Build your Card Hierarchy

Add cards inside parent cards

Updated over a week ago

What is a Parent Card?

When you begin to have more than a handful of cards, it can feel daunting to start organising all of them. Tags are a great help, but you might find that groups of cards work well together. You can group all of these cards inside a single 'parent' card. This process is fundamental for sharing, since sharing a single 'parent' card gives your friends instant real-time access to all the 'child' cards (if they are shared!).

How to Open a Card

You can open any card by clicking its title and then pressing 'Open in Noteboard'. This will change the 'Noteboard Target' to show only this card and its immediate children (more on that below). It will also mark it as a priority card and position it within the sidebar inside the 'Outline' (if it isn't already). This is an easy way to quickly pick up where you left off, as shown below:

The gif above also gives you a good example of the power of nested card hierarchies. Here you can see 'Courses' is a parent card that has four child cards 'Electrical Engineering', 'Image Processing', 'Introductory Python' and 'Matlab'.  

Keyboard Shortcut Tip: You can preview any card by single-clicking and open any card by double-clicking (or tapping if you are on a touchscreen device).

Adding Child Cards

You can make any card a 'parent' by adding child cards. There are a three different ways to do this.

1. Inside an Opened Card

Once you open a card, any cards you write will automatically become a child of that card, like so:

2. Using the ( + ) Menu while Editing

You can also add cards inside another card from anywhere using the ( + ) universal coupler menu during edit mode, as shown by the example below: 

3. Drag & Drop Card Titles

The last way to add a card to a parent is by dragging a card title onto another card title, like so:

Parent-Child Relationship Options

In a similar way to tags, you can change whether a card is automatically shared with the user members of a parent card. TL:DR; Blue = shared, Grey = private.

  • Private cards can only be seen by those users you have specifically added to a card. If a user joins the parent they won't be able to see this card (i.e. will not be automatically added as a member to this card). Also members of a parent who are Ghosts and Readers are only able to add unlisted cards.

  • Shared cards can be seen by everyone who is a member of that parent. 

Multi-Parent Hierarchy

One of the biggest advantages of Supernotes is that you can build a multi-parent hierarchy, where one card can have multi-parents and belong in two places. Imagine a card on "Aqueducts" this could belong in a parent called "Roman Empire" as well as "Architectural Marvels". If Aqueducts has child cards these are also present in both places.

Other use cases for Parent Cards

Here are a few extra cool use cases for parents: 

  • Selective table of contents on the parent. You can add a list of card links to important child cards that are within that parent.

  • General comment stream on the parent. If you are adding cards at the same time as other members, you can have a general discussion using comments on the parent card. 

  • To-do list on the parent card. If you want to do a sprint or remind yourself of your milestones, you can set out objectives or to-dos on the parent card and check them as you go.

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