If you’re someone who needs a solid, easy to use, no frills notes app, then I reckon
that the Notes app that’s built into your Mac computer is most likely more than enough
for you.
In this video, I’m going to show you how to use it to get the most out of it.
We’ve got a lot to cover so stick with me until the end of the video, if you’ve always
wanted to get more from the notes app, but not really known where to start.
OK, let’s get into it.
Navigation; When you open up Notes for the first time,
you’ll have either a 2 column view, or a 3 column view, and you can change this yourself
by tapping on the sidebar button, in the top-left corner of the Notes app, next to the traffic
lights.
The Sidebar on the left is pretty crucial, as it contains things like quick access to
your Shared notes and folders, your folders for your Notes account, and your Tags.
We’ll cover all of these in more detail later on in the video.
Hidden away down at the very bottom of this sidebar is the New Folder button, which again
we’ll cover in more detail soon.
In what has now become the middle column, you can see the Notes within the Folder that
you’ve currently selected.
So for example, I’ve currently got the Food folder selected, and so you can see all of
the notes within the food folder.
You can toggle between a list view and a grid view, and then in a somewhat confusing user
interface choice, Apple have opted to put the Delete Note button just to the right of
both of these, so do be aware that this is what that button represents.
Also, a key thing to understand about Notes is that your view is, by default, one where
you’ve always got a note open and visible, and that note will take up the majority of
the screen.
So here for example, you can see that the recipe note that I had open is taking up most
of this screen.
I can tap to move to a different note in the middle column, or I can use the arrow keys
on my keyboard instead.
Within the note, the options at the top of the page are a little confusing, as some of
these buttons relate to the note that we’re currently viewing, while some relate to Notes
as a whole.
So the first button is to create a brand new note, although tapping that here will create
that note within this current folder.
You can change it once created if you wish.
Then this cluster of 4 buttons are related to this specific note.
We’re going to cover these in more detail when we talk about creating notes.
The 4 buttons at the upper right of the note are a bit of a mixture.
You have a button for adding in a link, then a button for locking the note, then a button
for sharing the note, and then a search box, which can either be used to search within
this note, or the Notes app as a whole.
Again, we’ll explore searching separately.
The final thing to point out in terms of navigation, and a key difference between the Mac version
of Notes and the iPhone and iPad version, is that you’ve got a number of options up
at the top of the screen in the menus.
I won’t cover everything in here, but we’ll cover a number of these options as and when
they become relevant throughout the video.
Creating a Note So understandably, one of the first things
you’re going to want to do when working in Notes is to create a note, and there are
a number of ways in which you can do that.
I’ll try and cover all of them, and we’ll start with the most obvious, which is manually
creating a note.
The best way to do that is navigate to the folder that you’d like the note you’re
about to create to live within.
So I’ve been working in the Food folder that I’ve created, let’s assume that the
note I’m going to create is related to health, and that I therefore want it to live within
my Health folder.
I’ll choose Health from the folder list on the left.
Next, tap the New Note button.
You can see that a new note is created, and it’s here within the Health folder already.
Your cursor will by default land on the Title section, so the first thing I’m going to
do is give my note a title.
Once you’ve input your title, you’ll want to tap the Return key on your keyboard to
move into the body of the note itself.
I find that tapping this twice is best, as it fully moves you out of the title section,
and into the body of the note.
In here, you can begin creating the content that’s going to form your note.
Text is of course the most obvious content that your note is likely to have, so I’ll
add some text to illustrate this.
If I tap on the Aa button, you can see that we’ve got a number of options for formatting
our text.
You can choose between making text Bold, italic, underlined or struckthrough.
Then underneath that, we have options for choosing styles, like Titles, Headings etc.
Note that I’m currently producing this video in MacOS Ventura.
There have been some additions to text formatting in MacOS Sonoma, but I’ll cover those off
separately a bit later in the video, and there are also a few text formatting options in
the menus up top, again I’ll cover those a bit later.
To the right of the Text Formatting button, we’ve got the option to input a checklist.
This is exactly what it looks like.
Checklists in Notes aren’t as good as using the Reminders app, but if what you want is
a simple and effective way of managing tasks within a note, this could be enough for you.
To the right of that, we have the Table button.
