Finally, I found it. Welcome, Tana!

Do you know what Tana is? Just a month ago I would have answered in the negative. But then I started noticing more and more articles and mentions of it on Twitter, Medium, Reddit. Then they even started writing to me in the comments that I should try it — it would turn my perception upside down. And I tried it. And yes, it turned my perception upside down.

Let’s start with the fact that I’ve been testing Tana for about 3 days now and it’s an incredible user experience. They are different from all the analogs I mentioned earlier. Imagine Obsidian only without the minuses for teams — that’s Tana.

In this article I will take apart and show you the important Tana product solutions which I get a kick out of and which are fundamentally important for quality knowledge and project management.

Main concept

Let’s start with the concept. They don’t have folders and, as you already know, that’s an incredible plus for me. Instead of folders they use supertags (I’ll talk about them below). Any information can be found using queries and tags. Folders are an unnecessary entity.

The concept behind the product is to break the barrier between knowledge management and projects, which is exactly what I talk about a lot. The guys at Tana think there should be no distinction between the two sections because they are connected.

Flexibility & UI & UX

Tana is incredibly user-friendly and understandable in terms of UX and UI. You just know what you need to do, even without guides and tutorial videos.

Want to create a new page?

Just clicked on the text and lo and behold, the new page is ready.

Also, what I also liked in terms of user experience is the ability to work with all the drag-and-drop elements. You can move data and query to another query just by dragging and dropping elements. That’s incredibly convenient.

And then there’s the easy-to-use shotcuts. Many people think this is not so important, but believe me these details reflect the quality of the product.

Supertags

The next thing I want to tell you about is supertags, a new concept invented by the developers at Tana. In simple words, you create and assign a supertag to an object and then you can make predefined fields to that tag. Let’s look at an example.

Here is the Dmitry Korzhov object. I assign a tag #person to this object and set the parameters that this tag should have.

For example, we have added Email and Date of Birth. And now I want to add another object with this tag, let’s see what happens.

It automatically added those fields because I put a #person tag. That’s incredible. That’s what I missed so much about Obsidian.

Also, I want to notice the way these tags are set up.

We can create new fields with different knowledge formats. We can take values from other supertags-it’s essentially creating links between databases and more. It’s awesome!

Queries

Moving on to queries. I thought I wouldn’t be able to find more powerful queries than in Obsidian via Dataview in any tool. I take it back, Tana is much more powerful than Obsidian in terms of queries too.

See how the queries are generated here.

It’s an intuitive panel where we choose what we want to retrieve. We can query the supertag fields, the supertags themselves, and generally all the entities we use in Tana.

But that’s just the beginning. Next, look at the photo above, the top panel. There’s filters, there’s sorting, and there’s view. Filters and sorting are incredibly important and the fact that it’s there and easy to use is a huge plus. But also, on top of that, you can do groupings here as well.

Okay, I think I’ve piqued your interest enough to show you the real magic. This is a mapping.

Yeah, I was shocked the first time I tried it. It’s incredible. You can customize the display of your queries and in doing so — filter it, group it and sort it. I have no words, these are the most powerful and convenient queries that exist.

Collaboration

An important topic to discuss, but I don’t have enough information to talk about it yet. I know that Tana has an option to work together with a team, but I haven’t been able to test that yet. I’ve asked the folks at Tana to add my colleague, but haven’t heard back yet.

From what I know it’s not possible to manage access right now, you can just add users. That’s a minus, of course, but it’s too minor a thing when you look at all the pluses that are out there.

Unique URL

A less global, but also important, topic is unique link identifiers. When you create a page in Tana, it’s given a unique identifier that’s independent of the page name — and that’s very cool. To share a link in Obsidian — you have to make sure that the name doesn’t change and the link will work. It’s different here. And that’s what I like about it. It makes it much easier to work with other tools where I can attach a link to the Tana page.

Application

The last thing I’m going to talk about is accessibility. In Tana, you can work both on the Web and download the application to Desktop. This is important, too, because if you’re considering this tool for teams, having a Web version makes onboarding new employees much easier.

Conclusions.

I have one key conclusion — the folks at Tana have done an amazing job. And if they keep it up and finish some flaws that are in the product (I will talk about them in the next article), this product will be unrivaled in the market of knowledge management and project management software.

Personally, I’m a buzzkill about their product, well done.