11/1/21
9:00 am

Using Tags In Notes and Reminders On a Mac

The new tagging feature of Notes and Reminders in macOS Monterey gives you a whole new way to organize. Unlike folders and lists, a note can have more than one tag. You can also create Smart Folders and Smart Lists using tags.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new tagging feature in Notes and Reminders in macOS Monterey.
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So a new feature in macOS Monterey and also iOS 15 is the ability to add Tags to Notes and Reminders. Let's take a look at how you can use them. Here I have a note that's about a meeting. I can easily add a tag to it. All I need to do is type the tag into the note. I can put it anywhere in the note that I want. A tag has to start with the pound or hashtag symbol. On US keyboards it's Shift 3. Then I could type a word, a name, a made-up word or combination of words as long as there is no space in it. So let's say I'll create a tag called Meetings. That's it. The next space or return or whatever I do will accept that as a tag and you could see it's actually the Notes highlight color there. I can add as many of these tags as I want and put them anywhere I want. Notice here there's a section for Tags. If I expand that I'll see all the tags that I've created in both Notes and Reminders. If I click on Meetings here it will show me all of the notes that have the tag Meetings in them. In this case it's just this one. But if I go back to all my iCloud Notes here and I add that same tag to other notes, then if I just click meetings I'll see those three notes. All three have that tag in them. Notice there's no folder called Meetings. I didn't create a folder. I just tagged all three notes. Now I can look at all the notes with that tag in it just by going to the tag itself. 
So already you could see how it can replace folders. But it can actually work better than folders because you could tag a note with more than one thing . So here I've got folders for three projects. In each one of these folders I have a note with the project goals. Now it would have been nice to actually add meeting notes in here too. The problem was that sometimes these meetings discuss more than one project. This one discussed Project Alpha and Project Gamma. So if I put it in one and not the other then I'd be loosing some information there. But with Tags I could easily do this. I could add a tag here and call it Project Alpha or just Alpha. Then also, since this meeting discussed Gamma, I'll include that there as well. Now I could go here. Let's say this meeting was all about Project Alpha. So I'll put Alpha and then this meeting was all about Beta. So I'll put that in there. 
Now you don't have to put them at the end there. For instance notice here I actually mentioned the projects here. I could have actually done a hashtag right there at that point. So I could have replaced this with a tag which looks a little bit more natural and it's how we're used to seeing tags in other situations. So now if I look under Alpha I'll see these two notes. If I look under Beta I'll see this one. If I look under Gamma I'll see this one. I could also go back into these notes here and let's add the tags. I'll put them right here in the title. The same for this one and this one. So now when I look at these tags here I'll see the Project Goals and two meetings that pertain to this project. I don't even really need these folders any more. I can just get rid of them.  
You can also use Tags to combine things. So, for instance, I can see Alpha and Gamma and see there's this one meeting where both were discussed. Then if I ever add another note that mentions multiple projects, like this one here, I could easily set it up with tags so that it is found in the right place when I'm looking for information that pertains to that one tag. 
I could certainly still use the folders if I want. So maybe, for instance, I could make a folder called Project Goals to have these all together so I can move this one into here, this one into here, and then get rid of these two folders. Now I have my three goal's notes right here but I could still use tags to access everything that pertains to a particular project. Of course I could also go in here and add more tags. Like a Goal's tag for each one of these. So now if I want to see all goals I don't need that folder anymore. I can go here to see all my goals. If I want to see the goals for a particular project I could select both of those and it will show me the one note that pertains to both of those tags. 
Now the Reminders App uses Tags too. As a matter of fact the tags are linked to each other. So if you wanted to add a tag to a To Do List item we could just type it as part of the description. So here I could type Alpha and you could see I can even Auto Complete there and now it's part of Project Alpha. If I look here for Tags you could see I can see To Do List items that just have that one tag in them. You could also add tags to a special field in the Reminder. So if I get info on this you could see there is the title there. I could put the tag there. I could also add Tags here. So now I can look for Reminders that have Beta as a tag. I don't have to see them in the main part of the reminder. You could even add it in the Notes section of the reminder. So if I do that here you can see the tag appears now in Notes for that reminder. So you have three places where you could put them. 
You can use tags in the same way I showed you with Notes. Instead of creating lists you can have one big list, or a miscellaneous list, put different reminders in there and then use tags so that the same reminder can be part of several different tags. Whereas with lists the reminder could only be in one list at a time. Since the same tags will appear in Notes and Reminders when you create one in one app it will appear in the other as a suggestion as you type. 
Now Notes has Smart Folders and Reminders has Smart Lists. So you can use those with tags. So I can create a new Smart Folder here and name it what I want and I could put tags in that. So if I wanted to put all of the meeting notes into a Smart Folder and call that Meetings, I could. So this is a Smart Folder here. It acts the same way as selecting Meetings down below. Then if I have a ton of tags down here I could simply hide those at some point and use Smart Folders to access only the tags that I want here in the name part of the left sidebar. The same thing for Reminders. You can create a new list in Reminders. You could click here to make it a Smart List and then you could have tags that are included. So I can, for instance, add a tag here like this. Use the Plus button, do some other thing like time or priority or location for that and just incorporate tags as part of my Smart List in Reminders. 
So as you can see Tags in Notes and Reminders' Apps takes organization to a whole new level. We're no longer restricted to having a note in one folder or a reminder in one list. We can use Tags so they can cross-reference each other. Lots of different things you can do with Tags in these two apps. Hopefully we'll see Apple extend this Tag functionality to other apps in future versions of macOS.

