Apple Notes App Tips And Tricks - Your Ultimate Apple Notes Guide!

hello my name's tom and this is proper honest tech note-taking apps come in all shapes and sizes across the range of apple devices from complex to simple old to new premium to free one thing's for certain you'll never run out of options if you want to try and find a note app that suits all of your needs but i've recently come to the realization that for my personal usage case the best app is possibly the note-taking app already included for free on ios ipad os and mac os apple's very own notes app because here's the thing the notes app included in your phone tablet and mac is way more powerful and capable than you think it is especially with icloud integration without being overly complicated but it's not always the most intuitive app to use particularly if you're not aware of what it can do so in this video i'm going to take you on a deep dive into apple's notes app right now in june of 2021 i'll show you what it can do and show you how to do it and just so you're aware i'm running all the latest operating systems 14.6 on ios and ipad os and mac os big sur 11.4 on the mac side of things i'm gonna break this video down into three sections creating notes then organizing notes then everything else first things first to make the most of the functionality we're gonna be talking about here you're gonna want to ensure that you're logged into your icloud account on all relevant devices and that you've got icloud switched on for the notes app if you're unsure head to your settings then head into the icloud part of your settings and ensure that this toggle here is switched on that's important partly because having the icloud functionality will back up any notes that you create but also because if you own multiple apple devices you can access view and edit your notes across all of them so if you start off a note on your iphone whilst you're out and about there's nothing to then stop you from picking up and finishing later on on your ipad or your mac i'm on notes on my mac at the moment but i'll be jumping over to notes on iphone and ipad throughout this video and i'll show you how things look there but one thing you'll notice is that for the most part the apps all look and act pretty much the same up here at the top you can see that we've got two folders which i typically ignore when i'm organizing my notes all icloud and notes i believe notes is the non-icloud version of notes a bit of a legacy to how notes used to be back when you couldn't back everything up into the cloud and you can see my folder is empty everything that i create nowadays is an icloud note clicking on all icloud notes is of course going to show you all of the notes right let's begin with creating notes to do that i'm actually going to use that empty notes folder we just talked about and then create a new note in there i'll give it a title and just put some text in to get things started so far all pretty obvious and i guess that this is how most people use the notes app jotting down a quick note on their computer or on their iphone using the on-screen keyboard and whilst this first tip might be super obvious i'll cover it just in case you can tap on the big a little a sign here to get access to all of the text formatting options available at the top you've got the option to put text into bold italics underline or strikethrough then under that you've got options for putting text into titles headings and lists if i compare this with the iphone app you can see it's laid out a little differently over here but offers the same range of options although it does also include an option for indenting the text once you get good at using this you'll be able to create really good looking notes the tick box lets you add a tick box to your notes which essentially serves as a way of creating a list this definitely doesn't replace the tasks function in ios but it can be useful if you need some kind of task or to-do list along with some information perhaps you've created a note in relation to a project and you want to be able to keep track of things as they're being completed this would be a good way of doing that having information and activities together in one place next to that you've got the table option which when you click on it creates a simple two by two table but you can add to this by tapping at the top of a column or the side of a row then choosing this menu and adding columns or rows as you need to and you can still use text formatting within your table so you could use bold to create headers italics etc over on the ipad a cool trick related to creating notes is that if you own an apple pencil you can just tap on the lock screen with the tip of the apple pencil and the ipad will wake up and create a new note ready for you to begin handwriting straight into so if you're the kind of person who likes to take handwritten notes in meetings this would be really useful for you you can also begin creating a note when you're using other software on your apple device by making use of the share function for example let's say that you're browsing the web and you see something that you want to keep a note of rather than bookmark choose the share button then choose notes you can choose to create a new note or add it to an existing one if you're creating a new note you can choose where in your notes app you want it to live and you can add some text to it before you save it it works from safari so you can save pretty much anything from the web it works from maps if you want to share a location with someone from photos and on ios and ipad os it works from pretty much everywhere so loads of different parts of the apple ecosystem you can also have siri create a note for you just begin with the standard siri trigger phrase then say make a new note for me when asked what you'd like it to say you can dictate using standard dictation phrases just remember that the first thing you say before you create a new line will be your title for example my thoughts on dictation new line this is how you can use siri dictation to create a note without typing anything at all full stop it's a really great feature comma and one that not many people ever bother to use exclamation mark and incredibly you can do this from any of your apple devices obviously your iphone ipad and mac but also your watch your home pod even your car if you have apple carplay so if you're the kind of person who likes to keep a note of things that inspire you you're never out of reach of your notes app okay so staying with the mac for a minute let's click on the image icon here this button allows you to get images into your notes using a variety of different methods you can see that we've got a few different options broken down into three sections at the top we've got photos which literally means we can add a photo from our icloud photo library directly to the note clicking on this is going to take me into my camera roll all my albums and i can select an image to add this works exactly the same way on the iphone and the ipad but what if you're working on a note on your mac and you suddenly realize that you'd like to capture an image right away and add it into the note well you've got three identical options for iphone and ipad and that's because i've got an iphone and an ipad connected to my apple id so notes knows that i'm able to access both of these functions i'm assuming that if you only had an iphone for example only the iphone option would show choosing take photo will wirelessly connect to your iphone or ipad and fire up the camera so literally all you have to do is grab your device point and shoot i'll try it now with my iphone there we go there's a picture if you're not happy with the photo choose retake photo and go again but once you are happy with it choose use photo and the photo will immediately appear in your note no messing around having to manually transfer the photo from one device to another but it gets even better let me show you the other options scan documents works exactly the same way but the camera will be aware that you're scanning a document rather than taking a picture and the camera settings