I would say that the most powerful premium feature of the Note Trac productivity tool is tags. If you ”Go Premium” for the reasonable price of $8/month (10% discount if you setup an annual subscription) you will be given access to along with a number of other great features that will launch your productivity to a new level.
Table of Contents
Introduction
This is the third post in a series on how to best leverage Note Trac to suit your everyday productivity needs. And as was already mentioned, this post will take a deep dive into tags. Tags are really no different a concept than hashtags on social media except they are a applied to notes rather than social media posts. The difference is that hashtags on social media posts are sometimes applied to a post arbitrarily without any intent to intelligently and directly categorize the content but instead to indirectly associate your content (or post) with other posts that fall under the same theme. Said more simply, hashtags are single dimensional.
With regard to note tags though, you are provided with a feature that enables you a great amount of power and flexibility in how you will later find this particular note and others like it. It address one of the biggest problems one encounters when you dump a lot of information into one place and it does so through the age old and sometimes dreaded (depending on who you are) concept of organization.
Tags essentially give you the ability to create categories under which a note is associated which means that you can have a collection of notes categorized more generally with a tag called “quote” and then you can build up a collection of “quote” notes with an almost infinite number of sub-categories that will help you collate quotes that you may want to find again later but would otherwise be very difficult to find if they were not categorized and sub-categorized with the tags. The rest of this post will demonstrate how tags can be used to organize your notes but further exploring the “quote” example that we’ve just briefly introduced.
Tag Basics
As we consider the Quote Note example let’s take the opportunity to explain the basics of how tags work as we build up the example that I have in mind that we will later use to demonstrate tag filtering.
Creating a New Tag
There are quite a few ways to create a new tag, we’ll go through each of them here. Across the top of the app there is a menu bar where you will find the tags icon on the right, next to the Note icon. Click the tags icon and the Tags Menu will appear where you can create a new tag, edit and delete existing tags. Further, if you would like to filter notes based on a tag, then you can click one of the already created tags to add it to the filter list. We’ll look at filtering more in a later post. Below you can see the tag menu after the tags icon has been clicked.
Next click on the “+add” button in the newly displayed tags menu to add a new tag to your account. Note, this does not add the tag to a particular note. We will do that separately. For now we are just creating the tag and once that is complete it can be added to any note of your choosing. Notice in the screenshot below we are create a new tag called “quote” and have selected pink for it’s color.
Once the form has been populated, click the Save icon which looks like a little floppy disk and the tag will appear in the list of tags saved to your account as shown in the following screenshot:
Add tag to note
Now, let’s add the quote tag to the note with the quote from Thomas Watson. Do this by clicking the tags icon on the note itself and the same menu will appear that we previously saw when we clicked on the tags icon in the Note Trac App menu. The following screenshot shows this menu displayed for the note after the icon is clicked:
Once the menu appears let’s add another tag for the attribution of the quote. Just as before click the “+add” button and we’ll create a tag for “thomas watson” the author of the quote. This new “thomas watson” tag will now be displayed along with the previous tags as shown in the screenshot below.
Now notice two things. First, the icon following the tag name in the list for “thomas watson” has a minus sign instead of the plus sign. This tells us that it has already been added to the note. If you look at the note behind the opaque backdrop you’ll also notice that the tag can now be found on the note. Now let’s click on the “quote” tag to add it to our note and then click the “x” or outside the tag menu to get back to the dashboard.
Managing note tags
Now let’s add a few more tags to the note that indicate the core theme’s of the quote. Let’s add the tags death, joy, forgiveness and faith. Let’s do it the same way that we added the “thomas watson” tag. the note below shows the new tags added to the note accordingly.
On second thought, I’d like to rename the theme tags to start with an @ sign. This way they’ll be listed together and easily identified in the future as note themes. You do this by click back on the same tags icon in either the note or the Note Trac app menu. Let’s use the app menu to rename these tags. When the icon has been clicked, notice the pencil icons preceding the tags in the list of tags? Click on the pencil icon next to the “death” tag and the tag edit menu will be displayed for that tag as shown in the following screenshot:
Now we’ll add the @ sign to the beginning of the tag and click the update icon (which is also displayed as a floppy disk). When that is completed the death tag should now appear in the Tags menu with the updated name as well as updated on the note itself as shown in the following screenshot:
And now I will follow the same exact steps to update the other theme based tags in our note to have an @ sign before the name as shown in the following screenshot. Also notice that the wrong color was used for the faith tag. We’ll update that using the color pallet on the tags menu to change it to orange like the others. Notice in the following screenshot that in both the note and tag menu that the tags have been updated. Also notice that the tags are sorted in a different order now. Previously the tags in the tag menu were spread throughout the list of tags, now they are grouped together. This is because tags are listed in alphabetic order in both the Tag menu as well on the individual notes. This was done because items sorted in alphabetic order are easier to find as your list of tags grow over time.
Removing tag from note
Notice in the note with the updated tags that there are a few other tags that have been added to both notes in the screenshot. In this step we’ll remove the “work” tag from the quote note. In order to remove a tag from a note click on the tags icon for that specific note so that the tags menu is displayed as indicated in the following screenshot:
In order to remove the work tag from the specific note simple click on it in the Tags menu list. You should then see the minus sign change to a plus and the tag removed in the note itself as shown in the following screenshot. Notice that the “work” tag remains in the Tags menu as well as remains in the other note. This means that it can still be used within the app as you see fit.
After closing the tags menu it is clearly seen that the “work” tag, while removed from the quote note, is still tagged in the checklist note as is shown in the following screenshot:
Delete tag from the app
Now let’s take a look at deleting a tag. The key difference is that when you delete a tag it is completely removed from all notes that have been tagged with the tag you delete and it is removed from the tag list itself. Basically, it erases the tag from the whole app. If you want to use it again, you’d have to create it again from scratch and apply it to each note individually.
In order to delete a tag, click on any tags menu icon, in this case we’ll click on the app menu tags icon. Once the tags menu opens click on the pencil icon for the “tag-to-delete” tag and the tag that you want to delete will be loaded into the edit tag menu as is shown in the following screenshot:
Now in order to permanently delete the tag simply click the trashcan icon. Once it is clicked the tag will be removed from every note as well as the tag menu list itself as is shown in the following screenshot.
Conclusion
So in this post we have seen how to add tags to a note, edit them, delete them. We’ve also seen how to do this from the app menu. In the next post we will take a look at adding multiple notes with the same default tags and then take a look at the powerful tag filtering feature which makes it a lot easier to find the notes that you are looking for, especially when you have a lot of notes in your dashboard.
