Evernote is a powerful note-taking tool. There's no doubt about that. But one thing it has always been lacking is inline tagging. Until recently, kind of.

Evernote has a handy tagging feature that lets you assign tags to entire notes. Inline tags are essentially an advanced version of this.

What Are Inline Tags?

Inline tags let you add tags anywhere within a single note. For example, you could add a tag below a diagram, or at the end of a paragraph. By tagging your notes differently in this fashion, you open up whole new ways of getting your Evernote library organized.

Although there have been many requests, Evernote has yet to offer a fully functional inline tagging feature. For this, you'll need to use another tool like Roam Research or Obsidian.

But there is a workaround.

Evernote's Inline Tags Workaround

Evernote has powerful search features that will show you notes containing specific keywords. However, special characters apart from "_" (underscore) are not searchable. This is good news for us.

By adding an underscore to a keyword within a note, you are creating an inline tag for all intents and purposes. Let take a look at an example.

By including an underscore directly before keywords, for example, "_learning" and "_history, " you ensure that these keywords are searchable.

Personally, I also bold these inline tags, so they're more easily visible when scanning my notes, but this is not necessary.

Searching for Inline Tags

Searching your notes for inline tags is as simple as any other search in Evernote. Enter your inline tag, surrounded by speech marks, into the search bar and hit enter.

Only the notes containing your inline tag will appear. When you open the note, it will highlight the inline tag so you can quickly find the relevant note.

When you search for your tag without quotation marks, Evernote will not only search for your specific tag (_history), but also for all search terms with that word in them.

The Power of Inline Tags

As you can imagine, having this inline tag workaround gives you even more ways to get the most out of Evernote. You can now tag specific highlights from articles and book notes that you save to Evernote.

You can more easily organize long notes that were previously hard to navigate. And you can search different sections of your note for specific topics in a way that wasn't possible before.