39 Tips and Tricks To Get the Most Out Of macOS Stickies

Learn useful and powerful tips and tricks for using Mac Stickies. Find out how to highlight text, change list styles, add images and other media, arrage the notes, archive and transfer Stickies, plus much more.
Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you all sorts of advanced tips and tricks for using stickies on your Mac. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 700 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can find out more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So stickies has been around for 20+ years on the Mac. A lot of people use it to put little bits of text on the screen to remind them of things, to have a list and other things readily available to them. But there are so many little different tips and tricks that even people that use stickies everyday don't know about. Let's start with Strikethroughs.
Say you want to strike something out by putting a line through it. Well, if you select some text and you go to Font you can see you can make things Bold, Underline, Italic. But how do you do a Strikethrough. Well the trick for that is to go to Show Fonts, or Command T. Strikethrough is one of the options you get here. You can just select single strikethrough and it will strikethrough whatever is selected. Now notice you can also do Double Strikethrough. As a matter of fact not only can you do double strikethrough but you can do Double Underline. So if you want to distinguish between something that's underlined singly or doubly you can.
Now you can also color the underline in strikethrough. So here I've got a black underline under black text. But if I go to Color it will bring up the Color Controls and I can change the color to something else using anyone of the things in the Color Picker. You can do the same thing with a strikethrough. Add the strikethrough and then add the color. You can see here I can even add a different color strikethrough than the underline. Now another thing you can do is add Shadows. So I can select some text and then click here and it will add a Shadow underneath the text. It's kind of subtle but you can make it standout more using these controls here. So I can add a little more shadow and adjust it. Just another way to make your text standout.
Now another thing people forget about in all sorts of situations is using emoji. So hold Control Command Space and this brings up the Emoji Viewer. You can use this to access not only emoji but all sorts of special characters. You can use the Search field here at the top to search for something. So add the character that you want and then it adds it in there. Of course you can make that a larger font size as well using the font controls here or you can use it here. So you can add cool little graphics inside of your notes just using the thousands of different emojis and symbols.
When you create a new note it's going to create it using the color and also the font styling that's the default. If you want to change the default you can. Just go ahead in the note here and change things about the font. So, for instance, let's go to Show Fonts here. Let's go and make this larger and let's say make it a light version of that text. Also change the color of the note. Now we go to Window and select Use As Default. Now this will be used as default. So we do a new Note and we could see it's using the default font and the default color. Not all things are saved as default. For instance text color and some other items aren't.
Now what about highlighting text. There's no way to do that in here and there's no way to do that here with Fonts. But there is a way to do it. What you want to do is you want to open TextEdit. Then you want to create a new TextEdit document. You want to make sure it's set to Rich Text so go to Format and select Make Rich Text. If it says make Plain Text that means it's already in Rich Text mode. Now copy this text here and paste it into your Rich Text document in TextEdit. Then select it and here you can use this control to set the highlights. So let's make it an orange highlight here. Now select the text again, copy it, and paste it back in. You could see when you paste it pastes the highlight as well. Now you may think that's a little hard to do every time you want to highlight. But you could select this text here and then choose Font, Copy Style or Option Command C and then choose something else. Then choose Font, Paste Style or Option Command V. Now you can see it highlights that. So as soon as you have one highlighted you can highlight another.
Now you create Lists in Notes as well. Let's create a new note here and let's make a list in it. Now to convert that to an actual list I would select it and do Option and then hit the Tab key. It makes it into a list. So now when I put my cursor at the end and hit Return you can see it continues the list. If I put my cursor in a line and hit Tab it indents it one more. Shift Tab outdents it back to the regular level.
Now it looks like you only have this one option, a little dash here for lists. But you can change that using that same TextEdit trick. So let's select this, Copy, and back here again in TextEdit I'll paste that in. Now if I select that text I can go to Format List and I can change things about it. Like the bullet type. So I can make it a regular bullet or any of these. Hit OK and you can see it changes it there. Now if I select it and Copy and I go over here and I Delete what was there. I can't just paste over it. Then paste the new list in you can see it's now using those bullets.
