2/8/22
9:00 am

25 Tips For Using Notes On a Mac

Notes has added a lot of new features over the past few years. Here are some tips to help you get the most from the Mac Notes app.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some tips for getting the most out of the Notes App on your Mac.
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Over the last few years the Notes App on your Mac went from being a very simple tool for writing quick little bits of text and keeping them in the same place to having tons of different features. You may not be aware of all that Notes can do right now. Keep in mind to get the most out of Notes you really need to be storing your notes in iCloud. You have the option to store them locally on your Mac or you can use another system like Goggle. But to get all of these features you really need to be using iCloud to store your notes. Of course this also makes your notes available on your iPhone, iPad, and other Macs which makes it so much more useful.
So to start let's look for some tips for organizing your Notes. There are actually two ways to view your notes. One is in List View. But you can also switch to the Gallery View like that to see them like this as little cards. You can change the scale here by going to View and then Zoom In, Zoom Out or shift Command and then the period and comma. So we can make the cards bigger or make them smaller to fit more of them on the screen. When in List View you can Sort in various ways. You go to View and then Sort Folder By. You can choose the default which is Date Edited. Or you can manually choose Date Edited, Date Created, or by Title. Then you can choose Newest to Oldest or Oldest to Newest if you're using dates. So if you switch to one of these you'll also get this Menu here. You can select it and easily change the sorting right there. 
Now there's no way to put them in your own order. It's a list and it's always going to be sorted in some way. But you can Pin notes to the top if you have an important one. You can select a note and then go to File and then Pin Note. Or you can Control Click, right click or two finger click in the trackpad on any note and choose Pin Note and that will move that one to the top and keep it there above all the other notes. You basically have two groups here. Pinned notes at the top and then the rest of the notes here below it. To Unpin you just do the same thing. 
Now with Folders here you're going to have all iCloud which is going to show you all your Notes. You can't sort them. You can create your own folders here to put your notes in. Notes can only be in one folder at a time. So if you move a note from one folder to another it won't be in that first folder anymore. One of the things most people don't realize you can do with folders is you can put them inside each other. So you can take a folder like this, drop it into a folder, and then you've got subfolders here. You can easily drag the folder back out to take it out of that folder. 
But another way to organize your Notes is by Tags. So you can go into a note like this and add a Tag just by typing the hash or pound symbol and then a Tag after it. You can put that anywhere you want in the note. Then it will have tags applied and you could see your Tags right here. You can select a tag and just see the notes that use that tag. You can select more than one tag and you'll see the notes that you use both those tags. But you could also create Smart Folders. So you can create a new Smart Folder and the Smart Folder is going to refer to a tag. So let's say we want to have a Smart Folder with all of the beta tags in it. So I'm going to say Okay and there you can see the new Smart Folder. Now I don't add notes to this by dragging and dropping them in there creating them in this folder. I simply use the tags. So if I went to another note like this and then I added beta to it it now appears in this Smart Folder here. One of the big advantages to using Tags is that you can apply more than one tag to a note. So with Folders if a note belongs in two different folders there's really no way to do that. But with Tags you could have two different tags in the same note. You can create two Smart Folders, one for each of those tags. You'll find that same note in both Smart Folders. 
Now you can also Search by using the Search box up here to find your Notes. So if you want you could not really have much of an organizational structure at all. Just put all your Notes in one folder and then rely on Search to find them. But also checkout here that there are some special search things you can do. You'e got Suggested Searches. You can search for all Shared Notes, all Locked Notes, Notes with Checklists, Drawings, Scanned Documents or Attachments. Note though when you do searches it doesn't just include the text here. It will also include the text inside of attachments and inside of scans that are in different notes. So if I search for Sound Effects here you could see it brings up this note and that has it inside of a scan. It's not typed as text.
