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.
I use both notebooks and tags. For all those who are asking for nested notebooks, the capability is there right now...with tags and the ability to nest tags as many levels as desired.
I use tags in two ways 1) to serve as dividers within a notebook; and 2) to move a note through a process.
There is a keyboard shortcut that I find extremely effective: CTRL + ALT + 7. YOU get a beautiful, searchable list of all tags, and that search returns child tags as well as parent tags.
For anyone interested in my thoughts on tags, here are a couple of posts I did:
I am a heavy tag user as I use Evernote for two purposes - knowledge management and GTD. The number of tags is a few dozen with a top level hierarchy of:
• Action
• Business
• Finance
• Personal
• Priority
• When
• Who
On the other hand, I have only a few notebooks - five to be exact that represent a note’s status in its lifecycle:
• Inbox
• Action Pending
• Completed
• Not Going To Be Completed
• The Cabinet
I accomplish all the searching I need with this setup.
The one feature I’d like to see with tags is being able to tag individual tasks in a single note. My workaround is do-able but still clunky compared to having each task in a single note having their own tags.
Lovely stuff, thanks. I really like the idea of Not Going To Be Completed. I have a number of notes that have been sat in a some day, maybe area for years. Maybe I should create a Not Going To Be Completed. It would be interesting to visit it from time to time.
I would like EN to update the sorting order for tags. In Evernote, "10blabla" comes before "1blabla" because the default sorting is alphabetical and not numerical, which treats numbers as characters rather than quantities. In this type of sort, "1" is compared character-by-character, and "10" is treated as two characters while "1" is a single character. It would be very helpful if sorting would be more smart than it currently is (and without the need to work with leading zeros). I believe this used be the case as well (long time ago) and this applies not only to tags actually.
Sorting order changed about a year ago, I think and become less smart but the same across the whole app. It was when they rebuilt the database.
From the help docs:
Symbols (ASCII 0–47): Sorted first.
Numbers (ASCII 48–57): Numbers follow symbols.
Additional symbols (ASCII 58–64, 91–96): These symbols are sorted after numbers.
Letters (ASCII 65–90 for uppercase and ASCII 97–122 for lowercase): Letters are sorted alphabetically, and the sorting is case-insensitive. Uppercase and lowercase letters appear together (e.g., "A" and "a" are treated as the same letter).
Final symbols (ASCII 123–127): These come last in the sequence.
One of the strenghts of EN is its flexibility... organize by notebook... organize by tag... use both... but it can also be a weakness if you suffer from decision paralisys like me ;-)
Fortunately the search engine is quite good.
I have actually started combining notebooks, I found I was starting to get lost with where to put what.
Another reason,for me, to reduce the number of notebooks, was for exporting to enex files. You can export entire notebooks no matter how many notes. Which I do regularly basically as backups that I import into another app.
Which brings up another issue if you use a lot if internal links between your notes. If the linked notes are in the same notebook, the link will continue to work in the other application. If the linked notes are in another notebook, you get the "//evernote..." url link.
Some good advice. Search is good and about to get better. I like the idea of combining some of your notebooks. After a while they build up. I should take another look at mine, I have a lot right now.
This discussion brought back memories. I first subscribed to Evernote, back in 2007 or 2008. At the time, Notebooks were NOT supported and we had to organize our Notes using Tags. This drove me crazy and I had written many complaints to Evernote about the lack of support for Notebooks or some kind of a folder structure. I was told that would require a major upgrade to Evernote’s structure and that it wasn’t planned. I almost stopped using Evernote because the feedback I got wasn’t encouraging about them adding a Notebooks feature. I was pleasantly surprised a few (couple?) years later when the Notebooks feature was added without prior notice, as I recall. Since I had been forced to use tags, I continue using them today, though I really don’t need to as I prefer organizing my Notes into folders (and now Spaces as well).
Evernote is my life organiser, and tags are brilliant, because a note can't be in two notebooks at once, but it can have multiple tags. And so many of my notes straddle topics.
But Notebooks are good for sharing, eg with partner, unlike Tags, which we can't share at the moment (unfortunately - I think that might be a Teams feature?).
