View annotated notes in sidebar

Hi, I've recently moved over to Zotero from Mendeley, and am a big fan of many features. But there is one thing that was very easy to do in Mendeley, but I can't figure out how to do in Zotero — even after a little bit of googling / sorting through feeds here — is the (fairly simple) function of viewing your notes in a sidebar. In Mendeley, if you right click and make a note annotation, you can then view all of them (for the document) together, in order, and if you click one it takes you to that part of the document. But when I click the "add note" icon in Zotero, and make a note, I cannot figure out how to find that text again except by manually scrolling through the document and hovering over the notes individually. The "Item Note" sidebar tab remains empty for me — is that something different from the "add note" icon?? — and if I click "add note" there, it sends me to a text editor that is not connected to any particular place in the document. I am sure that I'm just using the wrong process or search terms or something, but this is driving me nuts. Is there no way to add text to specific places in the document (the equivalent to a margin note) and then see all those notes later, where they are still linked to the place in the document? (Sorry if I am describing this poorly.) Can anyone help? Is there a good tutorial or something that I should watch?

What I'm trying to do (Mendeley): https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6638285/iefe304ghbdvxsg853po.jpg

What it looks like (Zotero): https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6638285/v44ww93pilqbomxfkr7w.jpg
  • edited March 11, 2024
    Open the sidebar on the left and click the Annotations tab.

    (The right pane shows notes. These are just note annotations, one of various kinds of annotations (with more coming in Zotero 7).)
  • This is incredible!! I knew I had to be missing something simple like this. Thank you! One follow-up question: is there a way to "sort" the annotations to show only note annotations? Right now it's showing everything that I highlight (in text), plus the note annotations — which is much better than before, but still makes it difficult to quickly scan through *just* the note annotations, as I was used to doing in Mendeley. (Sorry if this is also simple; I clicked around a couple different ways and couldn't figure it out quickly.) Thanks again!
  • Filtering by annotation type is planned.
  • Amazing — thanks for the help and all the work making such an incredible product!
  • And in case anyone else is reading: I did figure out a temporary work-around, which is to make your note annotations in a unique color, and then sort for that color (which is already a current feature).
Sign In or Register to comment.