Now let's talk about using Styles in Notes. With any line or paragraph that you have the cursor in you can choose a style. You can click here to see all of these styles. You can also go to Format and then see all the styles here. Pay special attention to the keyboard shortcuts because each style has its own keyboard shortcut. If you use Notes a lot it pays to learn these.  So you can switch between Body, shift Command B, and Heading, shift Command H, very easily. There are other interesting shortcuts here like, for instance, shift Command L for Checklist, Option Command T for Table. You've got Command B, Command i, and Command U for Bold,, Italic, and  Underline. Plus, Command + and Command - will increase or decrease the font size of the selected text. Now what if you want to go beyond these basic styles here. Well, you can style your text almost anyway you want. So you can select some text, for instance, and then go to Format and then if you go to Font you'll see Show Fonts or Command T and you'll also see Show Colors, shift Command C. So let's use Command T here and this brings up the standard system font controls. You could choose any font that you want. You could also choose any size and different variations of a font. If you learn to use this control which you'll find in different apps on your Mac you can see that you can setup a font like this and then add a favorite and then it will appear here under Favorites and you can easily access your favorite font types. You can also click here to bring up Colors or you could use that other keyboard shortcut, Shift Command C, to bring colors up. Then you could use any one of the color pickers here to set a color for that text. You could leave this open and then select other text and color it just as easily. 
Now if you have set Custom Text Properties for some text and you want to use that somewhere else you don't have to recreate it from scratch. Instead if you look in Format and then Font and Copy Style or Option Command C you can copy it and then Option Command V will paste it. So Option Command C to copy will go here. Option Command V to paste and it's just that easy to reuse the same text formatting elsewhere. 
If you find the text too small in notes you can increase the size by going to View and then Zoom In & Out. Shift Command and period and comma. To get to the default size Shift Command Zero. So I could easily increase the size there or decrease it. Note that this is temporary. So you increase the size a little bit to read the test. You switch to another note and then back and it's back to the default. But the default is set in Notes Preferences right here. Default Text Size. If you change this then it's going to set the default font size and you can switch to another note and it's always using that. 
There are lots of different types of lists that you can create in Notes. So you can type some text and you could select it and then go to Format and set it to, for instance, a Bullet List. Once you do that you can actually have sublists very easily. If you look under Format you could see under Indentation you could increase or decrease with Command and then the square brackets. So I can increase the indentation there and then create the next level or decrease it. You also can easily move items in Lists up and down. If you look under Format and then Move List Item you'll see that Control Command and then Up and Down Arrows will move items. So Control Command Up moves that item up. Down moves it down. Note this works in regular text too. You could still use Control Command Up to actually move the line up one. This is super useful for organizing inside of a note.  
Now if you make this a Checklist, which you can do by selecting here and going to Format, and then changing it to Checklist, there's also a handy button right here. Then there are some special things you could do. For instance, under Format you can go to Mark as Checked and anything you have selected will be marked as checked. You could also go to More and you can Check All or Uncheck All. You can select Move Checked to Bottom or Delete the Checked Ones. There's also a default setting here in Notes Preferences for Automatically Sort Checked Items. So that means automatically any checklists you create the checked items move to the bottom. In addition to Lists and Checklists you can create Tables using this button right here. A Table is just a way to organize things. It's not really a spreadsheet or anything like that. You can't do formulas. But you can type and then use Tabs and Returns to move around and enter data. You've got these little controls here. If you select one it will select the entire column or the entire row. Then you have a little menu here where you can Add a Row Above or Below or Delete a Row. So you can add another column, like that. Tables are pretty basic and there's not much you can do in terms of changing the format or width or anything like that of the table. But you can actually grab these handles here and use them to rearrange the columns or the rows very easily. 