Most Tags are free format, as I need to create them, but I've found it very helpful to group some of them in a hierarchy, using prefixes, eg:
- Eco: for Ecology, eg: Eco:ClimateAction, Eco:EnergySaving, Eco:EnergyStorage
- Loc: for Locations, eg: Loc:France, Loc:Germany, Loc:UK:Portsmouth
- Org: for Organisations, eg: Org:Amazon, Org:Apple, Org:BBC
- Proj: for Projects, eg: Proj:Garden, Proj:House, etc
I have some generic Tags:
- Priorities: 1, 2, 3, 4
- Years: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, etc
- 00 for to be Tagged (useful when I haven't got time to add Tags)
I tried Tags to set the level of each note - Lev1, Lev2, Lev3, etc, but it didn't work because notes weren't sortable, so I now prefix every note title to make them sortable by title, which works really well, eg:
A few improvements to tags that I would welcome are
Being able to turn off tag creation when you type tags into the bottom of a note. I often manage to mistype and create a tag I didn't want which I then have to clean up.
I'd like a button at the bottom of each note that brings up a pop-up of recently-used or frequently-used tags that can be clicked to select or deselect tags so multiple tags can be added quickly. I have a lot of notes that need to have their tags amended as they move through my workflow.
As suggested in the post, I'd like a full-screen tag view to make it easier to manage tags and I'd like the search bar to autocomplete tags when you use the tag: operator.
Tab groups might be useful too - be handy to set up groups of tags you could apply with a defined keyboard shortcut or function key.
Finally, I've mentioned it before, but I'd like a way to set up nested tags so that adding one of the child tags automatically adds the parent tag too.
I use both notebooks and tags. For all those who are asking for nested notebooks, the capability is there right now...with tags and the ability to nest tags as many levels as desired.
I use tags in two ways 1) to serve as dividers within a notebook; and 2) to move a note through a process.
There is a keyboard shortcut that I find extremely effective: CTRL + ALT + 7. YOU get a beautiful, searchable list of all tags, and that search returns child tags as well as parent tags.
For anyone interested in my thoughts on tags, here are a couple of posts I did:
https://frankbuck.org/evernote-notion/
https://frankbuck.org/evernote-tags/
“CTRL + ALT + 7” Learn something every day… I love it! Thanks!
For Mac folk its Option + Command + 7.
I am a heavy tag user as I use Evernote for two purposes - knowledge management and GTD. The number of tags is a few dozen with a top level hierarchy of:
• Action
• Business
• Finance
• Personal
• Priority
• When
• Who
On the other hand, I have only a few notebooks - five to be exact that represent a note’s status in its lifecycle:
• Inbox
• Action Pending
• Completed
• Not Going To Be Completed
• The Cabinet
I accomplish all the searching I need with this setup.
The one feature I’d like to see with tags is being able to tag individual tasks in a single note. My workaround is do-able but still clunky compared to having each task in a single note having their own tags.
Lovely stuff, thanks. I really like the idea of Not Going To Be Completed. I have a number of notes that have been sat in a some day, maybe area for years. Maybe I should create a Not Going To Be Completed. It would be interesting to visit it from time to time.
Tags in tasks would be very useful.
I like the improvements mentioned!
I would like EN to update the sorting order for tags. In Evernote, "10blabla" comes before "1blabla" because the default sorting is alphabetical and not numerical, which treats numbers as characters rather than quantities. In this type of sort, "1" is compared character-by-character, and "10" is treated as two characters while "1" is a single character. It would be very helpful if sorting would be more smart than it currently is (and without the need to work with leading zeros). I believe this used be the case as well (long time ago) and this applies not only to tags actually.
Sorting order changed about a year ago, I think and become less smart but the same across the whole app. It was when they rebuilt the database.
From the help docs:
Symbols (ASCII 0–47): Sorted first.
Numbers (ASCII 48–57): Numbers follow symbols.
Additional symbols (ASCII 58–64, 91–96): These symbols are sorted after numbers.
