Tags

A tag is a short label you attach to records. Unlike almost everything else in a table, a tag does not belong to the table — it belongs to the workspace, and the same tag can appear on records in as many tables as you like.

That single fact is what makes tags useful and what makes them easy to misuse, so it is worth stating plainly before anything else.

You manage them in Settings → Tags.

Where tags come from

Two ways, and most workspaces end up using both:

1. You type one. In a Tag column, typing a name that does not exist yet creates it on the spot. No trip to Settings, no ceremony.

2. You create it here. Settings → Tags → New tag, where you pick the name and the colour up front.

The first way is how tags actually accumulate. The second is how you seed a vocabulary you want people to reuse rather than reinvent.

Either way the result is identical: one workspace-level tag, immediately available in every Tag column in the workspace.

What Settings → Tags is for

The screen lists every tag in the workspace with its colour, and gives you the three things you cannot do from inside a cell:

Rename and recolour propagate. There is no per-table copy of a tag to drift out of sync, because there is no per-table copy at all. Renaming urgent to Urgent fixes it in all six tables that used it.

Seeing where a tag is used

Click a tag and you get its usage list: the records that carry it, grouped by the table they live in, with a count per table.

Do this before deleting anything. It is the difference between removing a tag nobody uses and quietly stripping a label off four hundred records.

Deleting a tag

Deleting is permanent and it is not limited to the tag itself: the tag is removed from every record that uses it, across every table. Those records are not deleted — they just lose the label, with no record that they ever had it.

The confirmation dialog says so. Read the usage list first.

The rules

• Names are unique per workspace, case-insensitively. Urgent and urgent are the same tag; trying to create the second one fails with a clear message rather than producing a confusing duplicate.

• Names are trimmed, and limited to 100 characters.

• Colour comes from a fixed palette of 18 — deliberately, so that a workspace's tags stay visually distinguishable instead of drifting into forty shades of blue. New tags created from Settings get a random one from the palette; you can change it at any time.

• Search filters the list by name, which matters once a workspace has more than a screenful.

Tags or a Status column?

This is the decision that actually matters, and getting it wrong is the most common way tags turn into noise.

A record has exactly one status. It can have any number of tags.

If a value is mutually exclusive with the other values — a record cannot be both Draft and Done — it is a status, not a tag. If two records in two different tables should be findable by the same label, that is a tag, not a status.

The failure mode worth naming: using tags for a lifecycle. Nothing stops a record carrying open and closed at once, because tags do not know they are supposed to be exclusive. A Status column does.

Tags in forms

Forms have a Tag component, so a respondent can attach tags to the record their submission creates. It draws from the same workspace vocabulary — a tag typed into a form is the same object as a tag typed into a table.

Worth thinking about before you publish a public form: whoever fills it in can create new workspace tags by typing them. That is fine for an internal form and rarely what you want on a public one.

Practical guidance

• Agree on a small vocabulary early and seed it from Settings. Tags created ad hoc are how you end up with urgent, Urgent!, and high-priority meaning the same thing.

• Use the usage list as a cleanup tool. A tag with zero usages is a typo somebody abandoned; delete it.

• Do not encode structure in a tag name. client-acme and client-globex want to be a relation to a Clients table, not two tags.

• Check usages before deleting. It is the one action here that cannot be undone.

Next

• Datatypes in Praxsuite — where the Tag column type sits among the rest.

• How to Create States From Scratch — the other half of the tags-or-status decision.

• Tag Component in Forms — collecting tags from respondents.

What it looks like

The count on the right is the fastest way to spot a tag nobody uses — and the one to check before you delete anything.