As an extension to the previous reply by @PaulWalters, my experience is that becoming comfortable with the attribute browser is the biggest pay-off single step you can take in feeling as if you can make Tinderbox do what you want.
Paul W’s illustration gives an idea of how you can see data displayed if you’ve added tags manually – for instance, putting Catfish, Gars, Mollusks in general, Zebra Mussels, Paddlefish, etc as values in a $TopicType attribute. You could also set things up to search the $Text of your notes for terms you’re interested in, and display the results the same way.
I find this kind of grouping and display to be my main, normal way of looking at info in Tinderbox. You’ll see some further threads discussing the details here: How to use the Attribute Browser and Finding attributes in the Attribute Browser , with links to other discussions.