10 Ways To Take Notes On Your Mac

You can use a variety of built-in apps on your Mac to take notes. Which app you use depends on your needs and the specific situation.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you a whole bunch of different ways that you can take notes on your Mac using only the default apps.
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Now one of the main things a lot of people use their Macs for is to take notes. Whether it is in a meeting, in a class, when you're talking to somebody over the phone, or you're just brainstorming. Now there are a lot of different apps you can use for this. Some of these aren't really thought of as note taking apps. But if you use them a certain way they can be very effective. 
Let's start off with the obvious app. The one with the name Notes. This app, of course, allows you to take notes. It stores everything inside the app so you've got this list of all these different notes and you can do all sorts of things inside a note. You can style text in different ways. So, for instance, you can create simple headings here and you can also create lists for very easily using a variety of different techniques. For instance you can do a checklist or you can format as a bullet list or other type of list. There are a lot of different things you can do. You can insert images. You can even link to other notes really easily. So you can do pretty complex things. The big of advantage of using Notes is that, of course, it syncs effortlessly over iCloud to your other devices. So you take notes on your Mac and you've got those notes available on your iPad and iPhone as well. A big disadvantage to it though is the fact that all the notes are stored inside the Notes App. Not as separate files.
So if you're looking for an app that stores things as files I actually love to take notes using TextEdit. It's the simplest text editor that comes with your Mac and you can use it in two different modes. I like to use it in Plain Text Mode where you can't really style the text or insert images or do anything like that. But you can type notes really quickly and they save as very small files. A big advantage as saving it as a file rather than inside of a system like the Notes App is that you can put the file where it is needed. So if you have a project folder with images and spreadsheets and documents in it you can put notes as text files in there as well. But you can also use TextEdit in Rich Text Mode. So you can switch to it like this or in Settings you can choose whether Rich Text or Plain Text is the default. Once you're in Rich Text Mode you actually can use styling, colors, and all sorts of different fonts, settings and headings and things like that. In addition you can add images as well. They will convert to a RTFD document but you can do a lot of formatting in here. 
Now if you really want to take notes with all the formatting options then of course using Pages is the way to go because now you've got all the different options. You could add shapes,  you can do charts and tables and really lay things out just the way you want. So a lot of people do like to use a full featured word processor for note taking and an alternative, of course, would be Microsoft Word if you're used to using that. 
You can also use a special Pages note taking template. You can see it here under Basic Templates. This puts you in Outline Mode right here where you can type using standard note taking techniques. If this is the way you like to take notes it's great to be able to start up really quickly with a document like this. Then you have the same advantages as you had with TextEdit. You can save these as separate files and put them where you want with file names that make sense. 
Of course you can also use FreeForm to take notes. So FreeForm just gives you this big blank canvas and you can add text to it. So you just add textboxes as you want. It's a little harder to keep adding a textbox every time you want to add something new but you do have the idea that you can lay things out anyway you want. So it's great for say brainstorming sessions. You could just keep adding all sorts of different things. Then the nice thing is you can easily move things around, rearrange them. You could easily link things together like this. Add images and do all sorts of things. So if the type of note taking you need kind of needs this style then FreeForm is a great app for that. 
Now sometimes when taking notes we don't want to actually do it by typing. We want to actually speak. There is a built-in app, Voice Memos, and you can use Voice Memos to record your voice and create this memo here. This is great if you're by yourself and say you're taking notes on something or brain-storming ideas or if you're moving around, like if you're driving, you can use it as well. When you play it back you have the ability to do all sorts of things like, for instance, skip to silent or change the speed. Any they sync across the Voice Memos Apps on your iPhone and iPad as well so it is actually easy to record on your iPhone for instance and then play it back say on your Mac later on to hear what you said. It's also great as a supplement to note taking in another way because you can use Voice Memos to record, say a class, and also take notes at the same time. Then have both the audio recording and your notes to go back to. 
Now you may not think of Numbers as a note taking app. Of course mainly it is used as a spreadsheet. But there is no reason you can't use this to take notes. In some cases it works out really well to have a table to be able to type into. For instance I could go ahead and take away all of the rest of these columns here and just expand column B, make it nice and big. I can use column A for something like, you know, the time. So in the meeting I can be recording times like this and then putting information in here. You can just keep typing and by default it will wrap. Or you can use Option Return to put a new line here. So you can actually fill each one of these spaces with lots of information. So you could have something like times here or you can have like names of people or projects or parts of the meeting. Have it all recorded here on the left and have information here and it creates kind of a framework for you to take notes in. 
Now you wouldn't think Keynote is an app you can use to take notes. It is used primarily for presentations. But it does have an interesting Outline Mode. Let's go to a basic white template here and you could see in the sidebar here I've got the regular view. Let's change that to Outline View. I can expand this a little bit as well to give me more room. Now I can actually take notes here, like this. Notice how it is Outline Mode here but on the right I'm actually adding slides. The idea is to focus on this while you're note taking. If I were to add something here I can hit Tab and it will indent and it puts it on this same slide. Notice how it puts it right there. I can just add more and it continues to populate this one slide with information. So it is kind of like using notecards to take notes. You've got each different cards here and you can do different things. The template is going to decide what it looks like. I like how these pages here work a little bit better than say this one for note taking. But you can adjust the template as you like if you're good with using Keynote. Putting an outline like this and then ending up with slides here could be an interesting way to be able to playback or print out the meeting later on. 
Now there are a lot of apps on your Mac that have a space for notes and in the right situation that can be the best place to take notes. For instance, let's go to the Contacts App. Every contact has a note section here. One interesting thing about it is you don't have to be in Edit Mode to type in the Notes Field. So I can add something like this that's a note for future use or maybe if I've just called the person or FaceTime with them I might have the contact open and this could be a great place to add notes here especially if this is a note I want to be able to find the next time I look up a contact. There's no limit on how long this could be. You could put pages and pages worth of stuff. It is only plain text so there is no way to style anything or add bullet lists. You can actually go and type the bullet symbol with Option 8 and kind of create your own bullet list and things like that. But for typing basic notes that has specifically to do with a person this could be a good place to do it. 
Now also the Calendar App has a good place for notes. With every event there is a section here for notes. So you could add notes here having to do with this specific event ahead of time or you can type notes as you're actually experiencing the event. So, for instance, if this is a phone call with somebody I can have this be something I want to ask them but then while I'm talking to them I may have the Calendar App open and I can put more notes there. I find it particularly useful for things that have reservation or confirmation numbers like hotel stays or airplane tickets or event tickets. You could put all this information in Notes about directions where to park, all of that stuff and, of course since syncs over iCloud you would then have that note available on your iPhone if you're not at your Mac at the time of the event. Plus if you share the Calendar, like say with your family, then they would have access to those notes as well. 
Another place you can add notes is to any reminder in the Reminders App. So, for instance, I'll go to this reminder here and you could see there is a section here for notes. As a matter of fact you can keep going and add lots of notes here. An interesting thing is that you can actually style this a bit. You can do Command B, say for Bold, and actually look here in Edit you've got Fonts. You can see you can do Bold, Italics, Underline and you can even do some simple bullet lists inside the notes in Reminders. So you can think of this as a way to take notes for specific reminder or you can create an entire new list here and then use this list as a set of notes with notes for each actual item.
I want to add one more that predates pretty much all of these. That's the Sticky App. So this is still something that comes with your Mac. You can Search for it and this allows you to create these little Sticky notes that could appear on your screen as long as the Sticky App is running. So they will appear while you've got other apps going on. You can see it happening behind but you could also float a note on top. So even while you're using another app this note is there. So you have limited screen space so you can only really use Stickies so much to keep track of notes. I don't think it is a good idea to say have 10 or 20 different stickies on your screen. But for a quickly just taking some notes or making sure a note is kind of always visible to you until you actually take actions that are listed in the note, Sticky is a really good option that has been around for so many years and continues to be useful for a lot of Mac users. But unlike every other option I've shown you Stickies are on the Mac. They are local only. There is no way to see them on your iPhone or iPad or even on another Mac. 
So there is a whole bunch of different ways that you can take notes on your Mac and that doesn't even include lots of 3rd party apps that are specifically designed for note taking in different situations. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “10 Ways To Take Notes On Your Mac”

