Email address => \person(name: xxxxxxx)

Feedback
1

Hello,

Really enjoying the app. I have a suggestion; not sure how it’s possible to create this feature, or if it is even in demand. I’ve created my name tags as “@ first name initial, space last name,” such as “@B Hanson.” When I click on a meeting and choose to create a note, it adds the email address of everyone who is on the meeting invite list. I then spend time edeleting all of the email addresses and then asding the name tag “@B Hanson,” “@C Smith,” etcetera.

Is there a way to convert those email address to their already corresponding name tags? It wouls make it much easier to search through all my notes for that tag, also I wouldn’t have to do note “clean-up” each time I creating meeting minutes for re-occuring meetings by having to delete 15-25 email addresses each time.

Thanks,

-Bob

2

Hi Bob,

This isn’t possible at this point, because Agenda has no access to your contacts email addresses.

One thing we would like to do in future is integrate the Contacts app like we have integrated the Calendar app. This would allow us to see the emails of your contacts, and we could possibly add options like the one you are requesting.

But it is not possible at this point, I’m afraid. Thanks for the feedback!

Kind regards,
Drew

1 Like
3

Thank you for your reply.

4

This could be done with Shortcuts, I think, depending on how many People tags you have defined.

For a sense of scale, do you mind sharing with me how many you have? I could then think about how to go about creating a Shortcut that achieves this for you.

Not guaranteeing anything, but this could be a cool use case!

ScottyJ

5

I would say, over time, it would be close to 100. I manage my company’s relationship with Accenture and people bop in and out of client accounts all the time. I would say about 50-60 Accenture people and then roughly 40 sales people and executives at my current employer.

1 Like
6

Interesting. Okay, let me make a proof of concept for you, and see what you think!

Will reply again once done.

1 Like
7

Please don’t go out of your way. I appreciate it but that is top much to ask.

8

This was fun to do!

Alright, so there is a solution here to replace email addresses in a given note with an Agenda person tag, but it’s a two-parter:

  1. First, you need to have some way of telling Agenda and the world what Person tag equates to what email address.
  2. Second, you need to bash a given note up against the relationships you defined in part 1 to be able to make the necessary subsitutions.

I went about part 1 using the amazing Data Jar app, which allows you to build simple dictionaries for regular reuse (it’s free and doesn’t collect user data, so while it might be another thing to install, there is no financial or privacy cost).

This Agenda People Tag Builder shortcut might need some editing for you to work, but is set up to look through your contacts for anyone with an accenture.com email address, and then makes dictionary values using that contact’s first and last name, in the Agenda tag structure of @(First Last). So that assumes a bit about your contacts and how you name your tags, but it’s a relatively painless way of building said database.

Also, because this is making a JSON dictionary, you could run and rerun the shortcut and not end up with duplicates, because it will just overwrite existing values with the same data.

You can also just make a dictionary in Data Jar by hand, so long as the path is Agenda.People. You can add entries to Data Jar directly to make or expand the dictionary (the key is the Agenda person tag and the value for that key is the email addess).

With that dictionary made, you can now use the Agenda People Tag Replacer shortcut by sharing a given note to it as markdown (the markdown bit is important). I use markdown because any email address in the note is going to be linked, so we need to replace that full link properly ([someone@somedomain.com](mailto:someone@somedomain.com)) with just the Agenda tag. Share your note to the shortcut, and voila.

There is no penalty for email addresses with no equivalent tags as defined in the dictionary made earlier, because only positive matches are replaced.

Another little side note is that the replacement doesn’t demand case sensitivity for email addresses. Some systems like to capitalize for fun, and I thought it would be best to ignore casing to make sure matches occur as expected.

Would love to hear what you think of this, open to any feedback to imprave this!

ScottyJ

1 Like
9

I just saw this and will give it a try. When you say that it looks through my contacts, are you saying it looks through my contacts in my contacts app, or are you saying that it looks for contacts / email addresses that are on a meeting invite that are imported into Agenda when I create a new Agenda entry that is associated with a calendar entry?

Thanks!

10

Ah, Contacts app.

I guess it could be made to look through the note itself for any/all addresses, see which ones are already in the dictionary, and then ask for others, but I wanted this to be a rough draft to see if/how it worked for you, then I could mature it in to a single Shortcut.

ScottyJ

11

I’ve been thinking about this more, and what if there was just one Shortcut that could find email addresses in your note, bash that up against the Data Jar solution, replace matches, and ask for a tag if no match is found (and store the answer for future matches).

Would that work?