Tame Your Apple Notes By Using Sections

A new feature in Notes is the ability to have sections in each note that can be collapsed to hide the lines inside. You can use this to organize the information in a note and to use fewer notes.

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Video Transcript: Gary with MacMost here. Let's take a look at using Sections in Notes. 
A new feature in macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 and iPad OS 18 its ability to have collapsable sections in Notes. 
In Notes here your first line is typically your Title. This is usually in a large bold font. Then immediately the second line is just some regular text and it's in a non-bolded regular size font. But as you go through the note you can have your own headings by simply clicking here and then assigning the style heading to it. Then once you have a heading then you can continue to add more to the note. 
Headings look nice but they also serve a function, that's to define sections. Let me add a few more headings and some text under them. So here you can see I've got all these different headings and I've called them First Section, Second Section, and so on. Of course you would use a more descriptive heading depending upon what the content of your note was. Now the space between headings, this right here, is a Section. It's automatic. You don't have to define it as a section. You just have two headings and whatever is between them  will be a section. 
Now you don't have to do anything with these sections. You can just use them to make your notes look nice. A special thing you can do with these sections is you can collapse them. So to do that just move your pointer over the heading and notice you have this little arrow that points down. This is traditionally called a Disclosure Triangle although it is not really a triangle. Just kind of this little arrow that hangs out to the left and you only see it when you move your pointer over the heading. You can click this and it will turn to instead of pointing down it will now point to the right. This section is collapsed. It is all still there. You can click again right here and it will expand to reveal everything that is there. You can do that for any section. So, for instance, this one here. Also notice you can do it for subheadings. If you look under Formatting Styles you'll see that you've got Title Heading and Subheading. Heading and Subheading are the main ways you create Sections. 
So I can collapse this Subheading here, like that. I then got this section right here where I've got two subheadings under a main heading. I can collapse each one of these or both of them if I like to make everything a little bit more compact, like that. Here's how they work on the iPhone. You can see the same way that you basically create these headings here and then you can tap to collapse sections just like on the Mac. It works the same way on the iPad as well. 
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Now know there are some keyboard shortcuts you can use here. First, to make Sections you can use the keyboard shortcut, Shift Command H for Heading, and Shift Command J for Subheading. On US keyboards the J key is just to the right of H key so it is easy to remember. Just use those two. You can also use a keyboard shortcut to collapse and expand Sections. So I've got the cursor blinking here in the line that contains the heading. I can go to View and I have Collapse Section, Option Command and Left Arrow. So if I use that you can see how it collapses the section. It only works if  the cursor is blinking in the Heading. For instance if I put it here in the section I can't use that. You do have the ability to collapse all sections and expand all sections. Just use Shift in addition to those other keys. So Shift Option Command and then left arrow collapses all of the sections. Shift Option Command and the right arrow expands all the sections. 
One limitation of Sections is that they continue until the next heading. So, for instance, here I've got this Heading formatted line here, my subheading and another subheading. If I were to put more text here you may want this to be just part of this main section here and not part of these subsections. But if I collapse this, it collapses everything until the next heading. Another thing to know about is Copy & Paste works a little funny. Like, for instance, if I want to take this whole second section here and move it to the end I can do that by just selecting everything just like normal and using Command X. If I collapse this section I can select this entire line here. I'm going to triple click to do that. Then do Command X to Copy the whole section. Then I can go down here and I can Command V to Paste and it pastes the whole section. That is the simplest way to do it. But sometimes it doesn't work quite as well. So try it but always remember that Command Z for Undo is your friend if things go wrong. 
Now this is really useful for making your notes more compact. For instance, if this information here isn't something you really need you can collapse that section there and leave it collapsed and have your note like that knowing that there are more details under here. This is really useful for Lists too. So, you can have a list like this and put some items and let's turn this into a bullet list. What I can do here with this line is that I can turn this into a subheading and now I can nicely collapse that list to get it out of the way. 
One thing to note is that you can always use lines formatted as a title to collapse a section. It won't work if there is just one. You have to have a second one. So I can have another title here and let's format that as Title and now both of these title sections can be collapsed. So you actually do have three formats that can be used for collapsing sections if you want. 
Another thing you can do with this is to have fewer notes. I hear a lot from people that have hundreds of different notes and it's getting a little unwieldy. Well, you can use this to combine notes. So, for instance, instead of having one note per meeting you can have a note like this. You could see here you could have basically three notes in one, or just keep going with the notes. You can have all your work meetings that you may have had separate notes for before all under one note. You can just collapse all of the ones you aren't using. Also note that collapsable sections only work in notes that are stored in iCloud or on your Mac. They don't work in other Note Systems like if you have a Goggle Account setup with the Notes App.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Tame Your Apple Notes By Using Sections”

Sheldon

5 months ago

Thanks bunches

Cheryl

Another very informative and helpful video.

I use notes frequently and while format my content. However, I didn’t realize that I could collapse sections.

Many thanks, Gary.

Joe

Thanks I use notes a lot and this is handy.

John

4 months ago

Good information. Notes just keeps getting better and better.
I used to design software for an instrument my company sold. I really appreciate how Apple has managed to make Notes really useful with great features with a bare minimum of icons and buttons.