Live: How To Use Apple Notes Effectively

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.

On this live episode, let's take a look at using the Notes app effectively.

Okay, so I've talked about the Notes app many times in individual tutorials, and there are many reasons to use the Notes app and many things it can do.

It's really evolved quite a bit since when Apple first introduced it many years ago.

there's a lot you can do with it now and also it has a lot of fans now a lot of people really like using it uh they like keeping all sorts of notes and records and things in it using it for all sorts of things so um let's go and take a look here at the notes app so basically what notes is is it is a uh a way for you to just type text include other bits of media and things as well in just, you know, this format that's not creating a document.

You're not creating a document like you would in Pages or Word or TextEd or something like that.

You're just recording things into what is this library or database of just little notes.

And so you don't have to, you know, have all these files littered everywhere.

But it is kind of in this library or database that's part of your data that's not easily accessible as individual files.

So it's very different than using an app where you would say, you know, create a document like word processing thing.

And I think a lot of people struggle with like when they should be using notes and when they should be creating documents.

So definitely if you are wanting to create something for publication, whether it's like a document you distribute around, create a PDF printout, or it's just something you're giving to somebody else, like a paper you're writing for school or a report you're writing for work, that's a document.

And that's something you would use pages or word, or maybe a spreadsheet app or maybe Google docs or something like that for.

But when it's for you, when it's something you just want to write down and like you're primarily the only person that's looking at it, then that's a good use for a note.

And that's where the note comes in.

Now there's a lot of crossover, certainly, but that's, I think, a good way to, you know, think about when to use notes.

And you could use it for all sorts of things.

You can use it to help yourself get organized.

You can use it for productivity, for just remembering things.

I know I used to keep a little notebook on my desk when I was working before, you know, notes existed, and I would just jot down things in there and just page after page after page of notes, a lot of which I would never need to go again but sometimes i would turn back a few pages to remember something that i had written down and it's just where like everything went was my brain dump there and the notes app kind of takes place the place of that for a lot of people but you can also use it for traditional note-taking like uh in class classes in school you want to take notes you can use this instead of paper you want to take notes at a meeting at work any kind of thing i got on a zoom call a zoom meeting doing an online course, whatever it is you're doing, or even just doing your own work, you can have it open on the side and be keeping notes about what you're doing there.

Now, I'm going to assume here that we are using, under accounts here, that we're using iCloud.

Because in your internet accounts, like in iCloud, you have got the ability to have notes.

You can see I've got it right here.

I've got it enabled.

And that's primarily how most Apple users do things.

But you could also with, say, Gmail have notes.

But when you're using Gmail notes in the notes app, you're using Google's features for notes, which is not going to include most of what I'm talking about.

You can keep basic notes there.

And there are other systems that allow you to keep basic notes as well.

And the notes app will interface with them, but then you won't have a lot of these features.

Another thing about notes is, of course, it goes across all the Apple platforms.

So you've got notes on Mac, notes on iPad, notes on the iPhone.

and using iCloud, they sync across all of those.

So you can have a note you started on the Mac, you can add to it on the iPhone, you can review it on the iPad, you can go back to your Mac.

It's just always syncing your notes up.

So it's really useful for that.

But I'm gonna primarily look at on Mac here, but most of what I'm talking about could work on whatever device you feel most comfortable with using.

I know a lot of people use an iPad, for instance, should take notes in class.

And you could do that using a keyboard or the virtual keyboard on the screen.

So we've got here the in notes.

When you want to create a new note, you've got the little button here.

You've got file new note and it creates a new note.

And the first thing that you need to pay attention to when you create a new note is that first line.

The first line of text is different than every other line of text in that it's going to be used as kind of the title or think of it as an analog to the file name.

when it comes to creating a document.

So if I were to call this, you know, my test note, notice here in the little list here in the sidebar, you've got that as kind of the title.

So you want to pay careful attention to that first line.

Don't just start adding information there.

Give it a title every time, even if it's just the date and the subject or whatever it is, or just something that's a placeholder and you get back to it later.

Then after that, All the additional lines, this is just, you know, some info, some text, you know, whatever.

You can just keep typing after that.

It's this first line that's the most important in a note.

So you have to do pay attention to that.

It would almost be nice to have it be a separate thing, a note title.

But I kind of like the fact that it's kind of the whole idea here is you kind of, you know, everything's kind of easy peasy.

Just do whatever you want.

and having the first line be the title but it's just the first line and you go right to the second line it's not a separate field it's kind of a nice feel to it so um yeah so you treat that as the file name now you want to pay careful attention since i want to talk a lot about organizing you want to pay careful attention to some settings here you can see i've got here a list of everything i've got the i've got basically three columns it's very much like mail i've got the column here that shows me servers and folders.

In this case, I'm only using iCloud, so it has iCloud.