Now you can also do the same thing for Numbered Lists. So let me go to Format and List in TextEdit here. Let's change this to a numbered list. Hit OK. Select this and I'll then delete this here in stickies, paste it in, and you could see it has numbers now. It will continue the numbering.
Now what if you wanted to create a Checkbox list. A lot of people want to do this. There's no real good way to do it in Stickies but there is a way if you really want to. What you can do is use Control Command Space to bring up Emoji and Special Characters. Search for Ballot and you'll see a bunch of different checkboxes here. Let's select the empty one. Paste that in. I'll do a space and I'll put a word after it. Now to continue doing that list, it's not really a list it's just regular text, Copy that box plus the space and paste it in and then continue the list like that. Now if you want to check something off select the box and then do Control Command Space. Search for Ballot again and select either the X or checkmark. Once you have one you can easily copy it and paste it into one of the other slots.
Now the other key things that you can do with stickies is that you can set it to Float on Top. So the selected stickie will now float on top of everything else. So if I do that and then say Open a Browser window here you can see no matter what I do with this browser window the stickie note is going to be on top of it. This other one, which isn't set to float on top, is going to act like a normal window. I can bring it to the front or I can select another window and it will go on top of that stickie. But the floating one will always remain on top. You can also select any window, floating or not, and set it to Translucent. You can kind of see what's behind it.
Now if you're using multiple desktops this could come in really handy. So I'm going to use Control Up Arrow to go to Mission Control. Create a second desktop. Now you can see if I go to the second desktop I don't see stickies. If I use Control Left Arrow to go to the first desktop I do. But like with any App if I go down into the Dock and Control click on it, go to Options, I could assign it to All Desktops. Now if I do that you can see when I go to the second desktop those stickies are actually there. So the stickies are on all the desktops. That not only makes it easier to see the information but you can say copy things and paste it into a stickie. Go to the other desktop running another app and still have access to the things you put in there. So you can kind of use it as a way to transport things from one app to the other.
This doesn't work when you've got apps in full screen mode. So, for instance, with this Safari window here, if I go to Full Screen by hitting the green button, notice that there's no stickies on it. If I do Control and Up Arrow you can see desktop 1 has stickies. Desktop 2, if I go to that, also has the stickies. But Safari as a full screen app isn't a desktop so it doesn't have stickies. Now you can get around that by instead of using full screen mode just make this as large as you want. You can either drag the corners out or I like to Option and double click on a corner. Now you can see it fills the screen but it's still a desktop. So you can still have other windows including this translucent stickie note on top of it.
Now there are also some arrangement options. If you go to Window, and Arrange By, you can arrange by Color, Content, Date, or Location on the Screen. So, for instance, Content would put them in alphabetical order. So it will rearrange them like that. Also it shrinks them all to just the Title bar. You can double click on a Title bar to expand it or click this little button here to expand it or shrink it back to a title bar. Now if you accidentally do that and it kind of ruins the layout you had before there's an unusual feature in Stickies. If you go to Window there is Undo Arrange by Content or Option Command Z. So it's an Undo specifically for an arrangement. So if you Undo that it will Undo the arrangement that you did and get your layout back.
Now let's talk about some other things you can put in Stickies. You can drag and drop links into them. So here I've got this link to this site here. I can drag and drop it in and you can see it becomes a link. You can go to another site and do that same thing. You can create a list of Bookmarks this way. All you need to do is click one of the links and it will open that up in your Browser. So if could be an alternative to Bookmarks or you could have a bunch of links for some research you're doing in a stickie note. 
You could also add links by going to Edit and then Add Link. Then you could type the link in there. Also if you go to  Edit and then Substitutions make sure you have Smart Links turned on. Then it will automatically turn any link that you type into a clickable link. You could also have a link to an email by typing Mail To and then colon and then the email address. Now when you click on that what will happen is it will open up your Mail with a new composition window all set to go to that address. Now since we turned on Smark Links we don't actually have to type Mail To colon. So we can just type the email address and it will turn that into the same kind of link.