Again, this function is really no replacement for a spreadsheet, but if you need to produce
basic tables, this works quite well.
By default, you get a 2 by 2 table, but if you tap on the little ellipsis at the top
of a column, or at the side of a row, you have the option to delete or add rows and
columns as needed.
You can also select and format text within Tables.
To the right of that, you have a button for getting images into your Note.
If you choose Photos, your Notes app will access your iCloud photos album, and you can
access all of your individual photos and videos as you might want to.
But more interesting here is if you’ve got other Apple products associated with your
Apple ID.
For example, you can see that for this Apple ID, I’ve got a couple of iPhones and an
iPad, and my device knows this, and gives me the option of adding in Photos from those
devices, using handoff.
You can see that for all three, I’ve got the option of taking a photo, which is where
your Mac will connect to your iPhone or iPad wirelessly, you simply take a photo on your
device like you usually would, and whatever you take will automatically be added to this
note.
You can scan a document, which is very similar to taking a photo, except the camera on your
phone will be prepared for accepting a scan, rather than taking a photo.
And you can add a sketch.
This is of course best on an iPad, where you’ve got more space and might even have an Apple
Pencil, but that’s how this works.
The button to the right of that is to add a link.
This will default to whatever you currently have open in your browser, so if you wish
to add a link using this method, simply hop out of the note, open Safari and navigate
to whatever you want to add in.
You’d then simply tap on Add Link, to add the link to your note.
You could of course simply copy and paste the URL of the link in if you wish.
To the right of that is your button for locking this note.
Locking notes is useful, as it gives you an extra layer of protection for your notes,
should other people use your computer.
You can choose to lock the note via your computer password, or Touch ID if you have that available,
and the note will lock across all your other associated iCloud devices.
To the right of that is your share button.
I’ll cover working collaboratively on notes in a separate part of the video, but that’s
essentially what this is all about, although you can also export notes from here into other
apps.
Creating a note from Safari So that’s how to create a note the most
manual way, but there are other options that you might want to use instead.
For example, if you’re browsing on Safari, and you find an article that would be good
to add to your Notes app, you can do this right from within Safari, rather than having
to go into Notes to do it.
To do this, you would simply click on the Share button in the upper-right corner of
Safari, and choose Notes from the options that show here.
Your link is already created, but you can add some text to the note here if you wish.
Then where it says Choose Note, you can either create a brand new note, which by default
will go into the main page of your Notes app, or you can click into Folders, and choose
the folder you’d like your new note to be created in.
You can also choose an existing note, and this text and link will be added to that note.
Choose Save when you’re ready, and you can then see that if I navigate to the Notes app,
the note that I just created is already showing there, complete with the link and text that
we added.
One thing to also point out here in preparation of something we’ll be looking at later in
the video, is the use of tags.
So I’m going to press the Option Key and the number 3 to create a hashtag, and then
I’m going to add a tag to this note.
You can see that as soon as we do that, the tag is visible here on the left in the Tags
section.
PDF Shoutout By the way, there is an accompanying PDF for
this video, with full step by step guide including screenshots, and you can access it, along
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Click the link in the description of this video that says ‘get the PDF’.
Creating a note using Siri You can create a new note using Siri on your
Mac if you wish.
I personally think the functionality is a bit too limited here to be truly useful, but
it’s there if you want it.
To do it, you’d access Siri on your Mac, and say “create a new note”.
Then, when prompted, you’d say what your note is about, so in my case I’d say “things
to consider when choosing a new treadmill”.
And just like that, Siri will create a note for you.
It will by default just put the note into your All iCloud notes folder, and you’d
then need to go and organise the note away somewhere.
My biggest issue here is that you still have to add a lot of the additional content in
yourself manually.
You could of course use dictation to add more text in using your voice, but if this is something
that you think would be of use to you, I guess you’ve got the option there to use it.
Collaborating on notes A great feature of Notes is the ability for
you to quickly and easily collaborate on a note with another Mac, iPhone or iPad user
who’s also using Notes.
To do this, from a note that you’d like to collaborate on, tap the Share button, which
is in the upper right of the screen.
You can see that you have two main options, to either collaborate on a note, or to send
a copy of it.
Collaborating means you can work on it together, in real time, while sending a copy will simply
send the content of the note to someone else.