Now there are other types of elements that you can add to your Note. One of those is Links. You'll see the button here and it's grayed out. If you've got Safari and it's not hidden, it's an active window, then you'll find that when you go here you could add the Active Page as a link very easily. This also works in other apps. However, despite the fact Apple, in its documentation works in the podcast app, and I assume it's supposed to work in apps like maybe News and Books and such, I can only get it to work in Messages in addition to Safari. So here I've got Messages and Safari with both as active non-hidden windows and they both appear here and I can add a Link and it creates this cool little preview of the webpage, in this case. Clicking it takes you right there. You could also Control Click here and you could say View As Small Images to reduce the size of the link. Another cool thing that you could do is you can use your iPhone to scan or take a photo. You could see right here there's an iPhone using the same Apple ID and setup so continuity features are working and you can take photos, scan documents or add a sketch and this will switch your iPhone into a special mode to do one of these things. You don't have to do anything on your iPhone previous to this. You just select one of these things and your iPhone will instantly go into Camera, Scanning, or Drawing mode. You can also do this with the iPad as well.
Now with just your Mac you can add any image that you want to Notes just by dragging and dropping. So you can drag and drop a file right in here and it will add it. You can also click here and use the Photos Browser to browse your Photos Library and pick something from there and drag and drop that in as well. When you have a lot of attachments in your Notes you can view them all in one place by going to View and then Show Attachments Browser. This will bring up a special mode here where you can see all your photos and videos, all your scans. If there are any map links that you have added. Any website links, audio, or documents like scans or pdf's that you've added. Then you can select it, double click and it will open it or you can select it and Control Click and you can show in Notes to jump right to that note. You can also do things with the text in your Notes using what are called Data Detectors. So sometimes move over text in Notes or in other apps and you'll see a little box like this. You can click on that little box there or if you right click on it you could do various things with it. For instance, show address, copy the map URL, that kind of thing. Phone numbers you can call using your iPhone or you can FaceTime from your Mac or send a message. It will even work with date and time to allow you to add a new event to your calendar. 
You can also Export your notes using File, Export as PDF. Using the PDF format you can keep all the text formatting images that are embedded everything in the note, even the links and such will work. So we can export this here and now we can see we can open it up in Preview and we have a nice PDF to save or archive somewhere or send to somebody. You can even import documents from a variety of formats. Text documents, of course, but also Rich Text Format, the type created by TextEdit, but also something can be exported from almost word processor. It has a very limited set of formatting that it can use but, one course, so does Notes. So it would kind of make sense. But here is a note that has got different styles of text in it and if I were to Save it to the Desktop here and then in Notes go to File and then Import Notes. Select this note here and you can see here it imports it in and it looks just like the original. 
You can also Lock Notes if you want. Of course Notes are already protected on your Mac because they're in your User Account. Somebody else can't get to them unless they have your User Account password or you left your Mac wide open for them to view anything on your Mac. But if you want to add an extra little layer of security you can click here, lock the note, you have to provide a password, now that note has a lock on it. So if I quit Notes and go back in you could see that note is locked and I can't get to it unless I enter the password. Now it's unlocked. All locked notes are locked or unlocked together. So all notes with a lock on it would be unlocked and I can go here. I can close all locked notes like that. For any note I can remove the lock like that. Just enter the password and now that's a regular note again. 
Here's one last tip. If you want to have this note in a separate window you can. One way is to just double click on the note here and it opens up in a separate window like this. Another way to do it is to go to Window and Float Selected Note. The same thing. So now you get it in a separate window. But what good does this do you? Say you go to another app like say Safari and you it's now behind this. Now you can actually make a note stay on top of everything else. Go back to the Notes App with this floating window selected. Go back here and you'll see that you can now command it to float on top. It seems to be the same right here. But note if I switch back to Safari this note still stays on top. It's going to stay on top of everything. So now I can see it and edit it, work with it, while I'm looking at other content and never fear that it will actually fall behind another window and I'll loose track of it.
Of course there's even more to Notes than this. There are collaboration features where you can share a note with somebody else. You could both edit the note even in real time. There's also the new Quick Notes function where you can bring up a note from the bottom right hand corner and it will be linked, to say, a Safari webpage and reappear when you go back to that page. It's really becoming a full featured Notes App and a lot of people are leaving the third party Notes Apps just to use the one that comes with their Mac. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 22 Responses to “25 Tips For Using Notes On a Mac”

