Sections & Categorizing

A common way to make sense of a pile of notes is to lay them out side by side and group the ones that belong together. On a canvas those groups are sections: the canvas engine's frames. A section can also be tied to a category, so that sorting a card into the section also files its note under a tag or a property value. You don't have to redo the grouping afterwards in the note tab.

Drawing a section

Pick the Frame tool from the drawing toolbar's extra-tools menu (shortcut F) and drag out a rectangle. Anything you drop inside it belongs to it, and moving the section moves everything in it. Double-click the section's title to rename it.

A section with no category is only a visual group. Nothing about your notes changes when cards go in or out of it.

Tying a section to a category

Select a section. A Categorize chip appears above its top corner. Click it and choose one of these:

• A tag, e.g. health or a nested tag like health/sleep. Type a tag that doesn't exist yet and pick Use new tag to create it.
• One value of a property of type select, multi-select or status, e.g. Status: In Progress or Topics: sleep.

The section now shows a chip with its category and the number of cards inside. If you haven't renamed the section yourself, its title changes to the category too. Click the chip at any time to switch the section to a different category, or choose Stop categorizing as … to remove the category.

If the section already holds cards when you pick its category, those cards get the category straight away. A toast tells you how many cards changed, and its Undo takes the category off them again.

Removing a section's category, or changing it to another one, does not take the old tag or value off the cards already inside. Your notes keep what they have.

Dropping cards into a section

Drag a card into a section tied to a category and let go. The card's item gets the category:

Section category	Note	Task
Tag	The tag is added	The tag is added
Select or status value	Set to that value, replacing the old one	Left as is
Multi-select value	The value is added next to the ones already set	Left as is

It is the same edit you would make in the note or task itself. The note's properties panel, the folder view, tag pages and search all show it, and it syncs like any other edit.

Dropping a note or task from the sidebar straight onto a section works the same way.

A toast confirms the change. Its Undo does both halves: the card goes back to where it was before the drop and the category comes off the item. The canvas's own undo (Cmd/Ctrl+Z, or the undo button) does the same thing when the last thing you did was that drop.

Some cards can't take a category, and those are left as they are, with a toast that says why:

• File cards. A PDF or image has no tags or properties to write to.
• Tasks in a property section. Tasks take tags, but they don't have note properties.
• Event and project cards. These have neither.

If an item already has the category, nothing is written and no toast appears.

Moving cards out of a section

Dragging a card out of a section tied to a category does not remove the category from its item. A drag that silently deleted a tag would be easy to do by accident and hard to notice, so the item keeps it. A toast offers Remove … in case you did mean to take it off.

Moving a card straight from one status or select section to another of the same property (e.g. from Status: To do to Status: Done) just switches the value, so there's nothing left to remove and no toast offers it.

A card belongs to one section at a time. Sections can't be nested, so a card never picks up two categories from one drop.

Lay out by property

Lay out by property, next to Add card at the bottom of the canvas, sorts the whole board in one step. Pick a select, multi-select or status property. memrynote then:

1. creates one section per value of that property, each tied to its value, placed in a row to the right of everything already on the board;
2. moves every note card whose note has one of those values into the matching section, in a grid.

A note with several values of a multi-select goes to the section of the value that comes first in the property's list of options. Cards whose note has none of the values, and cards that aren't notes, stay where they are. Sections with no cards are still created, so you have somewhere to drop cards later.

Laying out writes nothing to your notes: every card lands in the section of a value its note already has. Cmd/Ctrl+Z undoes the whole layout.

Sync and older versions

A section's category is stored with the section, inside the canvas. It adds a few bytes to the board, and those bytes count toward the canvas size limit like the rest of the drawing.

A device running an older release of memrynote shows these sections as plain frames, without the chip, and dropping cards into them there changes nothing. The category is kept when the board is edited on that device, and the section works again once the device is updated. The tags and property values written to your notes sync through the notes and tasks themselves, so every device sees them either way.

Next steps

• Cards & Links: putting notes, tasks and events on a canvas
• Sync & Limits: how canvases sync