And you can see I've got several folders here under iCloud and also the all iCloud, which is just going to show me all my notes stored under iCloud.

And the next column here is a list of all of the notes.

And I've selected all iCloud, so I see all my iCloud notes.

I could actually change this to gallery.

And then you get this view, which I think is not really good for organizing and getting things done.

So sticking with list view here, you get all of this.

Now, if you go to note settings, you've got some things here.

You can sort them and having them sort by date edited or date created.

Date edited is always going to be putting your changes, your notes that you change at the top.

Date created, that is going to be keeping things in the order in which, you know, you created the note.

And then you could do by title, in which case the title is even more important because now it's alphabetical.

But you also have this checkbox here, group notes by date.

And you could see that here where I've got today, I've got 2024 notes.

You know, it would break it up by month.

So if I had more recent example notes here, it would say, say September and August and things like that.

So these are things to pay attention to when kind of organizing and just how to see your notes.

I'm just going to use it in this way.

works well for me, but you may want to try out the other methods as well.

And let's go into a node here, and I've showed you some of what you can do, right? You can just type text.

You have the ability to format text in lots of different ways.

I can select some text.

I can click this button for easy formatting.

You've got bold, italics, underline, strikethrough.

You've got different formats.

These are like styles and pages.

You've got title, which is automatically the first line there.

But then you have heading subheading and body which this is you can do monistyled like that you can do a bullet list and then you know you type like that and it will just put a bullet in front of each one you could switch to a dashed list you could switch to a numbered list which is kind of nice there block quote is another thing you can do and you can tell combine a numbered list and a block quote there.

You can also do check boxes like that.

And now you can, you know, check different items.

When you're checking items here and using a list like that, note there's a setting here for automatically short checked items, which will automatically move checklist items to the bottom of the list as they are checked.

I'd like to have that off and just keep the list in the order I've got it, but it could be useful to have that turned on if that's your style.

And yeah, you can go with these different formats here but you also have the ability to go to format and then you've got fonts you've got show fonts you could change to like another you know font there and change the size do you know all the stuff that you would expect to do if you really want to get technical about things so you've got these things here but you know you stick to these and uh you can do a lot there, especially the ideas here to be note-taking, right? So you want to be quick and you're not thinking about formatting stuff.

Most of the time you want to do that, that probably tells you, you probably want to be in Pages or Word or something and actually creating a document, not in the Notes app.

So yeah, you've got all the different things.

Let's take a look at making the contents of the note more manageable.

So you could just keep adding more stuff here and just keep adding text.

Eventually the list gets pretty long.

Let's go ahead and add some paragraphs of text here just by inserting some sample stuff.

So I've got like all this sample text here.

What you could do is you can create lines that are headings.

So I, with this, with the cursor blinking there, I'm going to go here and say, I want to make this a heading like that.

And then this one here, I'm also going to, let me type something or something else, and make that a heading as well.

Now, the cool thing about this is notice if I click there to put the cursor in there, I have this little triangle here or arrow.

If I click it, it will collapse everything underneath that heading to the next heading.

See how I could do that? This makes your notes more manageable.

You can have pretty long notes and have whole sections that are kind of hidden like this.

So, you know, I create some extra space here, like doing that.

Maybe this is like intro text.

This is, you know, something here.

And I do a heading.

I could do something minor like that and say, this is a subheading.

You know, when I can collapse the subheading, I can collapse this whole heading right there, collapse this, collapse this, really compress what I've got here.

And even though I've got all this information in this node, it's not like overbearing.

You know, it's not a big overbearing wall of text like this by collapsing these sections.

So this is really important.

I think one of the most important reasons this exists and uses for this is to help you have fewer nodes.

I often hear people that say, oh yeah, I use notes a lot.

I have like 500 notes or 1500 notes.

And I think at some point having too many notes makes the whole thing much harder to use.

And I think this can help with that.

Like for instance, say if you have a work meeting every morning and you decide I'm going to take notes at that meeting.

So you create a new note for that work meeting and it is time for the next work meeting.

You create a new note for that and a new note for the next one.

And you've had like a note a day on the work, the morning work meeting.

Instead, create a note called morning meeting, and then create a heading every day with, you know, that date and have all the notes for each thing underneath that.

You could even put it where, uh, like the most recent ones at the top, the most recent ones at the bottom and all of that.

And you can collapse these down to just focus on maybe today, but also the one from three weeks ago, because you're working on that project or something.

And the idea is then you just have one note instead of, you know, 200 notes a year.

So I think that's really useful, but also to make things more manageable if you're taking notes in class, as the teacher changes subjects, you can have a different heading there.

It's also useful, you know, just create a bunch of notes, a bunch of text as notes, and then you go back and you kind of edit them and you can kind of put these headings and subheadings in there just to make things more organized.

So that's really, I think an important organizational skill is using headings effectively.