Razvan Mihai

3 years ago

Hi Gary. Thanks for another great tutorial. Note app has come a long way indeed lately despite its limitations.

Is there a way to insert the current date in a specific format as in Word app? I tried to do this using Shortcuts, but I could not get it to work. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Razvan: If you have the know-how, you should be able to create a service in Automator to do it. Or use Shortcuts to do it by having the date put into the clipboard and then you paste it.

Razvan Mihai

3 years ago

Gary: Thanks for the tip. I will give it a go at using Shortcut and having the date put into the clipboard. Then paste using the Command-V. I hope I could use this shortcut on the iPhone/IPad as well.

Grant

3 years ago

How to change Note password.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Grant: Notes, Preferences, there's a button.

Patrik

3 years ago

Great stuff as always Gary I found the video very interesting espcially the part with tags. I sell Apple products in Sweden and I always recommend people to macmost.com so they can learn more😀👍🏻

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Patrik: Thanks!

Ellen

3 years ago

My "Notes" does not have the "attachment" icon or "float on top". Computer: MacBook Pro 2013 OS Big Sur. Is there a way to update Notes? Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Ellen: Notes gets more features with every version of macOS. I can't remember which features were available with Big Sur, but I'm using the current macOS here, Monterey.

sidney austin

3 years ago

Gary, informative as usual but my notes app does not have all the bells and whistles that yours does. I am running Mojave 10.14.6. do I need to upgrade to latest software to get all features shown in your video?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

sidney: Yes. This is Monterey. You are several versions back.

Paul

3 years ago

Great stuff. It's just that I have a hard time following your mouse. YOU know where you're moving it to, but I don't. You're moving it around talking like I'm a mind reader. For me, it would be nice to see something so I could follow with my eyes. I had no idea Notes could do so much. Thank you for spelling 'Notes' out so clearly.

Ray

3 years ago

Great tutorial, as always, Gary. Thanks!!

I'd like to use Notes to create a shopping list. List all the items I "sometimes" buy, mark the ones to buy for my next store visit, have only the marked items show up in the store, then make them "disappear" (but stay in the unmarked list) as I pick them up at the store.

Can I get Notes to do that?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Ray: No, it doesn't do precisely that. Sometimes you have to work with the features the app has and come up with a solution. Maybe use Move Checked to Bottom to just get the items you need at the top. Or, maybe use Reminders instead so the checked items disappear and then check the ones you don't need before you go to the store.

Jasper

3 years ago

Razvan-here’s a way to add the date with a shortcut

https://reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/ihgwhd/ymd_tagging_for_journaling_with_an_automator/

Ed Adams

3 years ago

One of your best , thank you

Ed Adams

3 years ago

since tables are limited to just framed text can you insert a real spreadsheet from excel, google, or Numbers?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Ed: No, Notes doesn't support spreadsheet tables.

Michael

3 years ago

Brilliant Gary. Brilliant tutorial. I never realised the power of the latest Notes version. I'm now in the process of moving from MS OneNote to Notes. Thank You
Cheers
Michael

Kathy

2 years ago

Hi Gary, is it possible to sort all of many folders that I have in Notes alphabetically (etc) or just the notes within one folder? I am unable to find if it's even possible. Thank you!! K

Gary Rosenzweig

2 years ago

Kathy: No way to sort the folders except manually. How many notes do you have? If it is that many, you may want to consider storing some of that information in files instead of notes. See https://macmost.com/using-textedit-instead-of-mac-notes.html

Kathy

2 years ago

Thank you Gary, I will check out your video link. I have 250+ notes but am in the process of cleaning things up and text edit will be very helpful. K

Comments Closed.

25 Tips For Using Notes On a Mac

Comments: 22 Responses to “25 Tips For Using Notes On a Mac”

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