Using Freeform On a Mac: A Quick Course

Freeform is a useful app that allows you to create visual documents that aren't notes or word processing files. Learn how to add text, shapes, connection lines and more to build anything you like.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's an introduction to using the FreeForm App on your Mac. 
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FreeForm is an app that was introduced in 2022 in macOS Ventura. It allows you to create a document that uses lots of different graphics. Something that really doesn't fit the mold of a word processing document or work in an app like Notes which mostly uses text. FreeForm is built into the system so you've already got it on your Mac if you using Ventura, Sonoma, or beyond. Here I'm going to launch it from the Dock but you can launch it anyway that you like using Launchpad, Spotlight, and so on. The screen that you'll start on just shows you all of your boards. You may not have any yet. So a document inside of FreeForm is called a Board. You have a sidebar here which you can get rid of to create more space and you've got some Toolbar items, one of which here allows you to create a New Board. We'll do that and now we've created a New Board, it's just called Untitled, and we can click here and change its name if we like. The Board itself is blank but you'll probably see a bunch of dots here giving you a sense of the background of the board. You can turn off the dots with this button at the bottom right. 
Now on a Mac the primary elements that you would add to a Board are Textboxes, Shapes. You could add media-like photos and videos. You can also add Links to webpages and links to other documents as well. You can also add little notes. I'll just click here to add some text and it puts a little textbox in the middle. So I can double click it and now type something in it. So let's create something that will be kind of a title of this. Once I have a piece of text like this notice that I've got these controls here for changing the Font. I'm going to want to either select All with Command A to make sure that I'm changing the Font for everything here, or if I've just selected the item and I don't have the blinking text cursor in it that anything I do in this little menu will affect the entire thing. So, for instance, I can click here and I can change the color of the text. I can click here for more text colors and I get the Full Color Picker here as you do in many other Mac Apps. You can click here and you can change things about the Font. For instance you can make it Bold, and Italic if you want. You can Justify the text. You can change the text to a list type and you can click here to bring up the full Font Panel and change it to any Font you want. You also have a lot of control if you just select the item and then you go to Format and you can see there's Font and Text and Indentation and all of that with the keyboard shortcuts and you would expect. You can click here and change the size. Let's make this a little bit bigger. I can click and drag any element around. 
Now another type of element you can add is a Shape. If you click here you get the Shape Chooser which looks very similar to the one in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I'm going to choose a simple rectangle and now I can move this around and grab any corner or side to change its dimensions. I can also add Text here. So I can double-click in it and type something. Then it becomes like a Textbox but with a shape around it so you have all these controls here. Sometimes you'll see a little Three Dots Button which means there are more things that you can do that won't fit in this box. I can now take this shape, position it where I want. If I want to change the color of it you can see that there is a color dot there and I can change the color to something else. Note that I can also change the border color. So right now it is set to nothing. You can see the little red line through it. But I can change it to something like just a regular line or a dotted line. Then I can increase the size. Change the color of the line itself and then I can position this where I want and do what I want with it. I can continue to make other shapes. So I can do a circle here. I can shrink this down. I can type something in it. When you are changing the size if you hold the Shift Key down it will lock its ratio there. You can continue to add more shapes. So let's add one like this and let's make, to say, a bookcase. But let's say I want this to be rotated 90 degrees. If, instead of just clicking and dragging any one of these dots, if I hold down the Command Key I can now rotate it. If I hold the Shift Key down it locks to a 45 degree angle so I can kind of put it like that. I can create another shape to say be behind everything. Notice how it covers everything. All I need to do is go to Arrange and Send Backward or Send All the Way to the Back. It will do that. If I click on it here I can change its color or perhaps just give it a border like that, change the color of the border, and then give it No Fill and have it like that. So you can see it is still behind these other objects. Note that while moving things around you want to get things just perfect you can use the arrow keys on your Mac as well. So I can use Arrow Keys to move one pixel at a time or Shift and Arrow Keys to move in tenths, so I can get this exactly where I want. 
Now an important thing to know about FreeForm Boards is that they have no edges. So instead of thinking of this as a page where there are actual borders and sides, it's not the case here. I can use the trackpad, two fingers on a Magic Mouse, and move around and you can see there are no edges.  I can use two-fingers on the trackpad and pinch In or I can use this control here to zoom out and you can see there's just infinite space on all sides. I can zoom In and Zoom Out. I can move this around and I don't have to worry about the edges of the page at all. If I feel like I want to create a page for myself, I can always add a background element like a box and put it behind every thing. But otherwise I can keep on expanding to any side I like. 
Now let's go back up here to the Boards level and I can see the new Board I've created. I can Control Click on this and you can see I can do various things that you would expect. Let's Rename this and I can also view these in a List View like this instead of in a Grid View. I can Favorite anyone that I want to make it appear in a special location. So perhaps I can have the one I'm currently working on in there. I can also view by Recents here and you can see it shows me Today, and then it groups them by month or by year. Let's create another Board. Now I want to show you that a common thing to do is to use this for flow charts and organizational charts. So in this case you might create a shape like this and then put some text in it like that and maybe the default color isn't what you want. So maybe let's put a gray background here and let's put a black 2 point border around it like that. Create the shape that I want. Let's even adjust the font size like that and there we go. 
