Using Tags In Notes and Reminders On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new tagging feature in Notes and Reminders in macOS Monterey.

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So a new feature in macOS Monterey and also iOS 15 is the ability to add Tags to Notes and Reminders. Let's take a look at how you can use them. Here I have a note that's about a meeting. I can easily add a tag to it. All I need to do is type the tag into the note. I can put it anywhere in the note that I want. A tag has to start with the pound or hashtag symbol. On US keyboards it's Shift 3. Then I could type a word, a name, a made-up word or combination of words as long as there is no space in it. So let's say I'll create a tag called Meetings. That's it. The next space or return or whatever I do will accept that as a tag and you could see it's actually the Notes highlight color there. I can add as many of these tags as I want and put them anywhere I want. Notice here there's a section for Tags. If I expand that I'll see all the tags that I've created in both Notes and Reminders. If I click on Meetings here it will show me all of the notes that have the tag Meetings in them. In this case it's just this one. But if I go back to all my iCloud Notes here and I add that same tag to other notes, then if I just click meetings I'll see those three notes. All three have that tag in them. Notice there's no folder called Meetings. I didn't create a folder. I just tagged all three notes. Now I can look at all the notes with that tag in it just by going to the tag itself. 

So already you could see how it can replace folders. But it can actually work better than folders because you could tag a note with more than one thing . So here I've got folders for three projects. In each one of these folders I have a note with the project goals. Now it would have been nice to actually add meeting notes in here too. The problem was that sometimes these meetings discuss more than one project. This one discussed Project Alpha and Project Gamma. So if I put it in one and not the other then I'd be loosing some information there. But with Tags I could easily do this. I could add a tag here and call it Project Alpha or just Alpha. Then also, since this meeting discussed Gamma, I'll include that there as well. Now I could go here. Let's say this meeting was all about Project Alpha. So I'll put Alpha and then this meeting was all about Beta. So I'll put that in there. 

Now you don't have to put them at the end there. For instance notice here I actually mentioned the projects here. I could have actually done a hashtag right there at that point. So I could have replaced this with a tag which looks a little bit more natural and it's how we're used to seeing tags in other situations. So now if I look under Alpha I'll see these two notes. If I look under Beta I'll see this one. If I look under Gamma I'll see this one. I could also go back into these notes here and let's add the tags. I'll put them right here in the title. The same for this one and this one. So now when I look at these tags here I'll see the Project Goals and two meetings that pertain to this project. I don't even really need these folders any more. I can just get rid of them.  

You can also use Tags to combine things. So, for instance, I can see Alpha and Gamma and see there's this one meeting where both were discussed. Then if I ever add another note that mentions multiple projects, like this one here, I could easily set it up with tags so that it is found in the right place when I'm looking for information that pertains to that one tag. 

I could certainly still use the folders if I want. So maybe, for instance, I could make a folder called Project Goals to have these all together so I can move this one into here, this one into here, and then get rid of these two folders. Now I have my three goal's notes right here but I could still use tags to access everything that pertains to a particular project. Of course I could also go in here and add more tags. Like a Goal's tag for each one of these. So now if I want to see all goals I don't need that folder anymore. I can go here to see all my goals. If I want to see the goals for a particular project I could select both of those and it will show me the one note that pertains to both of those tags. 

Now the Reminders App uses Tags too. As a matter of fact the tags are linked to each other. So if you wanted to add a tag to a To Do List item we could just type it as part of the description. So here I could type Alpha and you could see I can even Auto Complete there and now it's part of Project Alpha. If I look here for Tags you could see I can see To Do List items that just have that one tag in them. You could also add tags to a special field in the Reminder. So if I get info on this you could see there is the title there. I could put the tag there. I could also add Tags here. So now I can look for Reminders that have Beta as a tag. I don't have to see them in the main part of the reminder. You could even add it in the Notes section of the reminder. So if I do that here you can see the tag appears now in Notes for that reminder. So you have three places where you could put them. 

You can use tags in the same way I showed you with Notes. Instead of creating lists you can have one big list, or a miscellaneous list, put different reminders in there and then use tags so that the same reminder can be part of several different tags. Whereas with lists the reminder could only be in one list at a time. Since the same tags will appear in Notes and Reminders when you create one in one app it will appear in the other as a suggestion as you type. 

Now Notes has Smart Folders and Reminders has Smart Lists. So you can use those with tags. So I can create a new Smart Folder here and name it what I want and I could put tags in that. So if I wanted to put all of the meeting notes into a Smart Folder and call that Meetings, I could. So this is a Smart Folder here. It acts the same way as selecting Meetings down below. Then if I have a ton of tags down here I could simply hide those at some point and use Smart Folders to access only the tags that I want here in the name part of the left sidebar. The same thing for Reminders. You can create a new list in Reminders. You could click here to make it a Smart List and then you could have tags that are included. So I can, for instance, add a tag here like this. Use the Plus button, do some other thing like time or priority or location for that and just incorporate tags as part of my Smart List in Reminders. 

So as you can see Tags in Notes and Reminders' Apps takes organization to a whole new level. We're no longer restricted to having a note in one folder or a reminder in one list. We can use Tags so they can cross-reference each other. Lots of different things you can do with Tags in these two apps. Hopefully we'll see Apple extend this Tag functionality to other apps in future versions of macOS.