# Smart Journals

Smart journals are special types of journals whose entries come from other journals. These entries are picked based on criteria you give the smart journal to search for entries. When you create a smart journal, MacJournal will ask you to set up the search that is used to find these entries. At the top, you can name the journal as you would when creating any type of journal. Below that, you can tell the new smart journal to find entries with a word or phrase in its text. The "Required" checkbox indicates that the text must match regardless of the other search criteria, while unchecking that checkbox will let it match based on other metadata alone.

Below the content field is the place to set up the metadata search. Each entry has many different types of metadata, which you can see in the Inspector and Info Bar. The smart journal can search for any of these metadata to add that entry to the smart journal. By default, it will add the entry if any of the metadata matches the search, but by changing the "Any" button to "All", it will require every metadata field that you add to match before the entry is added. The "None" option will tell the smart journal to require that none of the metadata matches in an entry before it is added.

Each metadata field is in a row. The first button is the field's name, such as "Topic" or "Tags". The next button in most rows describes how the search works for that metadata: is the text for which you are searching in the topic? Is it at the start or end of the topic? For something like tags, you can set it up to search for a tag that the entry has or for entries that don't have that tag. To add a new metadata field for which to search, click the "+" at the end of a row.

Once you have the search set up how you like, press the OK button and the smart journal will be created and will fill itself with entries automatically. As you add entries elsewhere and change its metadata, entries will automatically be added or removed from any smart journal. Smart journals act like regular journals in all other ways, so you can delete them the same as journals or export the current contents.

Back to Topics