[unboggling]

Originally Posted by travger

Please can you clarify? What restrictions exactly? Examples? How can I treat for example all short stories as if in another library?

What I do is use a symbol as prefix to a tag abbreviation in a combination simple enough to remember and unique enough not to produce matches with other words or abbreviations in the metadata landscape.

So if I type the tag !sf (that's exclamation point Science Fiction) alone in the search box, the book list restricts itself to just books tagged with !sf. It doesn't need
this prefix
fieldname:"=
or this suffix
"

A search restricts the booklist from everything to a subset that the search matches if Preferences/Search is set like so:
Unchecked, Search as you type.
Unchecked, Highlight search results instead of restricting the book list to the results.

So just by typing
!sf
I get all my science fiction.

Or just by typing
!sf or !fn
I get all my science fiction and fantasy.

Or just by typing
!sf and !fn
I get all books that have both tags.

But this informal method is predicated on having relatively unique tags. For example, the tag ref doesn't work because I'll get all records that contain any word starting with ref, rather than just my reference books. But what does work is one of these:
_ref, !ref, %ref, @ref, $ref

and with Authors, it's easy to just type in the complete author name if one part of it isn't unique, such as mercedes lackey rather than lackey or mercedes alone.

Edit: Oops, should've used short stories example:
%shr

Edit2: Oh, in case I didn't make it clear, it doesn't matter what column those tags are in, or what field that doesn't get displayed in columns such as Comments long text field seen in Edit Metadata. If the tag exists anywhere and the search matches a record, the record is listed. Edit3: excepting fields not included in Preferences/Search, if checked yes to restricting to certain listed fields.