So let's talk about the whole thing where you create lots of notes, right? So you want to organize notes.

So maybe you don't create 500 notes, but maybe you do have 50, right? So you want to organize it.

The most obvious organizational feature here is folders.

You can click here or go to file, new folder, and create a new folder with a name like that.

And then I can go here and drag a note into this folder.

Now, it's still going to be under all, right? Because by definition, that is all.

But this other folder here called notes, it's not there.

Why? Because I put it here instead.

So you can create as many folders as you want, organize your notes into them.

And a note is only in one folder.

It's located there.

You can see it in all.

you can search for it and look at it in other ways but it can't be in notes lectures and new folder it only can be one at a time so that is a good way to organize things in general if you have good names for your folders there and if you have a small number of folders i think if you have a hundred folders it starts to lose its utility but if you have 10 folders it could be very useful so I think as a first way to look at this um you could really you know organize well with notes or with folders they don't have to be by topic though you can think of it as like you could have a folder called archive for instance so the idea here is maybe I call this one archive and maybe I can even spell it correctly and then I've got archive here and the idea is I put notes you know, this is my current notes.

And then I'm done with this.

I can archive it.

And it's no longer in current notes.

It's no longer getting in the way because I look at this folder as my primary folder.

Then I look at archive and these are old notes, right? So I've cleaned things up.

My notes here is now nice and lean with just, you know, the one or seven notes that I know I need.

And archive's got the older notes if I want.

So you can do that.

You can do new, you can do old, you can do by project, you can break things up, work, personal, you know, all sorts of different things level of importance lots of stuff like that so uh yeah folders is useful and it's uh not the only way to organize because there are other ways including tags so let's go and i'm going to take um let's take these out here i'll just put these all in notes here so i've got like this in fact let me go and put all this stuff here in notes i've got this notes folder and it's just got a ton of stuff, class notes and all sorts of work notes and stuff.

So tags, you can tag a note and you could tag it anywhere inside the note.

And the way to do it is just anywhere in the note.

So let's say at the bottom of this, I could put a tag by typing the pound or hash symbol and just type something.

I'll just call this tag something.

And then it automatically changes it to a tag, and you see it's yellow there.

And I could tag something else, like this one, also with a tag.

And it could autocomplete there.

You kind of saw that happening.

So the idea is that tags could be used instead of folders.

So if I look at this section here on the left sidebar under tags, I could see this tag, and I can click on it.

And then what I'm going to get is a list here of everything with that tag in it.

So I've got now these two things here.

So it works just like a folder, right? Except, except I could go and I'm going to click on all tags there.

So I'm not really looking at just those.

I could go and add another tag.

So I could say, for instance, this is definitely something for work, right? Whereas maybe this is something for, you know, personal, right? So now I can look at my work notes, the ones that are tagged work, and I can look at my personal notes, the ones tagged personal.

And you can see here, I could actually click multiple times to get different things.

I'll show that in a second.

So there's my personal notes and there's that one.

But I also have, let's go here, all tags and say I've got that note, the tag called something.

And I've got both of those there.

So a note could be, I can have more than one tag.

It can't be in more than one folder.

So this is really useful.

Even like the basic thing where sometimes you have a note that can be work and personal.

It's like, which one do you put it in? And in which situation are you going to be looking for it in the wrong folder? But if you tagged it worked and you tagged it personal, you would find it when looking at either tag.

And you could do complex searches here.

So you could see how I could have something, that tag called something.

I click on it again.

You could see the cross going through it, the strikethrough.

So it's basically saying, show me all the tags right here.

Show notes that match the selected tag and something crossed out.

In other words, notes that don't have the tag something.

And I can do, say, something and personal, right? And I now will get things that all tags are selected, or I could say any tag selected.

So now I could say work, personal, or also for something personal and lecture.

show me things that have any of those but i can also say show me notes that have all of those or show me notes that are have personal something and not lecture right so you have all sorts of different ways of going through these and like you know figuring out which notes that you know you've got so you can tag notes with so many different things and you can put them at the top you don't have to put them at the bottom you can put them anywhere you put it in line with text um put them anywhere you want.

I've even done the thing where I've labeled it tags.

I said tags, colon, space, and then put all of these tags there.

And the idea being that, you know, I could clearly see where the tags are like that.

But you don't, you don't have to.

You can do your own style.

You can put them at the bottom.

You can put them at the top.

I'm going to, you know, cut them and paste them there like that.

So yeah, you could do all sorts of things.

Easy to delete.

there you go i don't know why that one wasn't taking but yeah so you've got they're easy to delete in all of this so um tags are really useful and i think far more useful than folders because they can do folders like you can just put one tag per note and that's it and then use them just like folders if you wanted to but you could also put multiple tags per note and you could do all these complex searches you can also go and create something called smart folders file new smart folder and you could pre-define these so you could say i want a smart folder that includes note matching all of these filters so tags and all selected and say i want it to be personal and also uh i could say you know other things like it's got to be in the most recent let's say the the date edited is in the last 30 days.

You know, and I could say the tags all selected and I could add more to this.

So you could create these smart folders.

I won't go too much into it now, but you create smart folders.

So you don't have to like click on these tags and get everything in the right, you know, selection.

You could say, oh, I really want things that are tagged work, but not personal, but they have to do with taxes and make that a smart folder and something you can easily access if you wanted to.

So you can get pretty complex with them, or you can keep it simple.

Tags are definitely something that you want.

And you could use folders now for something else.

Like I mentioned before, creating an archive folder could be useful.

So you say, okay, I'm going to buy current notes and archive as two folders.

And then I'm going to, you know, use tags for topics, right? Lots of cool ways to organize.

So yeah, there's that.

Now, when you're dealing with tags, one of the cool things you can do is you can be in a note and say, oh, okay, this is a personal right here.

And just trying to highlight that to show you a personal.

And I could go here and say, oh, let me see what else I've got that's personal.

Right.

And I could see all the notes here that are tagged personal, or I could see all the notes that are tagged something.

Right.

And then it's an easy way to get around.

Like if you've got a work project called Project Alpha.

You can create a tag called Project Alpha or Alpha, and then you can go here and see all the notes that are related, right? There's meeting notes, there's ideas, there's like a to-do list, there's, you know, deliverables, you know, all sorts of different things that are all tagged with that project.

And you can go look at it here, but you could also link from note to note.

So let's go ahead and take, I've got all these notes here, and let's say that I want to, I've got this development meaning note, and I want to link this test note.

I want to be able to get to it really easily.

So I've got this little list here, and I say C, and I want to be able to click here and jump to this note.

You can create a link to it.

The easiest way to do it is the shortcut, and it's greater than, greater than.

Two of those.

And then you've got a list here of your notes.

You could find it in the list or just start typing.

So if I start typing my, you know, test note, you could see it narrows it down.

I also have the ability to create a new note here.

But if I click my test note, you can see I've got this link here.

Now I'm viewing this note.

I click here, it jumps to this other note.

If I want, I can create a link back.

So I'll create a link back so I can go back and forth between these two notes really easily.

So this is really cool because you could have, say, meeting notes.

Then you have your project note thing and you've got like a to-do list.

And one of the items in the to-do list, really, you just want to refer back to the meeting because you've got notes in there about what this item is.

You can create a link from one note to the other, which is really cool and means that you can link notes together without having to worry about tags or folders or anything.

And you can link across tags and across folders to completely different things.

For instance, you could have a note that has, you know, notes about, say, if you work in, you know, IT or something, you could have notes about different servers.

And then you have a project that has to do with that server.

You could link to the note about that server that has, you know, all sorts of things about that server that you need to know and how to handle it and stuff.

So even though those two things may not be related directly because you've got some notes about your servers that you maintain and you have some notes about projects, a link like this from one note to another could help bridge that gap.

So there are really cool ways to do things, but you can do even more because if you really wanted to create some organization, you can create index notes.

So notice here, I've got some old notes here that are like for classes.

Like I would do an example of like, oh, you've got your, you're taking notes in classes, right? Well, let's say that you wanted to create a note of class notes, right? And you want to link to stuff and you want to say, okay, astronomy for that class, let's make that a heading for this.

I just want to link to my astronomy notes.

So I'll do greater than, greater than, and I'll link to this note.

And I'll do greater than, greater than, and I'll link this to this note, right? And then I'll do Zoology.

And I'll make that heading as well.

And then I will link to this note like that.

And you can see how I can build basically a table of contents to go to class notes.

To be able jump to any of these thatI want like that.

So I can go to class notes and then find the class note.

I create a new set of notes for some classes.

And then I could add them easily here in this list.

And I can, you know, collapse this list like that, you know, each one.

So you create these index notes.

And you could do this for all sorts of stuff.

Like you can create one that's for work and has all of your projects, has links to meetings, has links to, you know, all sorts of other things that you could do and just organize this any way that you want.

And then you can even have links back to stuff.

Like, I don't know if you would do it here for class notes, but you know, you could have a, uh, like, you know, link here that goes back to class notes, right? So you go here, here, and then you can go back to class notes like that.

So you could have these ways to return.

It's like you're building personal web, right? Your own web or wiki, you know, internet, whatever of all your stuff.

If you organize it with links back and forth between notes, you could do some really cool, useful organizational things.

So, and, and, you know, there's other things you can do as well.

Like for instance, you can pin notes.

So I can go to a note like this one.

This one's super important.

I control, click it, right, click it.

I could say pin.

And now it's always going to be at the top.

And for a note like this, it's like an index of all my notes.

I would probably want it up there pinned to the top.

And then, yeah, you could do, you know, on top of that, you could still search for notes.

So you don't have to do this.

That's the important thing is you could do it as you want.

If you say, boy, this is too much work.

I just want to just have a note for a class and that's it.

Then you can use the search bar up here.

And, you know, as long as you know a term like astronomy here and you could search and you'll find all of that in there.

So yeah, you could do all sorts of cool things like that.

You've got the ability to organize as you want.

So I hope that's kind of the big takeaway from this is there's a lot of different ways to organize.

You could do folders or not folders.

You can do tags or not tags.

You can link from note to note, build your own index notes for things or not.

You can choose which ones you use.

you could switch it up and change it.

You could use tags for work.

You can use a folder for home.

You could do none of this and just have a bunch of notes that you just have and say, well, it's too complex to have organization.

I only need like 10 notes.

I'm just going to not worry about all this.

And that's fine.

Just like the notes themselves, where you could just type text that have this any way you want, you can do this any way you like and change it later on.

So there's a lot of cool ways to organize things.

And Apple's just making all these tools.

It's like a toolbox of stuff for organizing your life.

And you can use it or not use it.

And probably it's not a good idea to use all of it.

Probably a good idea to say, hey, I really vibe with tags.

I'm going to do that.

Or I just want, I don't want tags.

I just want to have like four folders and everything goes into a folder.

That's fine too.

So I just wanted to kind of, you know, go more into notes here and what you can do with each individual, you know, note.

And then I'm going to look at some questions that there might be there.

If you have any questions, put them in the chat.

I'll take a look at them.

I know there's some there already.

So in each individual note, there's a lot of other stuff you can do besides text.

For instance, you can go and attach something here.

You can attach a file.

You can attach a photo.

Let's try that.

Let's do a photo here.

And I'll just grab a photo like this one and add it.

And one of the annoying things about notes I find is that by default, it's just going to put the width of the photo to be the whole width of the page there.

But you don't have to just use that.

You can control click, right click, or two finger click on it and say you as small, which is what I usually do.

And then you get a small version of the image.

And you can still select it and hit the space bar and quick look the image so you can still look at it uh but it's not going to like take over the node especially you know and this may just be a small item compared to like the rest of your node so you've got that you can also use your devices to do things now if you're on an iphone or ipad you could just there's a button for sketching and you could just do a sketch because you're using your uh you know touch screen maybe an apple pencil on the ipad too but on the mac it's got this neat feature where you could have your phone and or your ipad just you know the same one use the same icloud account and you could say oh i'm going to add a sketch and then the screen's going to turn to a sketch thing and i could sketch something and you know click the the check mark there and it should insert it here.

And yeah, it did there at the bottom of that note.

So, you know, you get the ability to do that.

And also notice there are other things here.

I could use the camera on my phone or iPad to scan or take a photo.

So those are kind of neat.

But what's even cooler than that, I think, is recording audio.

If you go to record audio on any device, the Mac, it works here.

You can do a recording and you can't quite see it.

It's underneath me here.

there it is and you can record record some text and you can see it's just recording and it works just like a voice memo so you've got this recording here and when I click done it will appear here as this little recording and you can see it gives you a transcript it automatically transcribes it I think that relies on, you know, it's certain, you have to, older Macs might not do it.

Well, older Macs, older iPhones, older iPads, it may have to do with, you know, the capabilities of the processor, whether or not you get a transcript.

But if I double click and go in here, I can see the transcript.

And I could even go in here and say, add the transcript to the note.

So I can use this to record, say add transcript to the note.

And then I could delete the recording if I wanted to, or I could leave it in there.

So that's kind of a cool thing you can do.

and if you're in a meeting or in a class you can just record the meeting or class that way like using your device as a microphone to record which is kind of neat so when you can still take notes while doing that so that's kind of cool you also have the ability to include you know i think this like basic but it shouldn't be overlooked if you type the url like this it's a a link and it will go to like a website, which I think makes it really useful because, you know, think of it like you're doing research for something online.

And what would you do if you went to a bunch of pages and you found some pages that were useful? You would bookmark them and you would add them to your 50,000 bookmarks that you have.

Well, instead you can just add links in a note, you know, just copy and paste the links into the note.

And then you have a list of links here.

You could add, you know, some description like that underneath, you know, and create things that have descriptions that are a little more useful than having just a bookmark.

And then they're not cluttering your bookmarks and you can organize them under headings and all sorts of stuff.

So that's kind of useful.

The links are simple, but shouldn't be overlooked.

You can, when you do a photo, I'm going to go, or a sketch, let's go and add a photo again.

And I will add one.

I'll just add, you know, this one here.

Uh, no, you can mark it up.

You've got the markup tools, just like you do, uh, in any other, uh, you know, app where, you know, like preview for instance, or in mail, you know, and you could draw arrows onto things and add text and do all sorts of stuff.

Just scribble if you want, you know, like that, um, sketch and create.

shapes and stuff.

So you've got that ability done and you'll see it goes back in here.

And that works for, you know, just photos, but it also works for PDFs too.

So you have that ability and that's important too, because sometimes you want to take notes where there's something visual and you want to mark it up.

I mean, you're in a class, the teacher shows something on the board, you take a quick snapshot of it with your iPhone and you're taking notes or maybe your iPad.

And now you can go in and mark it up and circle the thing that you like, or you could do it later when you're, you now reviewing your notes you can mark up the uh the image like that so so yeah markup is is important uh you have the also the ability to create tables which has probably the weakest part of notes right now you can do these tables like this um and you know you just get this four by four table here you can click on these uh you know the the top there and then click here and say odd column before add column after, delete column, and create new columns.

You can create new rows, that kind of thing.

You can just press return here in the last cell and create a new row.

They're not little spreadsheets.

Unfortunately, you can't do spreadsheet stuff with them, but if you need tabular type data, like this is going to be date and this is going to be something you record and notes to it, you can use it as a simple table.

I think if you really want to get into tables, of course, then you're talking about documents, pages, numbers, and all.

But it is there.

The other part is, and it's not really so much about organizing your life, though, but it is important for this, is you can share a note like this, and you can collaborate.

Notes collaboration is powerful.

For instance, you're in a meeting at work and there's 70 of you there.

Instead of everybody taking their own notes, you can have a collaborative note where everybody's taking the same notes, right? You can add to it.

Somebody else can add to it.

And, you know, or maybe it's a note with 30, a meeting with 30 people, but you and the other two people on your team collaborate on a single note.

So that's kind of useful.

And you can almost communicate back and forth in real time inside that note while the meeting is going on.

Same thing for a class.

and a few friends can actually have a collaborative note for that class.

But you could do collaborative notes for all sorts of things.

Like for instance, if I'm going on a trip with a friend, I will sometimes, you know, we have notes about things to do, places to stay on a trip, that kind of thing.

Important information.

Do a collaborative note about that trip.

And instead of having to like message the person like, hey, we should go visit, we should go do this trail while we're there.

I just add it to the note under like a heading saying, you know, trails, you know, that kind of thing.

And he could just collaborate back and forth and, uh, you know, do that for all sorts of different reasons.

Collaboration is powerful, not exactly organization for you.

And it's a little different at the beginning.

I said, if it's something you're going to publish or turn in like a report or something like that, then it's a document for pages, word, et cetera.

If it's something for you, it's for it's notes.

Collaboration is kind of the exception there where it's, it is just for you.

Whereas you are like maybe a group of three people that are just personally going to sharing this note and collaborating on it.

But if the three people collaborating on that note were then going to turn in a report, then that would be something that then you would go to a, like an app, like pages and prepare that report there.

So, you know, and there are ways to deal with that.

Like, for instance, like say you want to start in, you start in notes and you realize this is really a document.

I should be working in pages.

you actually have the ability to go to file and there's open in pages which basically converts the note to pages opens it up as a pages document and you're ready to go so it's a really easy way to get from notes to pages which means notes can be a useful place to start a document like you have an idea like if you're a writer and you have an idea and you don't want to waste time creating it you know thinking of a title a file put it somewhere just start a note start writing and then after you've got like a couple pages done, then say, okay, this is going to work.

Let's go and use file open in pages, convert this to a document, and I'm working on it as a writing document from now on.

But Notes was really handy in getting me started.

So I'm going to look at some questions here.

Let's see.

So somebody asked, is Notes comparable to OneNote? Yes, it is.

They're not a lot to each other.

I haven't used OneNote in a little while, but I'm sure OneNote has features, Notes doesn't, and Notes has a feature.

OneNote doesn't, but yeah, they're very similar.

I don't know if there's a way to import.

I don't think there's a way to import directly from OneNote, but you can go to File and say Import to Notes, and I think it accepts text documents maybe or RTF documents.

It's certainly copying and paste works.

I know that.

I'm not sure.

You can also import Markdown.

If you can export to Markdown format, which is a text format from OneNote, then you can certainly import into Notes.

But hey, you know, copy and paste is always like a good option too.

Let's see, somebody said that twice when they, during syncs, the tags are replaced.

So lost that organizational effort.

I wonder if that has to do with maybe one of your devices is using a version before they introduce tags or it could just be a bug, right? So hopefully it doesn't happen too often.

I haven't experienced that.

Let's see.

Let's see.

If you place a large JPEG, it's too big, then we're placing with a smaller JPEG.

Yeah, it's tough, but remember, you can copy and paste too.

So like, let's say, I mean, cause this is, this is a huge image here.

This one is really big and detailed.

Look at that.

So a lot of resolution there.

I'm storing a lot of data in this note, but if I go to photos, right.

And I grab that same one, right.

I'll go and I'll, um, let's say I will.

Oh, uh, edit it in the image, uh, edit with, and I'll say, yeah, let's open it in preview.

And now when it's in preview, I have the ability to shrink it down.

There it goes.

So here it is.

It's a big, big image in preview.

Huge.

Right? 6,000 by 9,000 plus.

But I'm just going to go to tools and I'm going to say just size.

And this is, you know, obviously something that's taking me a little while, but I'm going to do 600 by 400.

There we go.

So now I've reduced the quality quite a bit of this individual image here.

And hopefully notes has not, or a preview hasn't frozen up on me doing that.

Let's see, that's the photos app.

So there it goes.

And the idea is here, what I'm going to show you, I'm not going to wait for a preview to finish whatever it's doing, is it's going to, oh, there it is.

Okay.

So I can just, you know, select all copy, right? And I can go here and then I should be able to paste, collect all, copy, paste.

there we go so i've pasted it in so this is you could see lower resolution so you would do have options that's not something i would want to do all the time but as i'm going to talk about in a minute you probably shouldn't have too many images and notes anyway also you could always create a shortcut that would compress an image down make it smaller and then put it into the clipboard so you can paste it in so there's there are ways around that um yeah yeah so so that's a way to do it and that actually kind of leads me into like you know one of the things i was going to talk about uh later is um the rules like to i think try to get the the most out of notes uh number one keep it light so not too many images right an image like this great if this illustrates a point or if you take a picture of the whiteboard and a class during a pivotal moment of the lecture, you know, great.

But, you know, you shouldn't be like importing, like saying, oh, my trip to Africa and then put in like 150 pictures in the note.

Like, keep it light.

Think about every image.

Does it really add to the note? Do I need it in there? The Photos app, the Photos Library, that's for pictures.

Or you have pictures as files on a folder somewhere.

In notes, it's just for notes.

If you need a picture to help the note be more valuable, then by all means put a picture or two in there, but keep it light in terms of notes.

Same thing for PDFs.

Like a PDF of a scan of like a piece of a map or a diagram in a textbook, put that in there as a scan from your phone, great.

But a 72-page PDF document, no, don't put that in notes.

That's a file you have somewhere else.

And that's separate from notes, right? So keep it light on when you come to that.

And also the second thing is keep it tight.

Don't have too many notes.

You know, I've said this a lot of times before.

Too many notes, if you find it becoming harder to just navigate through these notes, then you have too many notes.

There are ways to deal with that.

With, for instance, archiving.

I talked about here creating an archive folder, moving some of your notes into there.

but you don't have to just, you know, keep them in notes.

I could take something like this, like, oh, I graduated school.

This was an old lecture here.

I have the ability to export as a PDF or markdown.

And once this is a PDF, you know, I could save this out as a PDF file and I've got everything in it.

And I could save that to an archive notes folder in the finder.

I could have it forever and I can get rid of it here in notes to lighten up the load in notes to keep my notes database small or more compact, not have this list be huge, that kind of thing.

So think about archiving notes, archiving old stuff, even copy and paste.

If you're like, wow, this doesn't need to be a PDF, I could just go and copy and paste this into some other work document I've got or copy and paste it into a text document.

consolidated notes, that's another one.

You know, I talked about that here at the beginning in this test note here, having the different sections here, right? So maybe you don't start off thinking that this is going to be a series of meetings, right? You have, we're having a work meeting, great, take notes.

Then a week later, we're having another work meeting, great, another set.

And then it's like, we're going to have a work meeting every Monday.

And now you're thinking, oh, you know what? There's three work meeting things.

I'm going to combine them.

I'm going to copy and paste from one note to the other, create one note that's just going to have different sections for each work meeting.

And now I've combined all those notes into one, consolidated, and now my notes is a little neater.

So you can keep working like that.

And all the time, be thinking about different ways to optimize and to make things better, lighter, that kind of thing.

Think about whether, you know, oh, I've been doing this as notes, but maybe should be documents.

Maybe a good alternative to notes.

And another question that I saw in the chat was text edit.

TextEdit creates files and it can create rich text files or text files.

And I use TextEdit all the time to create notes.

The difference is that the notes I'm creating with TextEdit are notes that go with files.

So I'm going to create a new MacMost video.

I've got the video editing file.

I've got the exported file.

I've got the thumbnail.

I've got a bunch of images maybe I've put together for it.

A whole bunch of stuff that has to do with that video upgrading.

I put them in a folder.

I put a text file with each one.

That's the notes for that video.

So maybe it's a few things.

So make sure I talk about this.

Here's a little outline, that kind of thing.

Maybe here's what I want to use for the description or the title of the video.

That goes into a text file that sits there with those other files.

The reason it's not notes is because I want that to be with some files.

It's describing and adding to those files.

So I'm using text edit for that.

But I use notes for other things when usually they don't have anything to do with files.

Which leads me into like the last thing I want to talk about, which is basically what do I use notes for? So just to give you an idea, after talking about all of this, I obviously I'm not in school.

I don't go to work meetings.

So what do I actually use notes for? Just to show you how diverse this can be.

I have actually four different things I use notes for.

First thing I have is I have a note that's not too different from like this kind of thing here.

but it's called uh you know my week and in that note i've got a checklist of each mac each video i want to create that's a mac most video i have the things i want to create for patreon i've got a list of other tasks i need to do that are normal on a weekly basis like send out the newsletter uh you know i've got a couple online meetings and things that i attend and go to and stuff like that So I've got a couple of little check boxes there and I've got other events, things that might be unusual, dentist appointment or something like that, that are there.

And what I do is every Sunday night I go in and I clear it out because it usually has all the old stuff with checks next to everything I've accomplished.

I clear it out and I put new things in there or in cases where it's like newsletter, I just uncheck the box.

And that's my weekly work note, right? And then the great thing about that is it's free form.

I can just have it be a bunch of checklists one week, but if there's something unusual going on, I can put a whole paragraph of stuff or a photo in there if I need to.

I'm not restricted to, you know, is what I can add.

So I've got weekly plan, my weekly planner.

I've got my oldest note that goes back to the original notes app.

And it was the first note I created is watch read recommendations.

Somebody says, oh, I got a great book for you.

Or have you seen this TV show? Or sometimes I ask them, Have you seen any good documentaries lately? And they give me some recommendations.

I have a note that goes into, broken up into sections by like TV show, movie, book, your podcast, whatever it is.

And when somebody recommends something to me, even if it's something I hear, I'm watching some social media and somebody recommends something, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna check that out.

It goes in that list.

So this is kind of my memory, my brain for storing little recommendations.

And I will, you know, delete items as I've either, you know, check them out, watch them, or maybe determine and it's not something I want.

It's been an ongoing list for 10 years.

I've got trip planning, something I use notes for all the time.

I'm going to go on a trip, like I went to Africa earlier this year, Africa trip.

I put in there links to the different, you know, to the tour company, links to my flights, information about stuff, ideas of what I wanted to do, a packing list, a list of recommendations, a list of YouTube videos that had advice that I haven't watched yet.

I mean, I just kept adding to it and adding to it, removing things as I didn't need them anymore.

and even while I was on the trip, I could refer to it.

And then while I was on the trip, I could add notes at the bottom about things I needed to remember when I get home or whatever.

So every trip I do, I do a note for it.

And if I'm traveling with somebody, it's a collaborative note.

But if it's by myself, it's just my own note.

Trip planning is big.

Separate from that, I've got a list in reminders, my packing list, but I could actually, I often start that in the notes.

I start the packing list there.

So you could go back and forth.

and also I use it for quick capture of ideas, the other thing I use.

So I have an idea, and I just don't know what it's going to be.

And it's just this idea for a video or whatever.

I will start off in a note, but those don't usually last.

I will put them there, and then it will become something and goes into my list of ideas for MacMost or for a short story or whatever it is.

But the idea is I don't want to waste any time, so I create a quick note, and then I feel like, oh, this note either has to grow to belong with my notes or it needs to go somewhere else or be incorporated in some other note to-do list or whatever.

So that's what I use notes for.

I think the important thing is though that you can use notes for so many different things in so many different ways.

Don't be afraid to switch it up.

Just because you say, I'm going to use tags.

If three weeks later you find tags aren't helping you, stop using tags.

If you use folders and you find there's a bunch of folders and you're not using them, stop using the folders.

Try different things.

Try a different tag structure.

Create an index note like I showed, but if it's not helping you, forget about the index note.

Just have good titles or whatever it is you want to do.

Don't be afraid to mix it up.

All too often, I find people that, you know, they decide this is how I'm going to do it, and then they really push it to try to conform to the original idea, and it just doesn't work in practice.

You really don't lose anything by changing it.

Because the goal here is to get notes to help you organize your life, whether it's just your online life, your work life, your, you know, whatever it is.

Get notes to do that.

And if that means using tags, great.

If not, don't use tags.

Don't feel like you're missing out because you're not using tags.

It's just a tool in the toolbox.

Either use it or don't use it.

Don't be afraid to change it later on.

So anyway, that's, I think I've talked long enough about notes There's plenty of good stuff.

Experiment.

Play around with it.

If you don't think notes can help you now, just play in notes.

Play with all this stuff.

And then you might find you don't use it for a few weeks until suddenly you do need it.

And then the skills you learn by playing around with it help you build your first note that's useful, which leads to your second note that's useful.

And next thing you know, you're far more organized by using notes, whether it's on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or on all of those devices.

Hope you found all of this useful and thanks for watching.