For this example, we’re going to collaborate.
To collaborate, you need to send an invitation to someone, and the options further down this
page represent the different ways in which you can send that invite.
I’m going to send it as a Message, choosing the person from my Contacts list, adding a
bit of text, and then hitting Enter to send the message, but you could of course email
this, or AirDrop it, or whatever works for you.
Once sent, the person at the other end will receive a message with a link that they will
need to tap on to accept the collaboration.
Once that’s done, you’re working together.
You can see in this note that the person that I’m collaborating with has added some content
to the note, and you can see a cursor view which represents what they’re doing.
Any changes I make will reflect in real time at their end also.
Also, with the collaboration now in place, the Share button has now changed to a collaboration
button, and tapping into that will give us some new options.
At the very top of this menu, you’ve got options to message, or call or FaceTime that
person if applicable, so you can get together and work on the document in real time if you
wish.
You can toggle participant cursors on and off, and you can choose to see all activity
and highlights, which is obviously helpful if you’re both working on the document at
the same time, and want to keep track of who’s changing what.
You can also choose Manage Shared Note, and in here you can do things like add or remove
participants of the note, and choose whether other people can add participants in or not.
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Data in notes Something to point out, you can see that in
this example note, I’ve got various different types of data.
There’s a phone number, and there are addresses in different formats.
Your Notes app is pretty good at identifying these things, and if I hover my cursor over
the different data types, you can see that we get presented with options.
On a phone number for example, we can create a contact, or even call the number.
On an address, a Maps snippet will appear, and you can then choose either Open in Maps
to open the Maps app, or Directions to get directions to this location.
Formatting notes You’ve got a few different options for formatting
text in Notes, and text formatting here is actually better than it is on the iPhone or
the iPad.
In general, most of your formatting options are going to be found in this Aa button at
the top of the note.
You can see here that I can do things like quickly make text into Titles, Headings and
SubHeadings.
But if I select some text, and then right click on it, you can also see that we’ve
got some other options within the Font menu.
If you click into Show Colours, you can then choose a suitable colour for the text.
Also, another useful feature of Notes for Mac is the ability to copy and paste a text
style.
So here for example, if I’ve got some text that I’m happy with, I can select it, then
right click on it, then head into Font, and choose Copy Style.
The same can be done by selecting the text and choosing Option, Command and C. You can
then select some text, and right click and go to Font, and Paste Style, or choose Option,
Command and V. Creating Folders & Smart Folders
So a key part of managing your Notes in the notes app is going to be getting used to the
idea of creating and managing folders.
You don’t have to do this by the way, some people prefer to just have one folder where
all of their notes live, and they either search for what they want, or they use things like
Tags, but I think using Folders is still a really crucial part of Notes for most people.
To create a folder, tap the New Folder button in the lower left of the screen.
Give the folder a name.
For this example, I’ve chosen to call this ‘Equipment’, as I’m going to use it
to better manage my Health folder by creating some sub folders.
Also notice that I could make this a Smart Folder if I wanted, I won’t do that now,
we’ll do that on the next one.
Choose OK to create the folder.
And you can see that it’s been created, although it’s been created as a main folder,
and we want this to be a sub folder of Health.
To do that, just click and drag this folder onto the Health folder, and that’s made
it a sub folder.
I’m then going to go back into the Health Folder, and press down on the Command button
on my keyboard, whilst selecting multiple notes with my mouse or trackpad, and then
drag those into the folder we just created.
Also, if you click on the ellipsis menu in the folder that we just created, we’ve got
a rename option.
Something that people always ask about in these videos is how to get emojis into their
Folder names, and this is really easy to do.
If you’ve got a keyboard with this globe key down at the bottom left, you can tap on
that, or you can press the Control, Command and Space key together, which will bring up
the emoji menu, and you can choose the one that you want from there.
If you recall when we created a folder, there was another option, and that was to create
a new Smart Folder, so let’s explore that for just a moment.
Smart Folders are folders where you can set rules that would apply to any notes that you’ve
already created, but importantly, any notes that you create moving forward.
So to illustrate this, let me head into a note and add a hashtag to it.
Then, I’ll create a new folder, but this time I’m going to make the folder a Smart
Folder by ticking the relevant box.
