it doesn’t mean that if not many folk use tags they will take them away.

During one of the Evernote expert calls a few months ago I asked a question about how they decide if a feature needs to be removed and usage is looked at but also impact.

For example when Evernote removed the email the note contents to someone feature, there was very low usage, a lot of spam, but also very low impact as you could still email a public share link to someone which pretty much did the same thing.

Even though tags are not used by the majority of users, If tags were removed, then the impact would be huge as it’s an entire organisation structure, so I can’t see tags going away.

Tags on mobile have been improved slightly. You can now see the tags at the top of the note instead of having to scroll down to the bottom.

You can also copy and paste tags from one note to another on the desktop apps, although it is a little iffy, but works.

Click on the first tag with your mouse, then SHIFT/CMD click on the last tag with your mouse and CTRL/CMD + C to copy them.

Move to another note, select a new tag and paste the tags in.

They arrive as a comma separated list, so hit enter and the tags are applied.

How Evernote tags could be improved

• Adding a full screen view for tags could be useful, especially for folk who have a lot of tags. Seeing them only as an A-Z list can sometimes be painful.

• Being able to sort the note list order by tag would be handy.

• Adding tags to tasks would be very useful.

• Like you mentioned, William, pinning notes to the top of a note list would be nice.

• Tag groups could be fun. A pre-defined collection of tags that could all be applied to a note.

Do you use tags? How would you like to see them improved? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon