Linking To Notes and Documents on Your Mac

Until macOS Sonoma comes out there is anther way to link from one note to another using a trick with iCloud Drive sharing. This same trick will still be useful once we have Sonoma to link to Notes from other apps and documents. You can also link to documents and files using this same trick.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you a trick for linking to your own Notes and Documents on your Mac. 
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Now one of the things that you may want to do on your Mac is link from Note to Note or link from say a document or a calendar event or somewhere else to a note. It seems like this should be a like a built-in functionality. If you're in Notes you should be able to, maybe, select a bit of text like this and then create a link. As a matter of fact you can go and create a link. That's under Edit, then Add Link or Command K. Then you can put a link destination and here you can put a URL to a webpage. But you can't link to another note. It seems like you should really be able to do this. It would make Notes much more dynamic. In fact, you will be able to do this in macOS Sonoma. But if you want to do this now there's a way to do it. In fact even in Sonoma you'll be able to use this to link to Notes from other things, like say linking from a Calendar event to a Note or maybe a document to a note or even a note to a document. Let me show you how this trick works. 
So the first thing you want to do is you want to Share this note. Now you may think, well I don't want to share it. I don't want anybody else to have access to this. That's fine. We're not going to allow anybody else to have access. Just us. I'm going to select this note called Another Note and I'm going to click on the Share button here. I could also go to File, and then Share, and it will actually take you to the same place. You can see the same menu comes up either way. I want to switch to Collaborate. So, if you're on Send Copy switch to Collaborate. It should remember this for the next time. We're not actually going to collaborate with anybody. We're just going to collaborate with ourselves, really. So I'm going to use the Invite With Link option and then it's going to come up with this. We have to invite somebody. So the trick is I'm going to use my own Apple ID here, like this, and I don't really need to do anything else here. I'm going to click Copy Link. 
Now there are a bunch of options when I first did this. Like you can only have invited people access. Yeah, that's the default and you want that. Permissions can make changes while others to invite. Those don't matter because we're not inviting anybody else. So I didn't bother. I just left it at the default settings. Now I have in the Clipboard a URL. I can use that URL as my link. So let me go back to this first note here. Select this text and do that Command K and then Command V to Paste this link in. So you can see this link here, it goes to iCloud.com/notes. It's an iCloud link. So I'm going to click OK. Now if I click this link look what happens. It goes to the other note. So I always have a link to this other note. This isn't anything special once we get macOS Sonoma because there is a way to do that inside of Notes in Sonoma without having to fake everything using a Share. 
But this link can come in handy in a number of different ways. For instance here in the Calendar app I can have a test event. Let's say this note pertains to that event. I can click here, under Add URL, and paste this same link in. Now when this event comes up and I want to access the note I can click on that note right there and it takes me right to the note in the Notes app. So that is handy. Then you can do this in other places as well. Say, for instance in Context, say in a document. In Pages, for instance, I could have a document like this and I could set a link here. It's Command K here as well. I could say link to a webpage and put the link like that. Now when I use it in here it will take me to that note. So it works just about anywhere. 
The one place it won't work really well though is in Safari because when you're already in a web browser if you try to use it there it's going to take you to the web browser version of Notes. So that's probably not ideal. You want it to go to the Notes app. 
Now you can do the same thing with documents. So the idea is exactly the same. I'm going to go to Share here and I'm going to make sure I have it set to Collaborate, like before. I'm going to Invite With Link. I'm just going to invite myself, like that. Then Copy Link. Keep in mind this document has to be stored in iCloud for this to work. It won't work with local documents. But if you're using iCloud Drive for all your documents then it's already taken care of. So now in Notes here I'm going to select some text. I'm going to use Command K again. Paste this link in there. You can see it's linking to a Pages document there. What you would hope is you can click that and it would open Pages and go right to that document. It doesn't quite work that well. If I click it here it actually takes me to the document itself in the Finder. So now I have to double-click it and now it will open up in Pages. It would be great if it opened it up in Pages by default but actually this could be useful as well if you don't necessarily want to open up the document but maybe go to the folder that it is in or do something with that document itself, not necessarily open it up. So it's okay. It's something you can use again here in Notes. You can do it in the Calendar app. You can do it in other apps. Any place where you can put a link. But, of course, if you were to do it in Safari you'd end up with the same thing as the note. It's going to open up the version of Pages, the web version that will bring in the browser and it will bring up this document there which isn't really ideal.
Now this can actually work with any file as long as it is in iCloud Drive. You can see my Documents folder is in iCloud Drive. I've got a PDF file here. So let me go and share that. I can do the same thing here. Switch to Collaborate. I can then go to Invite With Link. I can just invite myself. Copy Link. Now here in this note I can have a link to the PDF using Command K. Paste this in here. You can see the link type is going to be iCloud Drive in this case. Now when I click on this it actually opens up a Finder window. It takes me right to that document. 
I don't think this is the type of technique that you're going to use a lot. Like have tons of notes linked to another notes and linked to the calendar and tons of Pages documents linked to Notes and all that. I think it is something that you might want to use occasionally when it is really important when you know you've got this note filled with information ready for a meeting. You can link the event to the note or when you know there's a Pages document that pertains to a certain note or calendar event or something else. It's a good technique to have up your sleeve when you really need it. As I said there's going to be a way in macOS Sonoma to link from note to note that is native to the Notes app and doesn't use a trick like this. We will be looking at that as we get closer to the launch of macOS Sonoma later this year. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Linking To Notes and Documents on Your Mac”

Suzanne Sanger

10 months ago

Is or Will there be a way to do this on an iPad? I’ve been wanting this feature for YEARS!

Gary Rosenzweig

Suzanne: Did you try using this exact same technique on the iPad? It will probably work.

Ken Nellis

Another trick in Notes to paste a link to a document doesn't rely on iCloud or Sharing the document. The trick is to create a URL using the "file:" scheme. With some trickery, you can get Safari to create the URL for you. As with your trick, it doesn't open the document itself, but opens the containing folder and selects the specified document. Happy to provide more detail if interested.

Ken: Right, that's the opposite. Linking TO a file in a Note rather than linking to a Note. Inconsistent, but works in lots of cases.

Linking To Notes and Documents on Your Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “Linking To Notes and Documents on Your Mac”

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