Letters (ASCII 65–90 for uppercase and ASCII 97–122 for lowercase): Letters are sorted alphabetically, and the sorting is case-insensitive. Uppercase and lowercase letters appear together (e.g., "A" and "a" are treated as the same letter).
Final symbols (ASCII 123–127): These come last in the sequence.
https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/34196825372307-How-does-sorting-work-in-Evernote
I preferred it the old way.
One of the strenghts of EN is its flexibility... organize by notebook... organize by tag... use both... but it can also be a weakness if you suffer from decision paralisys like me ;-)
Fortunately the search engine is quite good.
I have actually started combining notebooks, I found I was starting to get lost with where to put what.
Another reason,for me, to reduce the number of notebooks, was for exporting to enex files. You can export entire notebooks no matter how many notes. Which I do regularly basically as backups that I import into another app.
Which brings up another issue if you use a lot if internal links between your notes. If the linked notes are in the same notebook, the link will continue to work in the other application. If the linked notes are in another notebook, you get the "//evernote..." url link.
Some good advice. Search is good and about to get better. I like the idea of combining some of your notebooks. After a while they build up. I should take another look at mine, I have a lot right now.
This discussion brought back memories. I first subscribed to Evernote, back in 2007 or 2008. At the time, Notebooks were NOT supported and we had to organize our Notes using Tags. This drove me crazy and I had written many complaints to Evernote about the lack of support for Notebooks or some kind of a folder structure. I was told that would require a major upgrade to Evernote’s structure and that it wasn’t planned. I almost stopped using Evernote because the feedback I got wasn’t encouraging about them adding a Notebooks feature. I was pleasantly surprised a few (couple?) years later when the Notebooks feature was added without prior notice, as I recall. Since I had been forced to use tags, I continue using them today, though I really don’t need to as I prefer organizing my Notes into folders (and now Spaces as well).
I remember. It was pretty much a long list that you tagged to categorise and sort.
Evernote is my life organiser, and tags are brilliant, because a note can't be in two notebooks at once, but it can have multiple tags. And so many of my notes straddle topics.
But Notebooks are good for sharing, eg with partner, unlike Tags, which we can't share at the moment (unfortunately - I think that might be a Teams feature?).
Most Tags are free format, as I need to create them, but I've found it very helpful to group some of them in a hierarchy, using prefixes, eg:
- Eco: for Ecology, eg: Eco:ClimateAction, Eco:EnergySaving, Eco:EnergyStorage
- Loc: for Locations, eg: Loc:France, Loc:Germany, Loc:UK:Portsmouth
- Org: for Organisations, eg: Org:Amazon, Org:Apple, Org:BBC
- Proj: for Projects, eg: Proj:Garden, Proj:House, etc
I have some generic Tags:
- Priorities: 1, 2, 3, 4
- Years: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, etc
- 00 for to be Tagged (useful when I haven't got time to add Tags)
I tried Tags to set the level of each note - Lev1, Lev2, Lev3, etc, but it didn't work because notes weren't sortable, so I now prefix every note title to make them sortable by title, which works really well, eg:
1. Top level note for subject
2. 2nd level note
3. 3rd level note, etc
Thanks for sharing. That’s a really cool system. I love hearing about how folks organise with Evernote. Everyone does it differently.
A few improvements to tags that I would welcome are
Being able to turn off tag creation when you type tags into the bottom of a note. I often manage to mistype and create a tag I didn't want which I then have to clean up.
I'd like a button at the bottom of each note that brings up a pop-up of recently-used or frequently-used tags that can be clicked to select or deselect tags so multiple tags can be added quickly. I have a lot of notes that need to have their tags amended as they move through my workflow.
As suggested in the post, I'd like a full-screen tag view to make it easier to manage tags and I'd like the search bar to autocomplete tags when you use the tag: operator.
Tab groups might be useful too - be handy to set up groups of tags you could apply with a defined keyboard shortcut or function key.
Finally, I've mentioned it before, but I'd like a way to set up nested tags so that adding one of the child tags automatically adds the parent tag too.
I like the idea of switching off tag creation at the bottom. Like you I've created strange tags that needed cleaning up.