Now, I can instead of creating a new one and making all those adjustment, I can duplicate it by going to Edit and then Duplicate Selection or Command D. I can also just Option Drag like you can in so many other apps and then you can see how it puts a few of them there. Notice that the yellow snapping lines work just like they do in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote so you can easily align things like that. Now you can Option Drag and put one here and let's say we want to make an organizational chart. So I can put something like that there and I could put another one here. Now I want to connect these with lines when I'm done. I can do that a number of ways. One is I can click here and you can see one of the options is to create a connecting line. It's this little curved line and I grab a blue dot and I connect it to one element and then to another element. I can also go and do insert and then I can do connection line and it will do the same thing. Once I have a connection line I can click on it and you can see I get options here. One of them is for connection style and I can make it a straight line, for instance, like that or the kind of angled line like that. I can continue to create these for the other elements or I can Option Drag, kind of pull one out, and I'll attach the blue parts to this, adjust the green dot there to get it to fit. 
There's another way to do it but since organizational charts and flow charts are so commonly created in FreeForm you can click this button here and it turns on Connectors. Now when I select anything, like locks, I get these arrows and I can click and drag from an arrow to something. So I can very quickly and easily create these connection lines like that. You can see how fast I can connect everything here. 
Now another thing to know about is it is easy to select multiple items. You can select one and then hold the Command Key down to select multiple ones or the Shift Key will work as well. Once you've selected multiple items you can drag them all around together. You can also drag a rectangle around everything. Now as long as you've selected only things of the same kind, like I'll just select these boxes here, notice I get the ability here to change the shape or background. So I can change it all to, say, white like that. Maybe make the border a little bit bigger like that. You can even go in and if I Control Click on something I can change its shape, which is something you can't do in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. So I can change the shape to a circle like that. 
Note that you do have Alignment and Distribution options as well. So let's say I made these and they weren't aligned exactly. I can select these like this. Go to Arrange and then Align Objects and Align the centers of them like that. I can also distribute them evenly. So if they were not even, like that, I can go and say Distribute objects vertically and I can see they are all distributed like that. I can move them altogether.
Let's look at some of the other things you can insert. You can click here and choose a photo or video from your library. Let me just pick one right here, like this one here, and it will add it and I can move it where I want and resize it. Note if I tap it there I get the option to crop it. So I can zoom in a bit and move it around to get the spot that I want. I can Control click it and you can see I can turn off the shadow that is underneath it. I can turn off the rounded corners if I want. Another thing you can insert here is a Link. So you can just type a URL and it will add a Link like this. You can resize it somewhat. You can only get it so small. You can Control click it and turn off constrained portions to make it a little bit smaller. So when you click it here you can click on this button right here and it will jump to that link. You can also click here and add a Link to a document. So I could select this one, for instance, and it gives you a little preview of the document there. I can click it and this will actually take me to QuickLook. But from there I can go to Open it in the app. 
Another thing you can add is a note, which is this little box right here. It is a little sticky note. You can resize the sticky note as you like. You can Control click it and turn off constrained proportions to make it other different dimension. You can type in here something as well. It works just like a regular textbox but it kind of stands out because it has this interesting shadow underneath it. You can change its color. It's an easy way to add notes. You can even rotate it like that. So you can use this more for annotations than say a regular shape for actually adding content. 
Note this can do much more than these basic shapes here. There are all of the different shapes that are included with Apple stuff. So you can select something like this and you can position it. You can even select it and then go to Format, Shapes & Lines and you can make it editable. So here I can actually edit the shape if I want and make changes. You also have the option here under Shapes to use the pen and draw things just by using points. You can click and drag to make it a curve like that. So you can create whatever you want and make that a shape, fill it with a color and everything. 
I should note that on the iPhone and on the iPad with the touch screen you actually have an additional tool where you can actually just draw and sketch in Notes. But there is no way to do that in the Mac version.
Now it maybe enough that you just have this for yourself. You're using it for notes. You're using it for ideas. But if you do want to share it with somebody you have several options. The simplest one is simply to go to File, Export As PDF. You can export as a PDF and things like Links will work inside of a PDF. So you can use this to create interesting little PDF documents. I'm often asked how you can export as an image. Well, you can actually go to Print and then you've got PDF here. You can also go to Open In Preview and once it is in Preview you can export it as an image if you like. You also can Share this. So you can click the Share button here, or go to File and Share and then the idea is you're collaborating with somebody. You can select here to Invite specific people or create a link that you can send to anybody. You can determine whether or not other people can make changes or just view it. So when you add this you would select a sharing method. I'll select Messages here. I'll share it to another demo account and once I send this then it shows up as Shared right here and I can see who it is shared with. I can manage it. So here it shows me who it is shared with. I can change the permission. I can change permissions for individual users as well. I can turn Off the sharing. While sharing you can actually move the Board around and other people will see you move it. So you can make a presentation this way by putting everything you want to present inside of a Board and then sharing it with people, only letting them view it, and while viewing you can actually move it around, show them different things, even make changes and they'll see those changes live. 
There is also one other way to share that I'm going to point out. If you select one or more items, I'll just select everything here, and Copy and then go into another app like Pages, you can Paste that in and it will convert it to an image. You can see here it is a png here. But it is pretty high resolution. So you can use FreeForm to create some graphics and later on bring them into other documents. 
So that's a general overview of FreeForm. Now to master it all you need to do is use it. Create some sample Boards. Play around with it. Don't wait until you need it to actually use it. But create some fun things and experiment with all of the different features. Once you get the hang of it you'll find that you can take notes, create all sorts of graphic representations of ideas and things very easily and then either just have them there in Free Form to refer to or export them in various ways to use in other documents. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Using Freeform On a Mac: A Quick Course”