Chaz Cone

2 months ago

One thing you didn't mention about stickies is that you can double-click the title bar and shrink the sticky down to just the title line. That's my favorite feature.

Jim Terrinoni

Thank you Gary. Taking notes is one of the most used functions. I create a note in the Notes app in .rtf (realizing the styling won’t be kept when I paste it into the Calendar notes), however this gives me a faster way to type and I have a backup file. Using an older OS the Calendar app notes section is unpredictable. The cursor will jump to different places. This doesn’t happen in Notes. Plus, it’s easier and quicker to listen to the text in Notes before I send the note.

Jonathan

I sense from many of your videos that you seem to be particularly fond of the TextEdit app. What is the advantage of using TextEdit for taking meeting notes compared to Pages?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jonathan: Most of the time when I want to take notes, I just want to enter some text. I don't need some big document with all of the bells and whistles of a full word processor. A plain text document is fine. I do use CotEditor though, more than TextEdit. The result is the same. Here's a video I did on using plain text files for notes, but comparing it to Notes, not Pages. https://macmost.com/using-textedit-instead-of-mac-notes.html

Thanks Gary. As you note a big disadvantage of Notes is the inability to recover deleted files and of TexEdit is its lack of iCloud functionality. Can you restore a lost Notes file using Time Machine using a Mac?

Jonathan: Notes in the Notes app? No. That's an advantage to using text files. They also DO work fine with iCloud. Just store them in iCloud Drive. The problem is in editing them on an iPhone or iPad since TextEdit is Mac-only. But if you don't need to edit the text files on those devices then it isn't an issue (you can easily view them). Or, you can get a third-party text editing app like TextEdit+ or something.

Jane Mountain

I often need to record meetings for note taking, so I make a page document on my computer and then access it on my phone through files during the meeting. The recorder on the phone doesn't cut off as frequently as on computer. After the meeting I can easily go back to computer and do any necessary editing/review.

10 Ways To Take Notes On Your Mac

Comments: 7 Responses to “10 Ways To Take Notes On Your Mac”

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