Tags, properties, tables, and templates work together to help you define highly structured data in RemNote and view it in a variety of ways.
While these features are extremely powerful and flexible, that flexibility can sometimes make it unclear how you can use them effectively at first. You'll have an easier time learning these features if you first get a conceptual overview of the entire system, so let's take a quick look!
Tags
Tags allow you to describe what kind of thing a Rem is, in a way that cuts across all documents and hierarchies in your Knowledge Base. For instance, you might have an “Author” tag you apply to Rems representing authors you like. You can attach a tag to a Rem by typing ## with your cursor over the Rem you want to tag, then typing the tag's name; or by copying the tag, then pasting it over the Rem you want to tag.
The Rems that a tag is attached to are called its instances.
Once you've applied a tag to some Rems, you can do several things with the tag, including:
Find all instances of the tag in one central location by clicking on the tag anywhere it appears. You'll see a list of All Instances at the bottom of the page, as well as a Jump Back In section which you can use to quickly go to instances of the tag which you’ve recently edited.
Use the tag as a criterion in a search portal.
Create a table displaying the instances of the tag.
Properties
Oftentimes, we'll want to record the same information about every instance of a tag. For example, if we’re learning about Chemical Elements, we might want to know the atomic number and symbol of each, or if we’re learning about types of flashcards in RemNote, we might want to know the keyboard shortcut used to create each. We can attach properties to a tag to define what things we want to know about each instance.
The properties attached to a tag are automatically included on any Rem where you apply the tag. Properties can be displayed as normal bullets below the Rem, as special stickies to the right or underneath the Rem, or only when you zoom into the Rem or show it in a table. In the following example with some properties for Chemical Elements, you can see “On Right” properties for the atomic number and symbol, and “As Bullet” properties for the phase and appearance.
Instances and properties might remind you of Concepts and Descriptors, and indeed they are very closely related. When you define a Property on a tag, you're essentially creating a Descriptor that gets added to each instance of that tag, and the instances thus behave like Concepts. Oftentimes, it will make sense to explicitly mark your instances as Concepts. And when you add rows to a table (see next section), the created rows are actually composed of Concepts and Descriptors under the hood.
Tables
Tags and properties are also used to define tables. A table’s content is populated by a particular tag. Each instance of the tag is a row of the table, and each property is a column. The first column of the table is always called Name and displays the text of the instance's Rem.
To render a tag's instances as a table somewhere in your notes, type /table and select the tag you want to use as a data source. You can also view the table from the Instances List on the tag page.
Templates
A tag can have one or more templates attached to it. A template is a set of arbitrary Rems that can be added all at once to any Rem with that tag. For instance, if you have a Project tag, you might add a template that creates some headings describing the things you want to take notes on for each project.
One template of each tag can be set to auto-apply. When you add the tag to a Rem, the contents of the auto-apply template (if defined) will be added as children of that Rem automatically, just like properties would be.
To make that more concrete, here’s an example template you might use for each lecture you take notes on:
Here's how it looks when we apply it to a new document:
