FAQ
Is there a way to do X in Tana? Does tana support Y? In our FAQ you'll find answers to our most frequently asked questions.
FAQs
How do I have an impact on Tana's development?
Your feedback is incredibly valuable to Tana's development. The best way to have an impact on our decisions is to talk to us in our Slack community and be vocal about your needs / use cases. We log all feature requests and bug reports, and when we see repeat feature requests, we log the votes.
Feature requests:
Tell us about what you want and why you want it. When possible, give us specific examples of how you would use the feature, as talking about things in the abstract can make it difficult to understand precisely what your problem is and how well your suggestion would solve it. Sometimes the solution we implement will be what you specify, but often times we'll look at the problem or desire you articulate and find other ways to fit solutions into our roadmap.
Bug reports:
When sharing a bug report, let us know what you expected to happen and what actually happened. If you can reproduce it, the most helpful thing you could do would be to make a recording with Loom or Quicktime and share that alongside your report. Otherwise, you can take screenshots. Cleanshot makes it easy to take screenshots and blur out private parts. Generally, making your bug report as visual as possible helps us to diagnose and fix it.
How to set up a calendar/default day tag in a shared workspace
How to set up a calendar/default day tag in a shared workspace #FAQ #Help Center page
https://www.loom.com/share/91cf0ba46dd54735b40d1f934c9eb973
https://www.loom.com/share/91cf0ba46dd54735b40d1f934c9eb973
If the workspace doesn't have a calendar node yet, go to your daily node, and use the "Switch calendar" menu to go the daily node in the workspace you are interested in. This will automatically create the Calendar node with the Year > Week > Day hierarchy.
For adding a default tag to the daily nodes, there is a trick you can use to set it up so, but it’s a bit involved for now:
With the cursor on a node, you can run the command "Set default tag for content items", that allows you to set a default tag used on any new nodes created on the node you’re in.
And since the Calendar has a hierarchy of Year > Week > Day, you can use this to automatically set it up so new Years, Weeks and Days are tagged with a tag that has the Child supertag defined.
Here’s the way to do it manually:
Create and add tags for #calendar, #year, #week and #day (name them something that doesn’t exist before) to the Calendar, 2022, Week 36 (current week #), Thu 8th (today’s date) respectively.
Head over to your workspace’s Schema, and find each of the tags you just created and run the command Configure node (legacy) and set the Child supertag to it’s child equivalent (ie. Calendar > Year, Year > Week, Week > Day). You can copy/paste the tags directly from the Schema.
Now put the cursor on the calendar node, and run the command "Set default tag for content item", and choose the newly created Year tag. This ensures that all new "Years" will have this tag. Do the same for the Year node (week tag), and Week node (day tag).
This should create the setup you need
How do I create external links?
You can create links to external websites by pasting a URL on top of normal text, or on its own. If you would like to change the text, you can shift+click on the link and edit, as shown in the video below.
When you paste a URL into Tana, it creates a node with a special URL type, with a system field for URL. Edit the field to edit the link, and edit the node to edit the text displayed.
How do I alias an inline reference?
We do not currently have a way to reference an inline reference by a different name. However, if you select the inline reference with your cursor, you can use command+k > set alias if you would like to convert it into an * or + to save space in the node.
How to import from Obsidian/Logseq/other tools?
Currently we support Workflowy and Roam as native import formats. Check out the video about Tana Intermediate Format to see an early version of community-supported importers for Logseq and Obsidian, and how you could contribute to build an importer for your favorite format.
How to use Zotero with Tana - Maggie Appleton
Maggie Appleton is a product designer working at Ought and has used Tana since June 2022. You can find out what she’s up to on her website, where she writes visual essays about the intersection of design, anthropology, and programming. Reach her on Twitter or our Slack community
How can I paste into Tana and generate rich data structures
How can I create use scripts that extract data from APIs and send it to Tana
How do I merge tags?
There have been a couple of questions regarding merging tags and fields. We don’t yet have too many tools for merging content (this is on our list, though), but you can get quite a lot done by combining a few features that the platform already offers. Here’s an example of how you can “merge” two overlapping tags, by combining search expressions with batch re-tagging operations via the command line. If the same field is present in the tags that you’re combining, all field values will remain intact. Until we get more sophisticated merging tools, I hope this can be helpful!
A few other things that can be worth knowing if you need to rework a setup in tana:
The Set command lets you apply field values to any number of nodes in one go.
Search nodes can be converted to plain lists via the command line. This will simply detach the search expression, and leave the results as see them – and the list can now be manually edited.
The “Bring referenced node here” command lets you change the ownership of nodes to the current context.
Any real-world examples on what you do with extended supertags?
In our internal workspace, we have a base #todo tag which only contains Assignee , Due date and Status.
We then have #design task, #dev task and so on, which extend #todo – so they get those base fields – but add new, specific fields such as Github PR , Spec and Related feature.
It is also convenient to be able to add a new field to #todo, and know that any extension of #todo will get the same field.
Most of the time, we use the derived tags, but this setup lets us query for any #todo assigned to a certain person or with a certain status. Even if you don’t see #todo in your #design task tag, it’ll be there, and #design task is considered a #todo by the search expressions.
So when you have many tags that will share the same baseline of properties, the Extend feature comes handy. A lot like inheritance in object-oriented programming.
We use a lot of extended tags internally in the tana workspace:
#todo is extended by #dev task, #design task, #bug, etc.
#meeting is extended by #onboarding session, #followup, #investor meeting, #interview, etc.
#person is extended by #candidate, #alphauser, #investor, #employee, etc.
#user observation is extended by #wtf moment, #aha moment, etc.
