Sorry to seem negative again but I’m trying to use the new tags feature in a way that seems obvious to me and yet I’m struggling to get DTP to do what I expect it to.
So what I currently (pre-tags) do is import new documents, web clips etc. into the Inbox in my main database. Once a week I go through, read the articles if I haven’t already and then move them out of the Inbox to the appropriate place(s) in my various folder groups. I find the automated “Move to” convenient for this (although it rarely get the first choice right, the right one is usually in the list of groups presented)
What I want to do with tags is to review the documents in the Inbox as previously, then add multiple tags as appropriate, and then finally move the document out of the Inbox using the Move To tool. At this point it all breaks down, because when you use Move To DTP strips out all of the tags you’ve just added! This seems a very natural workflow to me, i.e. first tag the article and then file it, but I can’t see how to implement it in DTP.
I tried to get round the Move To limitations by moving the tagged document out of the Inbox manually, but this doesn’t work 100% of the time either. The reason is that when you add the tags, it’s quite likely that you will select one of the existing folder groups. Then when you drag the article manually into the folder, you end up with two replicants in the folder which is obviously not what you want.
I’d be very interested if anyone knows whether the workflow I want can be done with the problems I’m experiencing. If not, I hope this is something DT could add to the wish-list!
Do you use the global inbox (see sidebar) or the inbox of the database? In addition, which view’s contextual menu are you using? Usually a move operation should retain the tags and I’ve just checked this by moving a document from the global inbox to another database.
I’m using the database’s Inbox. I’m not using any contextual menu, I’m trying to file the document by using the “Move To” button in the fly-out “See Also & Classify” panel (i.e. just trying to make use of DTP’s AI features )
I’ve just tried again on a test document, and this definitely strips out all the tags that I added while the document was in the Inbox.
Indeed, this seems to be a deliberate design choice, according to this extract from the Help: “Note: If the document you are moving has replicants, these are deleted and the document is only placed into the new locations.”
This looks to me like a hangover from the pre-tags design, i.e. DTP still thinks in terms of replicants being in different locations rather than as tags as metadata.
Whatever the reasons, I still can’t use DTP in the way I described. Maybe there’s some workaround but I can’t find it.
Having similar problems here.
To play around with the new feature I’ve created a database with a bunch of quotation folders (named after the article author and excluded from tagging).
First I tagged from the tag bar the entries in my first folder. And everything worked. Then, with the second folder, I was trying to tag the entries (with tags that had already been created) by drag’n’dropping the entry in the appropriate tag folder and…Ops: the entry was moved to the tag folder but disappeared from the ‘article’ folder. I would have expected that by drag and dropping DT would have replicated the entry in the tag folder not move the entry: am I missing something? I think drag’n’ dropping to tag should be a basic feature as it’s far more efficient than writing the tag in the tag bar
I wondered about this too. The article on tags in the Help lists various actions and what happens when they are performed upon an item with existing tags.
It seems that “replaces all assigned tags” should also appear in the description of Moving an item. That’s how it is working for me.
In DTPro groups are the same thing as tags, actually, the main difference being that tags don’t all appear in the list of groups (which would be overwhelming). They do all appear in the folder “Tags”.
But other things appear (as tags or pseudo-groups) in the “Tags” folder too, things I never remember assigning, for ex. there is a Tags group called “3” which contains two items with the numeral 3 in their titles. My Tags folder contains these three variants: Government, government, and government’s.
It seems that the Tags are not only user-applied terms but in addition a concordance of all words used in item titles. This makes the Tags list rather unwieldy. It should be possible to review one’s tags list, if desired, to assure some consistency in tagging. The majority of the 2378 tags in my database are ones I did not choose and they are only applied to one or two items—not ideal when you have to scroll through all of them.
In summary, seems to me these things about tags should be re-considered:
existing tags lost when item put into a new group
concordance-type tagging (if it has to be there, at least it doesn’t have to be visible to the user)
On the plus side, the group-based tagging system does make it possible to have hierarchical tags, extremely useful. How they are visualized is bifurcated: you can set up a hierarchy using a group, that will be seen in the sidebar by default (Mammals folder or group, containing >Carnivores>Bears>Grizzly) or you can do the same thing by opening the Tags group or folder and adding folders to a tag that does not appear in the Groups list.
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