8 Ways To Make Text Stand Out in Mac Notes

While you can't add a background color to text in Notes for traditional highlighting, you can use many other techniques to make text in notes stand out.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about ways to have text standout in the Notes App.
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Now a common question that people have about the Notes App is how can you highlight text. By highlight they mean, like if you're writing on a piece of paper or you've got a printout and you use a pen like this to basically color in the text. On a computer it's basically making the background color for the text something besides white. You can do this in a variety of word processing apps. But you can't do it in Notes. However, usually what you're looking for is a way to have text standout. So instead of talking about what you can't do let's look at what you can do to have text standout in the Notes App. 
Here we've got a sample note. Let's say I want to make some text standout. Let's talk about the simplest, most straight forward ways first. One is, of course, you can just make the text Bold. So, For instance, I could take some text like this, select it, and then simply go to Format, and then if you look down under Font you'll see a variety of Text Formatting styling options and one of them is Bold. Now you're actually not going into this menu to do it. You're just going to use the keyboard shortcut, Command B. Command B is one of the oldest keyboard shortcuts to bold text. So let's do that. Command B and you can see how it makes that text bold. It's really easy to do. If I want to do it with some other text just select the text, Command B. If I want to Unbold something Command B works to toggle it. So I can easily select text and take the bold away.  It's straight forward but doesn't really highlight the text that much. Just a little bit. It's great for things like let's make all of the beginnings of each of these items Bold. The things before the colon here. You can see how it nicely kind of separates out each item here. So it is useful for that. But maybe not great for actually highlighting things. 
You can also do some other things you might have noticed there. Like you can use Underline or Italic. If you select this just use Command U and it underlines. You could see that does indeed make things standout. It's kind of what I use a lot of time. You can also use Command U to remove the underline. 
Then we saw that Command i makes things Italic which really doesn't make them standout too much. But keep in mind you can combine all of these things. So Command i for Italic. Command U for underline. Command B for Bold. You can use the same thing to take those away. 
Now another thing you can do is change the size of the Font. So you've got this text here. Let's go to Format, Font and you can see here bigger and smaller are Command Plus + and Command  Minus -. Now there is no way to just set it to a specific size. At least not until I show you a trick a little later on. But we can certainly use Command + and do it several times. So I'll just do it one, two, three times and you can see it makes the text a lot bigger. You can combine that with Command B for bold and that text really does standout. Then Command - to go back in sizes and Command B to take the bold away. 
Now one of the best ways to make text standout is to just change its color. But there doesn't seem to be any color controls here in the Tool Bar and you go to Format and it's not readily available here. But if you go to Font, then Show Colors or Shift Command C it brings up the Color Picker. You can use the variety of tools here to select a color. Now I've got this text selected already so I can use one of these. Let's go to this one here because it is just easy to pick out a color and I can just click right here and you can see it changes the text color. So it is very easy to color in various pieces of text with whatever you want. Making it standout or not. You can combine this with Command B for bold for text that stands out even more. 
Now whichever one of these you're using notice you still have the color chips here at the bottom. You can put your favorite colors in here and make it easy to get to them. So, for instance, I'll select this color right here and you see it changes my selected text. I can also drag from the main color block there to these little color chips and add it there. So maybe if I use another color, like this, I can drag another one. You can see I can even drag these around and reorder them and put my favorites here. So now I can easily select the color right there, select the color again, another one like this. You can just keep this Color Picker or Color Chooser around and easily just access these as you take notes, Anything you select you can just click one of these chips or one of these or use any other way to select a color.
Now how about setting the Font, You have a variety of different fonts on your Mac. Certainly having some text in a different font would make it standout. If you go to Format, Font there is Show Fonts, or Command T. This brings up the little Font Panel here. If you have one of these selected like the language you're using or All Fonts you could easily select a different font right here and it changes the font like that. You can also select a different size here. So this is a way of setting the size to something specific. You can click one of these numbers there or you can use the Slider if you want or even set it to a specific number at the top there. So you don't just have to use the Command Plus or Command Minus for that. So using a different font is a great way to make it standout. But you do have to set a bunch of different things. The Font and the Size and all that. 
However, there is something called Favorites here. So if you use something like this and perhaps even set a Style. Like, for instance, let's go find another font here, like something like Courier New. Set it to that and you can see there are various styles of that font. So I can set it to the Bold Style and maybe make it a little bit bigger, like 18 pt. That makes the text standout. Now if I were to click the three dots button here at the top left corner of the Fonts Panel I can Add To Favorites. Now it doesn't seem like anything happens right away. But if I choose Favorites from the collection you'll see it appear there. So now I can select other text that I want to use the same font style and size and easily set it to that. So now it is easy to have a few things here in Favorites and select those. Unfortunately, color while you can actually choose it here and set the selected text to a specific color, that is not saved in Favorites. Only the font, size and style. 
Now there is one last option I want to show you which is particularly useful after you first set some sort of style. Like maybe change the font or change the size, or made it bold or whatever. This works great if you've done a combination of those, like I have here. You can go to Format and then under Font there is Copy Style which is Option Command C. Then Paste Style is Option Command V. So Command C and Command V, but with the Option Key added. So with this text selected I'll do Option Command C. Then I'll select some other text, like that, and do Option Command V. You could see it changes that text to match the style that I copied. So once you've used, say, red, Courier New, 18 pt, Bold one time you can now copy the style and paste the style somewhere else. You can just keep pasting anytime you need it. You can even create another Note, like this, and you can just double click to select the word that has the style that you want. Option Command C and then go back to the note that you're working on and Option Command V and you get that style. So you can kind of have this style example in Note here that you can easily access to be able to copy and paste styles from.
So while hopefully one day Apple does allow us to actually highlight text by adding a background color behind selected text, until then we've got lots of different ways to make text standout in the Notes App. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “8 Ways To Make Text Stand Out in Mac Notes”

Elizabeth

3 months ago

Thank you - this will be very useful. I did know about bold, italic, underline and heading/subheading, etc. but I did not realize colors and other fonts were available. 🤓

Heather

Gary, thanks very much for this video. I use Notes all the time, but the inability to use highlighting is very annoying. If you have any influence on Apple, this is one change I hope they make soon. It is a mystery as to why they don't have it. Great job as always!!

Jonathan

Is there a keyboard command to repeat the last operation? Also, maybe one day you can do a similar video for making text stand out in Notes on the iPad and iPhone. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

Jonathan: No keyboard command that is generic for just any operation. Obviously you can just use the same keyboard command you used previously.

8 Ways To Make Text Stand Out in Mac Notes

Comments: 4 Responses to “8 Ways To Make Text Stand Out in Mac Notes”

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