Keep Small Notes Always In Reach On Your Mac With Stickies

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Stickies on your Mac. 

Stickies is an app that is on your Mac. Even if you've never heard of it you already have it. It comes with macOS. In fact it has been around longer than almost any other Mac App having originally been included with Macs since 1994. You can launch Stickies anyway you like. I use the App Launcher here, search for it, and there it is. 

When you first launch it you'll get two little sticky notes here. They appear as two little windows. You can click and drag these windows by grabbing the top part. But notice they don't look like regular windows. They don't have all the tools and the title and everything at the top. They're mostly just a text area over a colored background. There are a few buttons here at the top. You can drag these around to wherever you want. You can grab the corners and resize them however you want. You can create new ones using File, New Note. That will bring up a new little window here. So you can create as many of these as you want. Yes, they look like little sticky notes that you might stick to your screen, except they are actually windows in an app on your Mac. 

If I were to launch another app, like say Safari, you can see how they're covered up here. You could bring sticks to the front and those windows come to the front, just like any other window. But I'll show you how to make the windows stay on top of all other windows in a minute. 

Now what can you do in a Sticky? Well, you can type whatever you want, like that. You can have several lines of text like this. You can select text and you can style it just like normal text in a normal app. Go to the font area here and you've got your standard commands for Bold, Italic, Underline, keyboard shortcuts. You can enlarge the size of text and do other things with text, even changing the color of the text or going to show fonts to bring up the Text Control here and change the font and other ways to change the size and all of that. So you can style this text like you want, like this, and do all sorts of things to make the text interesting. 

You can also bring other things into here. For instance, you can drag and drop graphics. You can see there's a little graphic element there in the sample note. So you can Drag & Drop images in here but you can't resize them. So very small little things probably work best. You can even drag PDF's in here as a way to get small vector graphics into them. You can't get too much more advanced than that. There are no tables or checkboxes or lists or anything. But you can certainly make your own list manually using any characters you want. 

In addition to that you can change the color of any of the notes. Just select the note you want and then go to Color and you'll see you've got six different colors to choose from. So select a different color and it changes the color of the background. You just have those six colors here. No more variations than that. 

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Now what you're seeing here aren't little text files. They're actually a little database of Sticky Notes that you can't access any other way. If you quit Stickies they're all gone. But just launch Stickies again and they all come back. You can't Close them or you lose the note completely. If I try to click the little Close Box here it will warn me that by closing it I'm essentially deleting that note. So, you only really want to use Stickies for information you want to kind of keep on the screen. Although you can click the button all the way to the right here to basically collapse the entire sticky into just a narrow bar with the first line there. You can click it again to expand. You can also do the same thing by double-clicking anywhere in the top portion, like that. You don't need to do anything to Save. It's all automatic. So if I type something else here, like this, and I just quit stickies and I run it again you can see it remembered everything. Just by making a change it is automatically saving. 

Now if you do want to Save what's in here you can. You can go to File and then Export Text and you get to export from there as plain text which will get rid of the formatting, RTF, which will keep the formatting and RTFD if you need to keep any images you may have embedded inside a sticky. So you can use Stickies as a place to start writing something or start a note. Then you can either select and Command C to Copy and Paste it somewhere else or you can save it out as a text file or RTF file. 

Now if you do that, say I'll save this out as an RTF file to the Desktop like this, you can actually close this sticky and delete it and then you've got this RTF file here which you can open up in TextEdit. But also in the Stickies App you can import either text or an RTF file like this and you can see you can bring it back pretty easily. 

Now you can do two things with the windows to make them more useful. One is that you can make them translucent. If you select a window in Stickies, like I did the green one there, you go to Window and select Translucent. Notice how it's now semi-transparent. So you can have something underneath it and still see it there. It's useful for taking notes, say if you're looking at a webpage. But in addition to that, you can also set it to Float on Top. What that means is that sticky is going to stay on top of any other app I may have open. So, for instance, I'll launch Pages here and you can see here even with this Pages document covering the entire screen, this Sticky window because I made it float on top, stays on top. So I can interact with my Pages document here, and I can still see the Sticky note.  I can click on the Sticky note and now I can type in it or edit it and go back and forth pretty easily.

Now a lot of people ask how Stickies are different than Notes. Well, first of all the Stickies they have a position on the screen. They'll stay where you put them and you can see many at the same time. There's also the whole translucent and Float on Top aspect. Although you can make a Notes window with a Notes App do the same. 

Another thing about them is they're not saved to iCloud. They are just on your Mac. As a matter of fact there's no stickies app for the iPhone or iPad. If you have a second Mac it won't sync stickies between them. It's just a locally saved database of stickies. 

I want to share one tip for you that could make Stickies even more useful. You could easily create a Sticky from Select Text. One way to do that is to select text, like this. Then drag that text into the Dock to the Stickies App. That quickly copies and pastes the information into a new Sticky. Another way to do that is to select some text, like this, and then use the keyboard shortcut Shift, Command Y. That will also do it. The Stickies App doesn't even need to be running for this to work. It'll just launch Stickies and create this new Sticky note. 

So tons of different ways to use Stickies. Here are some examples. For instance you can use them as reminders but in a different way than the Reminders App does it. Instead of getting a notification you're just always going to have it visible on your Desktop. So, something like this that you'll just see all the time. Another use for them might be as a quick reference to something you need all the time, like having a little list, like this, handy if you use it in your work everyday.  Sometimes you need a piece of information but just temporarily, like for instance a tracking number for a package you're expecting in the next couple of days. You don't want to create a whole note for it and save it forever or anything like that. So a quick sticky that you can then delete when you're done with that information can be handy. A lot of people like to use Sticky Notes to store bits of information that they commonly copy and paste into email messages or text messages all the time. So kind of as another way to do text replacements especially if you've got a bunch of these and you can never remember the things to type to do the text replacement. Sometimes people use them just to start writing, just to quickly get an idea down. You can do that in Notes certainly. Some people like stickies better for it and then you can copy and paste into a Pages document later. 

There's just a ton of different things you can do with them. There are certainly plenty of people that never use stickies on their Mac and there are other people that rely on it everyday. So if you've never tried Stickies before give it a look. It's good to know it's there in case you need it in the future. Thanks for watching.