But there's another kind of email link you can add as well to an existing message. Here in the Mail app if I drag a message into here it will create this link to it. Now if I were to click on this it will actually open up that message in the Mail app. It's a way to kind of save a reference to an email. There are more things you could include but you have to go to Edit and then Substitutions and then turn on Data Detectors. Now there's all sorts of things you can do here.  Let's try entering in a phone number. If we move our cursor over it we could see Data Detector. That's that little box with that little down arrow there. Click that and there's a lot of different things I could do to this. It will jump to a contact if a contact exists. If a contact doesn't exist and we click it, it will give you the opportunity to create the contact. We can also Control click or two finger click on a trackpad and then we can make phone calls using that number. It will work with Addresses too. We can type in an address and you could see this one is even a multiple line. But the Data Detector surrounds the entire thing. I can click there and it will show me a map to that location. 
You could also use Flight Numbers. So type in an actual flight number like that. Click on the Data Detector and you will actually get flight information. The same thing for some standard shipping tracking numbers. So I could put a tracking number in there and then the Data Detector will actually bring up the tracking information. This is really handy if you get some email saying that you're getting a package today and you can just put them into a stickie note and not have to keep the email around.
Here's one that I think is really cool. You can type in something that looks like an appointment. See how that has got a Data Detector around it. It even has what it is. It's brunch and it gives a time. If I click there you could see it allows me to add it to my calendar. Now what's interesting about that is to say if I often do brunch on Saturday at 11:00 and I'm sick of always adding that as a new item almost every week I can put that in a stickie and then use the Data Detector to quickly add that, and perhaps other standard appointments for the week, in a list. 
Now you can also add to a stickie. So I can drag this image into a stickie note and it places it in there. It places it in there at full size and there's no way to adjust the size. So now I have this massive image in here. So what you're going to want to do is shrink it before you actually bring it in. So I can open this up in say preview. Then go to Tools, Adjust Size to something more reasonable like that. Then right from the Preview I can Copy it. I can switch to Stickies and paste it in. Now I've got an image that's a more reasonable size. I want to be careful here though if I'm working on the original image because if I close this document notice that preview, of course, automatically saves so I've just shrunk that document. So I want to make a duplicate of it or make sure I Undo before I close Preview.
Now a really cool thing I can do with Images is you could mark them up just like you can in email and in other places. You can see that little markup tool there. I can choose Markup or any other photo extension I've got. Markup is there by default. I can now mark up this image here. I can add scribbles to it or text or whatever I want. You could see it marks it up here inside of Stickies. Notice how the cursor gets really big and it's on the right side there. The image is inline so all I need to do to delete it is to hit the Delete key and it will delete the image.
I can also drag and drop video files in. When you do that it should give you the option to do it as an alias. So in other words just linked to the original video file or make a full copy of it in Stickies. You probably want to use alias. Then it will actually shrink the video down to size and you could play it inside of stickies there. If you have a favorite video that makes you smile and you just want to see it all the time you can put it into a stickie. You could do the same thing with Audio but there's a little trick that you need to know. Drag that in here and you're going to only see the top of the audio playback controls. So the thing here is to select it. I'm going to do Command A to select all. Then I'm going to go to Show Fonts and increase the size so making it think that it's a large font right there. Then you'll see the entire playback control in place. Then you'll probably want to enlarge the stickie a bit here. It really doesn't work extremely well but if you need to you can have a bit of audio in there and then, of course, shrink the entire thing down when you're not actually using it. 
How about PDF's . Yes! You can drag a PDF in and you can see it displays. Even if it's multiple pages you can scroll through the pages. Now you have the same problem here as you had with images. It will display full size. So if you wanted it to be smaller maybe open it in Preview and export a copy out. But not export as a PDF. Instead go to Print. In Print here you can choose a different paper size. Like maybe A6 paper which is 4 x 6 approximately. Then I could change it to scale to fit and I could do Save As PDF and create a new copy of it. Then drag this new copy in here and you could see that's a little bit smaller. So you can make adjustments like that. Now I've got a handy set of keyboard shortcuts that I can view. I can easily tuck it out of the way and bring it up when I need it. 
