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New Evernote no longer lets you search via multiple tags :-(
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Posted by Tiggerlou
Nov 11, 2020 at 04:32 PM
I just upgraded to the new, very different version of Evernote and it has lost some truly essential features. This is huge, especially since I’m still very busy converting thousands of documents out of Clarisworks into Dynalist (loving it, BTW, thanks for that recommendation). The thought of possibly migrating my thousands of notes out of Evernote makes me want to throw my hands in the air and give up.
This is what I posted to the Evernote forum.
~~~
I’ve been an avid Evernote user for years, I’ve recommend it to all my friends. But as of the new version, it appears that it has lost some features that have been truly *essential* for me. Evernote has been first and foremost, my go-to meticulously-indexed cookbook. It’s one of the major reasons I bought an iPad, so I could use it easily in the kitchen. I depend on it daily for that purpose.
I have three thousand recipes (I know.. I’m a cooking geek), gathered over forty years and dutifully entered into Evernote from multiple sources. I’ve laboriously tagged every one of these recipes by ingredients, seasonal and regional cooking, methods of cooking (air fryer, bread machine, etc), and categories of dishes (quiche, hot beverages, etc). I’ve also used tags to organize several possible dishes for one meal. I might search by multiple criteria, gather all possible recipes for a meal under the tag “Thursday” or “Thanksgiving”, then whittle down those possibilities and then proceed to shop and cook.
Until the recent new version, I could go to my recipes notebook, look to the upper right corner, and click in multiple tags to narrow down my options. I might select these tags: salad + seafood + ginger + Asian cooking. Voila, my three thousand recipes would be reduced to perhaps a half dozen along those lines. Another time I might select the tags for sweet potato + beer, dark + sausage. Or pears + cardamom + baking, sweets. You get the idea.
The fact that suggestions for those tags would show up without having to type them in precisely was a very big help, because I sometimes put an exclamation point ahead of the name of tags to make them more prominent in a list. There is NO WAY I could possibly remember the exact “spelling” of every one of my tags, to enter them into a search box exactly as they are named. I’ve treasured the fact that the box when searching for tags would auto-populate with suggestions. I could simply click one tag, plus another, and another, to narrow down my possible recipes.
These features are the primary reason I have used Evernote for recipes. They are the reason I’ve spent easily *hundreds of hours* over the years, organizing them this way. But now it appears that those beloved features are long gone!
I’ve tried using the search feature, but instead of bringing up tags, it brings up bunches of irrelevant results from notes that aren’t recipes at all. Apparently I can no longer search for multiple tags to narrow down my search, which has been absolutely essential to my using Evernote. I’ve tried typing in “tag:___” but I keep getting “no results” because I happened to type something like “chicken, baked” instead of “ckn, baked”. If I have to agonize over the precise wording of a tag, over and over and over, or scrollllllllllllllllllllll through my extremely long list of tags, meanwhile garlic is burning on the stove, then no way.
Absolutely. No. Way.
Please help. I’m really hoping that these treasured features are not gone for good. From the looks of it, tagging has now been crippled in a way that looks utterly pointless to me. Do I need to now move hundreds of tagged recipes into separate notebooks? But that still doesn’t replace searching for multiple tags. Honestly, what is the point of tagging if we can’t use it to whittle down the notes within a notebook? Are they now completely separate functions? What’s the point of that?
I’m really afraid that my meticulously-assembled cookbook is now unusable, and that is heartbreaking. OMG…. the thought of starting over with some other note-taking app, converting three….... thousand ........ recipes…..... ߘ
~~~
I did get an answer from the forum: I can go back to the Legacy version on a Windows computer, but I can’t do that on iOS. I actually spent big bucks on an iPad—in order to easily bring my recipes into the kitchen. If I’m back to searching for recipes on my computer in my office, that brings me back to the bad old days of printing out recipes, scribbling down edits on paper as I cook, then accumulating stacks of hand-written notes that I never get around to transcribing back into the computer.
I’m told that some features will come back on iOS… eventually…. They didn’t say that searching by multiple tags would ever come back. I am beyond disappointed.
Any thoughts, anybody?
Posted by Tiggerlou
Nov 11, 2020 at 05:57 PM
Well apparently searching via multiple tags works on Windows and Mac desktop, but not on iOS mobile.
I bought my iPad to use Evernote in the kitchen… :-(
Meanwhile, the Evernote forum is packed with a huge number of much more serious complaints about this new version, such as major data loss. People migrating away from it because they’re so frustrated.
Yikes.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 11, 2020 at 07:35 PM
Hi Tiggerlou, since you are liking Dynalist, I wonder if you can use it for your recipes, although I recognize that it’s likely a horrendous job - at least in terms of time.
I can’t imagine why Evernote would screw up its tagging capability. Given the limitations of its folders, tagging was the one thing it had done right. IMO Evernote made a blunder of Himalayan proportions with the current release, given the current notes software scene, first with programs similar to Evernote, and second with the emergence of Roam and Obsidian (Obsidian coming from the Dynalist people), both of which emphasize links/backlinks. Increasingly, I see these new programs as likely becoming successors to EN (and similar programs like Nimbus, etc).
Daly
Posted by avernet
Nov 11, 2020 at 09:58 PM
Tiggerlou wrote:
>Well apparently searching via multiple tags works on Windows and Mac
>desktop, but not on iOS mobile.
The new Evernote does support searching for multiple tags on iOS:
- Start typing your first tag name; it will show below the input field under “apply filter”; click on that tag;
- Repeat the operation with the second tag (…and so on).
I hope this helps!
‑Alex
Posted by avernet
Nov 11, 2020 at 10:02 PM
Tiggerlou wrote:
>I have three thousand recipes (I know.. I’m a cooking geek)
>[…]
Also, thank you for sharing the way you use tags on your notes (and this technique can be used on pretty any other software, not just Evernote). I’m more of a tag skeptic, and personally use just a few, but the sway you are using tags in this case definitely makes sense to me.
‑Alex