Comments: 23 Responses to “Using Tags In Notes and Reminders On a Mac”

Matthew Brandt

3 years ago

Hi Gary, could you please explain how to delete tags in the Reminders and Notes app’s? Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Matthew: Select the tag in the Note or Reminder, press the Delete key.

Razvan Mihai

3 years ago

Thanks, Gary, again for the excellent video. We now have a sophisticated way to organize our notes, but one thing that bothers me about the Notes app is the inability to change the default font. Is there any way to do that other than changing the font every time you open Notes?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Razvan: In Notes, Preferences, you can set a note to start with one of four styles. And you can change the default text size. That's about it. You can also create a "template" note and set it up like you want. Then instead of a new note, duplicate the template one.

Razvan Mihai

3 years ago

Thanks, Gary. I guess you mean selecting how you want to start a note depending on the document hierarchy level, i.e., title, header, subhead, and body. But you are still a prisoner to the predefined fonts of the respective hierarchy level. Creating templates is something I have been contemplating, and I will give it a go. Thanks. I wish there were a more straightforward solution for such a simple task.

Matthew Brandt

3 years ago

Gary, that worked for everything, except for multiple tags in Reminders, which was the reason for my initial question. I deleted every Reminder with those hashtags, as well as the completed ones, and when I select them, I see “No Reminders”. A search shows “0 Completed”. They do not show up in a Spotlight search, whereas every other tag does for both Reminders and Notes. Another person reported the same thing on Reddit. I deleted other tags with no problem. This is only in Reminders.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Matthew: Are those tags in Notes, maybe? The list of tags is shared. If not, is this really a problem?

Matthew Brandt

3 years ago

They're in Reminders only. I'm not using any tags in Notes. When I did, they deleted without issue. It's a problem in that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so it's inconsistent and annoying. The more tags that cannot be deleted, the more cluttered it becomes. For those trying to eliminate folders and simplify/declutter Reminders, needless tags are counterintuitive. That and can lead to reluctance to even use the feature. If I have 40 tags, and 20 are useless, it's a problem.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Matthew: So it must be a bug. Not happening for me. Report it to Apple and hopefully it will get fixed in a future update.

Fred

3 years ago

How do you delete a tag in Notes? Doesn't seem to work with the delete key or deleting all the occurrences of a tag. Same on iOS. Odd, no?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Fred: It should work if you delete all of the occurrences. Keep in mind that you'd need to delete all of them in Reminders too. But some people report that they sometimes stick around even after you delete the last one.

John

3 years ago

Hi Gary. Great video. Is there any provision for dragging a tag onto a note? I can’t seem to find one.

Neil

3 years ago

Hi Gary, It seems that a tag in a locked note is not recognised - have you come across this?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

John: No, you just have to type them.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Neil: That's right. And if you have a note with tags, you can't lock it.

John

3 years ago

Hi Gary. Is there a quick way to add tags to multiple items. I have a notes folder with 186 notes in it and I would like to tag them all so I can remove the folder. The only way I can find is to create a smart folder, which automatically adds the tag based on the name of folder then delete the smart folder and the tag remains. But what if you want to tag them all with a different named tag?

jasper

3 years ago

You can also apply tags by dragging a note, or several selected notes, onto the tag in its list in the sidebar.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

John: You just have to add them all individually if they are to have different tags. Or try Jasper's idea.

John

3 years ago

Thank you Jasper and Gary. Dragging a note onto the tag worked a treat!

Jeff J. Frank

3 years ago

I just updated to Monterey 12.1 on my MacBook Air 2020 and do not have Tags for either Notes or Reminders. Is there a toggle to turn them on/off that I'm not aware of or another step to enable them?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Jeff: Keep in mind that would only be available for iCloud-stored Notes. The Notes app also can access notes in other cloud systems, like Google. So create a new Note but in iCloud.

Paul

3 years ago

In Mac Reminders, I'm in the tags section of a reminder, I type a few letters until the pop-up menu for tags only shows one item. Now it seems I still have to use the arrow keys to select that item in the pop-up menu and then hit return after that. My hands have to leave home position on the keyboard. Is there a better way?

Gary Rosenzweig

3 years ago

Paul: Just type the whole tag.

Comments Closed.

Using Tags In Notes and Reminders On a Mac

Comments: 23 Responses to “Using Tags In Notes and Reminders On a Mac”

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