Brian Foster

5 months ago

In other words, Freeform is a stripped-down version of MacDraw, MacDraft, MacFlow, Org Plus, Canvas, SuperPaint, and other Macintosh drawing programs that fit on floppy diskettes forty years ago.

Gary Rosenzweig

Brian: Stripped down? No. It has: vector scaling support, connection lines, URL linking, 3D object support, cloud sharing, collaboration and presentation support and more.

Lindy

4 months ago

I SWEAR....you are so knowledgeable about Apple products ....
I'll bet you have Apple juice in your veins!😂 Without your videos we would be able to do the same thing ...after weeks of trial and error... You pack it all neatly 15 minutes! Awesome. 👍😎

Michael

3 months ago

Thanks Gary. Brilliant tutorial. I am using FF to create a custom planner of an upcoming trip. It is working great but I have two questions please:
1) Is there a way to add a web link to an image or shape. The only way I can find to add a link is to use Insert>Link but this is restricted to simply entering a url which can be clicked to view the site?
2) Any shape can be previewed by pressing the space bar. However, when objects are Grouped they will not preview with the space bar?
Thank you

Michael: I don't think you can add a link to a shape. As for number 2, not sure what you are asking. Yes?

Thanks Gary 1) Understood. Perhaps this will follow as the App develops. 2) If I select e.g. an image and press the space bar, the image is previewed nicely in a preview box. However, if I group the image with, for instance, a text box then when the Group is selected the preview function with the space bar does not seem to work. Wondered if I'm missing something. Thanks Michael

Michael: Yes, that does seem how to be how it works, sorry. I didn't read number 2 in your original comment as a question. I suppose use grouping to move things and then ungroup to get the Quick Look function back.

David Sullivan

2 months ago

I have started using Freeform for Mind Mapping. It works very well and most mind mapping apps only have very limited functionality until you pay for a subscription.
Thanks Gary for tips I can start using right away.

Using Freeform On a Mac: A Quick Course

Comments: 8 Responses to “Using Freeform On a Mac: A Quick Course”

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