Organize notes by tag?

darrensears

Hello, I'm trying to figure out a way to group notes by tag (or color) rather than by the item they're connected to. (And then, ideally, be able to reorder them within those groups.) It seems there's a way to, sort of, do this with the pdf reader, but I can't seem to find a way to get to it - and I have made sure I have the most updated version. The upper-left corner of my screen has nothing but the "new library" icon and the "new collection" icon - it seems to be missing most of what appears in the screen shots in online support. (I wish I could post an image of what I'm seeing.)

Has anyone else run into this issue...or, is there another way to do what I'm trying to do? It seems being able to do this would be the main point of the software....

Thanks!

dstillman

(I wish I could post an image of what I'm seeing.)

Upload it somewhere (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and provide a link here.

I'm not totally sure what you're referring to here. Are you asking about regular Zotero notes or PDF annotations? You can create a note from all PDF annotations with a given tag by filtering by that tag with the tag selector, doing a Select All in the items list to select the matched items, right-clicking, and selecting Create Note from Annotations.

You can do something similar with notes by exporting the selected notes to a word processor, exporting them to Markdown or HTML, or generating a report. (It's not currently possible to create a single standalone Zotero note from multiple selected notes so that you can continue working with them in the Zotero note editor, though maybe that should be possible.)

darrensears

Thanks! Here's a link to the screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hlkcIjCsAvLv5yAf0mTOrDUYlmiYtYk3/view?usp=share_link

I'm not sure what you mean by "regular" notes - so far I've done nothing with pdf annotations, so I assume that is what I mean...just notes added to an item. (Admittedly I don't really understand what a pdf annotation is in this case, since I can't currently create one.) Ideally I'd be able to filter notes by tag and view them together, by themselves, without creating a new note of some sort and without having to do anything involving a pdf...but it sounds like that's not possible.

adamsmith

What you're seeing is just the standard library. You'd get the PDF viewer when you open a PDF from Zotero.

As for notes, you can filter by tag and then select all and export/create report and that will give you all notes in an HTML, Word, or MD document. You can't re-organize/group etc. child notes in Zotero, not.

Just to be clear though:

It seems being able to do this would be the main point of the software....

the *main* point of Zotero is to manage and organize references. It does have fairly sophisticated note-taking function for a tool of its kind and they're going to be sufficient for many users, but if you want a maximally flexible note-taking and organization tool, you're going to be better off using something like Obsidian, Zettlr, or Roam (all of which have Zotero integration)

darrensears

Ok thanks - two more issues then. First, I can't seem to find how to open a pdf. And second, Word doc doesn't appear as one of the file type options for exporting a library. (The other options I've tried either don't allow for exporting notes or can't be opened...admittedly though I'm not familiar with the file types.)

dstillman

First, I can't seem to find how to open a pdf.

Double-click the parent item or the PDF attachment item.

And second, Word doc doesn't appear as one of the file type options for exporting a library.

This isn't about exporting a library — it's about exporting notes. As I say, you can export notes in Markdown or HTML, or you can generate a report and save that as HTML. If you want to preserve rich text, export to HTML and open that in Word.

darrensears

Ok thanks again - yeah I was going to the wrong place to export. One final question - is there any way to automatically select all the notes with a particular tag for export? Highlighting the tag itself (in the sidebar) greys out the *other* notes, but doesn't actually select the ones I want. I probably would've found a way if there was one, but I'd like to make extra sure before I do it all manually....