How To Take Notes For School Or Work On a Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about taking notes on your Mac. 

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A lot of people use their computers to take notes. This could be in a classroom situation like in a lecture where you're taking notes of what the teacher is saying or it could be in a work situation. At a meeting or some other context where you need to take notes about what's going on. There are a lot of good ways to do this on your Mac. You could use some of the basic apps that come with your Mac or you could get third party apps to do it. It all depends on what you want. 

Let's start by looking at the Notes app. The name of the app is Notes so you'd think this would be the ideal app for that. But Notes really means two different things. On the one hand you could be taking notes in a class or meeting or you could just be jotting down some information that you need later on. In fact a lot of times when people are talking about notes in a computer context they're talking about these quick little pieces of information. Not actually taking notes in a class or a meeting. That's what the Notes app really is about here.

The Notes app is for jotting down quick bits of information and having them at your fingertips. Not for really taking notes in a class or meeting. However, it still could be used for that. When you create a new note it's basically like a small word processing document. You can write whatever you want in here. You can style the text in different ways. You can create checklists. All sorts of things. So it's still a decent app for doing that. One of the big advantages to Notes is its quick and easy to launch. Another advantage is it syncs really well with iCloud so you can take notes on your Mac and then review them on your iPhone or iPad or vice versa. It has some organization here. You can create a new folder and store your notes in there and organize them by class or by work project. You can also take a note out of Notes by simply selecting it and Copying and Pasting it to something else. So it's easy to start off quickly in Notes when you need to start taking notes right now and then later on graduate into putting it into a word processor or a more dedicated note taking app. 

Now there are lots of alternatives to using Apple's Notes app. A popular one, of course, is  Evernote that a lot of people use. You can also use a third party app called Bear which is pretty good. Goggle has their note taking app called Goggle Keep. Of course you do that in the web browser. A really good and surprisingly free alternative is using Microsoft OneNote which you can get in the Mac App Store. It's basically a very advanced version of Notes. You can create different notes here. You have tons of styling options. You can organize your notes in all sorts of different ways, putting sections inside of notes and all sorts of things. You can also even draw right here inside the notes app on your Mac. Of course there are mobile versions of OneNote as well. But it's something to pay attention to if you're looking for more than a notes app even if you don't use other Microsoft products.

So let's look at some other apps that come with your Mac. One, of course, is TextEdit. TextEdit has two modes. You can create a new document here and it could be in Plain Text mode or Rich Text mode. Under Format I see it says Make Rich Text so I can assume I'm in Plain Text right now. You can set that up in Preferences of which one is the default. Plain text notes just allow you to type text. There's no styling. There's no formatting. Nothing. But an advantage is these files are really small and tiny. A lot of people just like typing in Plain text and not having to deal with text formatting and fonts and things like that while they're taking notes. 

If you switch to Rich Text you're basically working in a simple word processor. You can do all sorts of styling and create lists and things like that. You can even attach files and insert images. But you still end up with a file that's going to be smaller than a word processing document file and it's using standard Rich Text formatting which means that's compatible with all sorts of different word processors on a different platform.

A big disadvantage to using TextEdit though is there's no TextEdit on iOS for some reason. So anything that you save it as a text file or Rich Text format file you can get access to it on your iPhone or iPad in various different apps. But there's no quick back and forth like there would be say if you were using Notes or Pages to just open the file in the same app in either one and work with it back and forth between platforms. 

So let's talk about Pages. You can certainly use Pages for note taking. It even has a note taking template here that you can choose which is basically an outline format. So you can create notes in an outline kind of thing. I would prefer just to use a plain document. Style the text as I want and I can always quickly switch into a bullet list and use that as an outline. You can insert images. You can even import images directly from your iPhone so you can say insert from iPhone and take a picture of a white board or projector screen and then add that into your notes. You can do the same thing in TextEdit in Rich Text format.

