9 New Features of Notes in macOS Catalina

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode let's take a look at the new features in Notes in macOS Catalina.

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So first we have a new way to view all of your notes. The List View is what we see here and is what we've been used to in Notes. But now we have the Gallery View. Just click here and now you can view everything with these large icons with these previews here. So you can scroll through them and maybe it will be faster to be able to find certain notes. I know it can be hard sometimes to come up with titles for notes so this may make it easier. You also, of course, can view all of your iCloud notes, your Notes folders as well.

So speaking of folders you can have Shared folders as well as Shared notes. So you can go to a folder like this one. It just has one note in it but notice there are the three dots there. I can click that and add people to the entire folder. So this is just like sharing a note but now any note that is in this folder will be shared with another person or a group of people. People can create notes in there. Modify them, delete them, and all of that. So it's great if you have to collaborate with a team. You can have a folder filled with shared notes that you can all work on.

Another new feature is the ability to not only share with people and allow them to make changes but you can also invite them to View Only. It works with folders or with individual notes. 

Now if you have a note that has a checklist in it like this there are a few new options. One of the options is to be able to have checked items automatically go to the bottom. So if I check a few items here you see they won't automatically go to the bottom but if you go to Notes Preferences you'll see it's an option here. Automatically Sort Checked Items. As a matter of fact the first time you try to use a checklist in Catalina it will prompt you if you want to turn this on. So when I turn this on now when I check an item you can see it resorts the list and puts the checked ones at the bottom. 

However, if I have the it turned off I have some other options now that I can use. I can reorder these by dragging them around. So you can reorder the items in a list with a drag on different items. You can also use Shortcuts. So when you look under Format you can see Move This Item and it's Up and Down and it's Control Command and Up arrow and Down arrow. So I can use that to move items up and down in the list. 

Notice there were some other options here as well. A big one is the ability to be able to go to More and then Uncheck All. So this gives us the ability to create a checklist that we can reuse. For instance, this can be a daily checklist like this. Maybe it can be a packing list for going on trips. You can check things off as you need them and then without having to select them all or go and uncheck them all I can simply go to Format, More, and Uncheck All. Now you can see it resets the list.

So there's a bunch of new Search functionality as well. One of the things you can do is when you click on Search here you get some suggested searches which includes giving you a list of all the Shared Notes, all the Locked Notes, any Notes with a Checklist, any Notes with Drawings, Scanned Documents or Attachments. So you can quickly get these Smart Searches right here.

But also you can do searches for content of items. Here's what I mean. Here you can see the word video in this checklist. So if I search for video, of course, I get this note. No big surprise, it's in the text. But if I look at all of my notes here I can see I've got some notes that have photos in them. I've got some notes that have scans in them. So here's the interesting thing. You can search for items inside of a photo. So I don't have anything in this note except this photo. There's no text in there identifying anything about the photo. But if I search for dog that attachment from that note is going to come up and I can jump right to it. So it's actually looking in the photos you have there and will return the search results for the items it finds. It's taking some of that functionality from the Photos app.

But that's not all. Now you can also search for scanned text. So, here is a note that has a scanned document in it. I can see I put some words in there to look for things. So there's the word guitar. Okay. So now let me search for guitar. It finds that note and also the attachment there in the note. There word guitar doesn't appear in the note as text anywhere. It's actually text in the scanned document. But Notes is actually doing optical character recognition on that scan. It's figuring out what words are in there. At least the ones it can recognize. Then it's allowing you to do searches based on those words. So you can scan a ton of documents into the Notes app and then search for the notes that have those words in them even if you never typed the text. 

One thing to keep in mind is to use any of this advanced Notes functionality you have to be storing your notes in iCloud. If you're using another service, such as maybe Goggle Notes, then you only get basic text functionality in the Notes app. Also make sure you're using iOS 13 on your iPhone and iPad and Catalina on your Macs. If you're using one device that's using an older operating system then it's not compatible with this. Your Notes data in iCloud is held back to the lowest common denominator and it won't be able to do these new things.