You can also use the Continuity feature in macOS with iOS with an iPhone or iPad. Control click in here if I had an iPhone or iPad using the same ID I would have the ability to import photos taken directly from the camera on the iPhone or iPad, import scans, and also just create a drawing on the device. It would actually show up here inside my stickie note. Which is funny considering stickie doesn't even exist in iOS. So being able to draw something on your iPad, say with your Apple pencil, and have it appear here in stickies is kind of neat. 
Let's finish up by looking at Export options. You can go to File, Export Text, and it will export the text for the selected note. So we could put that here on the desktop and we could open it up in TextEdit and see that we get pure plain text. We don't get the Rich Text formatting and other elements.  We could also go to File, Export Text and then change the format and use either one of these to Rich Text  format document types that includes styles, and images, and things as well. In addition to that if you want to go and export as a PDF there's an option for that here natively but you can just go File, Print, and then use PDF, Save as PDF to save a PDF version of the note.
But you could also find the original note itself. Here's where you find it under your Home directory in Library, Containers, com.Apple.stickies under Data, Library, Stickies. So it's a long way to get there but if you want access to this you could easily create an alias to this location. Now each one of these is the document itself. You can see in QuickLook I can see it. So if you wanted to you could simply copy this file out and then you can access it.
So you'd think you could edit these in TextEdit it would be easier to do things like adding Lists, Highlighting and all of that. Save them and then you would see the changes in Stickies. But it doesn't work like that. As a matter of fact it would give you errors if you tried to do it. However, if you Quit stickies and then make a change, Save it, Close it out, and then Relaunch Stickies you'll see the change is there. So you can actually use TextEdit to edit stickies' notes as long as stickies isn't running at the time.
Now there are two other ways you can use these files. One is to transfer them to another Mac. So it's frustrating that Stickies doesn't work with iCloud. Anything you create on your Mac just sticks on your Mac. If you have a second Mac you won't see those stickies there. Well, there's nothing that could really fix that but you could take this file, copy it, send it over, use AirDrop, File Transfer, anything you want, to your other Mac. Stick it in the equivalent folder there. Then it will appear in Stickies on that Mac. It's not very useful for keeping things in sync but if you create a complex stickie, say with a whole bunch of interesting things and you don't plan on changing it much. You just want it on the other Mac. You can use this to transfer it and have it on both Macs. 
Now the other thing you could do is you could use this to Archive stuff. So I don't have Stickies running right now. If I were to drag this out and stick it here or put it in a Documents folder as like saved or archived stickies when I run Stickies again it won't be there. But if I Quit Stickies, put this back in here and then run it again you can see it reappears just fine. So you could use it as a way to retire some stickies and then bring them out of retirement as well.
So there's a tone of different tips and tricks and things that you could do with Stickies on the Mac. Hopefully you learned something new.
Comments: 6 Responses to “39 Tips and Tricks To Get the Most Out Of macOS Stickies”

Bart_in_FL
4 years ago
Fantastic. Have had an Apple mini since late 2014 and never knew about "Stickies." Absolutely terrific and great you have the 39 tips, too. Thank you, Gary!
Bob Smailes
Excellent series of tips Gary!
Joe Blow
Brilliant. Very useful.
Gene
Interesting videos. I have to ask, what is the function of all of this? I use stickies as a place holder for stuff I can't remember or want to have ready access to. Curious as to what other uses these features have? They are not supported in iOS so you can't share them on your iPhone or iPad can you?
Gary Rosenzweig
Gene: They can serve that same function for you, if you like. Or anything else you can imagine. It is up to you how you use them. No, they don't sync across to iOS or even to other Macs. Use the Notes app for that. But people still like Stickies.
I retract my earlier statement! I CAN see how this functionality could be very useful. I plan to redo my Stickies to be much more helpful. Thanks. You know more about Apple functionality then I'll bet most Apple employees.
Comments Closed.
39 Tips and Tricks To Get the Most Out Of macOS Stickies

Comments: 6 Responses to “39 Tips and Tricks To Get the Most Out Of macOS Stickies”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information