Now you can also record audio in Pages. But I'll get to that in a few minutes. File sizes are going to be larger in Pages but there's a Pages app for iOS so you can go back and forth between Mac and iPhone and iPad. The files can only be opened in Pages but it's easy to export out of Pages as a Microsoft Word document or Text document of something else.  

Now there are tons of alternatives if you want to go the route of just using a word processor. Of course if you use Microsoft Word for other things then why not stick with Microsoft Word for this and use Word for note taking. You can also use any major word processor. So something like OpenOffice or LibreOffice and of course you can use Goggle Docs. I know that a lot of students today use Goggle Docs for everything. So you might as well go ahead and create a new Goggle Doc and use that for note taking as well if you're using Goggle Docs for all your other classroom materials.

Now there are some third party apps that you should check out. One is called Ulysses and it's a great note taking app that has lots of cool features. Another is called iA Writer which uses markdown format which a lot of people like. So check that one out. Also check out GoodNotes in the Mac App Store. That one is built specifically for note taking but also does a lot with PDF's as well.

So let's talk about audio recording because a lot of times at meetings or in lectures you want to record audio of what's going on at the same time you're taking notes. Now you could do that with a separate app. So there are two apps that come with your Mac. One is called QuickTime Player and if you run that you can go to File, New Audio Recording. You can then select your microphone and then just record audio. You can just have this running in the background while you're taking notes during a lecture. You can also, of course, use the built-in Voice Memos app. This is great because it actually keeps the voice memos here inside the app so you just have these recordings in its own place but you can also drag and drop them out if you want. This could also just run in the background while you're using another app for note taking. 

Now Pages isn't ideal for note taking because it's primarily a word processor. But actually the audio recording function is pretty good for note taking. So you can go here to Insert, and then you could do Record Audio. You get this little box here where you can record audio. You hit Record and it starts recording. You can see a waveform there. You can just have that out of the way as you continue to type different notes. You can hit Stop. The cool thing is after you hit Stop you can hit Record again and it picks right up. So if you're in a meeting or a lecture where things start and stop a lot you can not have all of that blank space recorded. You can also go to Edit here and you can edit this down even listening and previewing to different sections or you can trim things. When you're done with the recording hit Insert and becomes this little audio element in here. You can click it to Play but you can also see here on the right, under Format, Audio you've got playback controls here and you can hit Edit Recording and go back into Edit mode. If you want to export this from Pages you can. Just drag from here to the Desktop or Finder window and you get an audio file. Microsoft OneNote also has the ability to insert an audio recording and it will add it in here. It records it and then you can stop but you can't pickup where you left off. You have to start another recording like that. But at leasts you can actually do it here in the app and have those audio bits in with your regular text notes inside the same note in OneNote.

You're probably thinking wouldn't it be great if there was an app that recorded the audio and actually synced it to what you were typing at that time. There is such an app in the Mac App Store. You can get the Noted app and when you record with that you get the timing to the left. So I can type things here on the main document and see timings there. When I hit Stop I can actually jump to the portion of the recording that fits with that part of the note. So you can take notes of a lecture and then jump to any part of that audio recording. So you might want to take a look at this Noted app here in the Mac App Store.

Another thing to consider if you're going to record audio is getting a better mic than the mic that's in your MacBook because that's going to try to capture your voice. You want to capture what's going on in front of you. So an external microphone will help. You may not want to get an expensive microphone that's hard to carry around. So perhaps look at something like this that's $30. Samson Go Microphone which can clip onto your Mac and record omni directional. That's what you want. So it's going to record everything in the whole room not just focused on you and the laptop user.

So when it comes to taking notes on your Mac you have tons of different options. In a lot of cases you can use any of the suggestions that I had. But if you have specific needs. If you're in school and you like to take meticulous notes, or if you go to a lot of meetings at work and you have to take good notes during those meetings, then you may want to look into some of these other options to see if any of them can increase your productivity or learning experience.