How to use Tana for Writing and Note taking — part 1
Tana is an app (in beta at the time of writing this post) you can use to take notes. These are the basic features of the app:
- The app lives as a webpage
- Free to use (I believe for now)
- The app is organised around blocks, nodes, tags, supertags, and search
- Everything is a block and blocks live in pages
- Every block is also a node
- It has a structure where you add bullet points.
- So, every note is a bulleted item
- You can nest bullets with
Tab
key and you can unindent withShift-Tab
- It allows rich text editing but it does not allow markdown formatting
- For content authoring:
- You can select a word or a group of words and decorate the words
- There is no concept of headers (first level header and so on)
- you edit an outline and that's it
- Each node in the outline (also referred to as 'item') can be converted to a page in itself that then contains other items
- Each item has tags, fields and properties
- You can arrange the views of the items as lists or tables or cards
- If you want to insert a hyperlink, you either type or copy paste the URL directly
- Or, you can select a word or a phrase or a group of words and directly copy paste the URL in that word
- you can directly create a table in MS Word and copy paste the cells
If you want to refer to a page or a node, first type
@
symbol; this will bring up a list of pages and the pages will be suggested as you type or search. Depending on your use or position of the at sign, this will be different in different situations:- If your
@
symbol is the FIRST element in a line, then it will directly refer it and you can view the contents inline in this page - If your
@
symbol is somewhere INSIDE the line, it will insert a hyperlink
- If your
You can import OPML format from Workflowy or Roam Research
You can export any node (or item). Once your cursor is on the node, hit Ctrl+k or Cmd+k (if you are on Mac) and it will bring up a long menu. Type
export to html
in the search bar and the node with subnodes will open in a new page. You can either save the html page and convert it to other formats or you can copy paste the contents. Alternatively, you can copy paste any page to other applications. Remember to format the resulting document as the document will contain the bullet points
These should be enough to get you started on using Tana. We will explore in part 2 about how Tana can be used to organise information using tags, supertags, fields, and search.
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