You can see that we’re given the option to choose what makes this folder ‘smart’.
I’m going to say that I want to include notes that have all of the following filters,
and then I’m going to choose the tag that I just created.
This means that the note that I just created will automatically be sorted into this new
Smart Folder, but if I then show you how I can create a new note, and that will also,
automatically be added to this Smart Folder.
We created this Smart Folder based on the Tags filter, but we could have done this using
lots of other filters, including things like Notes created within a certain date range,
notes that have been shared with a specific person, notes that contain attachments, and
you can mix and match, so you can really get quite granular in terms of how you use Smart
Folders to better manage your notes.
Pinning Notes If you right click on a note, you can pin
that note to the top of the folder that it currently sits in.
This is helpful if you’re working in a folder with a lot of notes, and you know that there’s
one, or perhaps a few notes that you’ll always want access to quickly, you can pin
them to make this easier.
Also, just to show you while we’re in the right click view, you have options like being
able to lock and unlock the note, being able to delete or move the note to a different
folder, being able to add in tags, being able to duplicate the note, and being able to open
the note in a new window, which can be helpful if you’re using a larger screen perhaps,
and you want to work in multiple notes all at the same time.
Search Searching in Notes for Mac is both easy and
really effective, and it all happens by tapping into this Search box in the upper right of
the screen.
You can see that Notes will give you a number of search suggestions - essentially, this
is a way of narrowing down your search results before you search.
So for example, you might want to narrow your search down to only shared notes, or only
notes with attachments.
Beyond this, it’s really just a case of typing in whatever you’d like to search
for, and Notes will do it’s best to bring back a suitable result.
Notes searches within the note itself, but also within attachments.
So here for example, you can see that if I search for the term ‘assembly’, it’s
identified it from a scan of some instructions.
In my experience, and according to Apple, it can also search within PDFs, but I find
that if the PDF is quite large, some indexing might have to happen first, but in general,
searching within PDFs is also something you can do here.
Changes in Mac OS Sonoma I’m making this video in July of 2023, at
which point Ventura is the current Mac OS version, and is therefore the version that
I’ve been using throughout this video.
However, we’re a couple of months away from Mac OS Sonoma releasing, and it’s going
to come with some pretty significant changes to Notes, so let’s take a look at them,
because clearly if you're watching this video in late 2023 or beyond, you’ll probably
have access to all of these features already.
The first major change is that you can link from one note to another.
So for example, let’s say that I’ve created a kind of Master note all about workout plans,
but then I want to create individual notes for each workout plan, and link to them on
this page.
You can see that when I tap on the Add Link button, the app tries to add a link to the
webpage that I have open, like we saw earlier.
But instead, if I right click in the body of the note, and choose Add Link, or press
Command and K, I can then type in the title of a note that I’d like to link to, and
then select it.
You can see that Notes drops it right into my note as a link, meaning that I can build
a kind of directory if I wanted to, with a master note, and then relevant notes underneath
it.
You can also now directly export the contents of a Note into the Pages app.
To do this, you would tap on the Share button at the top of the note, and choose Pages from
the list.
It may take a moment, but the contents of your note will be exported into Pages, and
formatted where possible.
You can see that you’d still have to do some editing work to make this look the way
that you want it to, but it works.
PDF Editing has also seen a drastic improvement in Mac OS Sonoma, although I should point
out that as I make this video using a developer beta, it’s still a bit glitchy, I’d expect
the kinks to have been ironed out by the time this releases to the public.
Essentially, you can see that you now have much greater visibility of PDFs within Notes.
Whereas before, you’d have to double-click to open the PDF in it’s own window, you
can now navigate through the pages of the PDF right here in the Notes app.
You can also mark the PDF up, allowing you to do things like add highlights, draw around
parts of the text, add your signature or add shapes.
Clearly, marking up a PDF is much more effective on an iPad, but it’s useful to be able to
do it here, I’ll probably cover marking up in more detail when I make a Notes tutorial
update video for the iPad very soon.
End So there you go, if you stuck with me to the
end, that was a pretty comprehensive look at all things Notes for the Mac.
There are loads of other notes apps out there, but for me, I think most people can get along
perfectly well with this app.
What about you, how do you use it?
Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like, and
subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.