I am learning how to use BE after many years using Sente. One of the features I used most in Sente was the sort by feature, i.e. you could sort by date added, author, title, date published, etc. Along similar lines you could look at a dropdown menu of user created tags and then see all articles, book chapters, etc having that tag. For instance, I had a tag called chemoprophylaxis. I could click on it and all articles with that tag would appear. I could then further refine if necessary.
In BE I see there is the option of attaching tags to references (and I do know about the tag cloud, though have not figured out how to use it), but I cannot then figure out how to sort by a given tag. For example, I have recently imported several articles to which I have added the tag gezira. See screenshot. But now what do I do? Is there some way to see all articles with this tag?
Screen Shot 2018-07-11 at 10.57.27 AM.png (75.56 KiB) Viewed 12637 times
Here you're talking about PDF tags (as opposed to the tag cloud, which deals with words in the library database). You can search for all PDFs with that tag in the live search box (click on the magnifying glass arrow and select "tags"), in the Find dialog, and in the Smart Group dialog (the latter two have a field called "Spotlight tags").
Sente tags are not the same as PDF tags. But in any case, they aren't exported and Bookends doesn't know about them.
Is it possible to sort by mutliple keywords at the same time? That is, if I want to find all the articles I have tagged (or used a keyword) water, American Indian, Montana (or whatever) is there a way to do that?
I assume you're talking about the database, not PDFs, and you mean "select by" I think. The tag cloud lets you do that, using Command-click to select multiple keywords at once.
Of course you can search for multiple keywords at once -- if you use Live Search, separate them with spaces. If you have keywords containing spaces, surround them with quote marks. This is an AND search. If you want an OR search, use the more sophisticated Find command (Command-F).
I am replying to main own query. I wonder if there is a way to see all of one's keywords? Is there a master list somewhere such that I could click on a given word and all of the references tagged with that keyword would be in a list? I understand that I can search by keyword(s).
Yes, that's what Term Lists are for (among other things). There are 4 default Term Lists, although you can add others: Authors, Editors, Journals, Keywords. The are generated automatically by Bookends, not by the user.
You can show the Term Lists in two different ways. One is as a standalone window. Right-click on the list to see what operations are available. The one that is probably the most useful is the ability to add a keyword to all selected references (you can do this with drag and drop, too).
The other way, which is what you are looking for, is to switch the Groups pane from displaying groups to displaying Terms (note the small triangle to the left of the word Groups). Select Keywords from the popup menu and you'll see all of your keywords, along with the number of times they are used. Clicking on a keyword shows all references that contain it.
Finally, you might want to read up about tag clouds in the User Guide (Help menu). It is shown in the bottom pane. You can display all or a portion of your Keywords in a weighted fashion (the most used are large and have a brighter color). If you click on a tag (keyword) Bookends will show all the references that contain it. You can create metatags that contain many related tags in one (e.g. a metatag you name "Colors" that, when clicked on, will show all references with the keyword red, blue, green, yellow, orange, etc.). These are created in Settings.