will change accordingly let me grab a document and let's put this down on the ground and when i choose scanned documents the camera app opens on my iphone ready to scan a document you can choose whether or not it's a color document scan multiple pages you've got lots of different options once done the document will immediately appear in your note and you can see that it appears in its own frame separating it from regular photos if you right click on it you can treat it like its own document opening it up to see the separate pages if relevant and even export it as a pdf finally you can add a sketch i'll use the ipad for this as it's better for this purpose than the iphone in my opinion but it works the same way and you would of course use whatever you have access to once i choose add sketch on my ipad my ipad will immediately change to sidecar with a blank canvas and the various drawing options i can use my apple pencil to add in a sketch i'm pretty terrible at drawing as you can see but i'll see if i can add a street in with a direction there we go that'll do i'll choose done and the sketch is immediately visible in the note now this functionality works essentially the same way on ipad and iphone the main difference being of course that you're not having to bounce from one device to the other you simply choose the photo option from the on-screen menu if you want to add a photo or scan a document and you hit the pencil icon if you want to draw something in okay so that pretty much covers the actual creation of notes but the challenge you'd be facing now is that all of your notes are just kind of dumped in a folder in your notes app with no real organization you can of course search within all of your notes so if you're the kind of person who would like to have your notes in one folder and then search for what you want you should be aware of the search field which sits at the top of each notes folder you just click into it type and enter just like any regular search field but for those of us who prefer to have some kind of order there are thankfully a number of options available to help you manage your note so let's move on to the second part of this video organization the most obvious form of notes organization is of course a folder on the mac there's a button at the bottom left which specifically states new folder while on the iphone and ipad you're going to want to look for this icon although be aware that if you use a magic keyboard with your ipad like i do the gray bar at the bottom while you're typing does cover this up if that happens to you just choose edit and then create a new folder from there you can also create folders within folders i've no idea what the limit is in terms of the number of folders you can create but i've certainly not hit it yet and i've got some folder structures that go pretty deep what i've done is to have a top level folder set up where i've got one for my personal stuff one for my business stuff and one that i'm calling second brain essentially for the random stuff that i need to remember that i know i never will if i click here to open up my business folder you can see that i've got a number of additional folders within there and if you can see an arrow that means that that particular folder also contains more folders also folders and notes can coexist in a folder for example here on the business folder it looks like i've got nothing in it due to the zero showing but that zero actually represents the number of notes contained within that specific folder and it's correct that i don't have any notes in there all of my notes are in subfolders within that sub folder i'll create a note in here just to show you and you can see that the number changes to 1. a quick tip emojis this is obviously easiest done on your ipad or iphone but you can add an emoji when naming folders you'll likely love or hate this but i quite like the extra visibility it gives to the different folders let me jump into personal then recipes to show you some cool organizational things you can do within a notes folder up here at the top you can choose to view the notes as a list or as a gallery i prefer list but if you make a lot of visual notes gallery view could be really helpful for you if i right click on one of these notes let's say the coconut macaroons one i can pin it which then ensures that the note stays pinned at the top of this folder and appears in the pinned section in all icloud on the iphone or the ipad it's a swipe gesture swipe to the right then choose the pin icon you can also lock a note which is a brilliant tool helping you to have the confidence to keep notes which contain sensitive information for example here's a note with the alarm code from my mum's place so of course i've gone ahead and used the padlock icon when creating this note to ensure that it's locked you can always use a password to unlock your notes but then depending on the security function of your device you can also use a biometric so on my ipad and my iphone i'd use the face id functionality and then on my mac i'd use touch id okay so that's note organization covered but what else can you do with your notes let's take a look in this third section of the video you can share a note or indeed an entire folder with another person and you can both edit them the same way that you would a shared document this is a great piece of functionality you can see in my personal folder i've got a subfolder for our wedding which is coming up next year and our house move later this year i've shared all of those folders with my fiance and she uses the notes function all of the time too so it helps us to be pretty organized with all of that stuff you would just choose the share option and then choose what level of access you'd like that person to have and how you'd like to share the note with them and you're done also if you ever wish to share the contents of a note rather than the note itself you can do that by choosing send a copy that's helpful if you've created something of value within the note and you want to be able to give that note to someone who perhaps doesn't use apple note you can literally export the content and send it as an email for example in terms of the structure of notes within a folder you've got a couple of options i already mentioned pinning notes which is a really helpful way of keeping the most important most relevant notes right up at the top of your folder always visible you can also sort notes the default is that notes will be sorted with the most recently edited note always sitting at the top but you could also sort them by note title or the date they were originally created on mac those options are up here and on ipad and iphone you're going to use the ellipsis menu up here that's pretty much everything for the iphone and ipad side of notes but there's one feature within notes for mac which i think is worth being aware of if you're like me and you use notes on a large screen you might want to increase the size of the otherwise very small on-screen text and you can do that by using shift command and the full stop or comma buttons note that this just changes the visibility of the text it doesn't actually make the font bigger so there you go a deep dive into the notes app for mac ios and ipad os what do you think were you surprised at just how feature-rich the notes app is do you feel like you can make the move over to it from some of the paid competition drop me a comment and let me know what you think and i hope you found this video useful if you did do please consider leaving me a like and subscribing to my channel so i know what kind of content you'd like to see in the future i'd definitely be up for making more videos like this for some of the other core apple apps if that's something that would help people out see you on the next video

Channel: Proper Honest Tech

Views: 124,907

Rating: 4.9580665 out of 5

Keywords: apple notes guide 2021, how to use apple notes, apple notes, apple notes tips, apple notes tips and tricks, apple notes tutorial, apple notes ipad pro, apple notes app, iphone notes, notes for ios, apple notes ios 14, apple notes ipad, notes app, apple notes 2021, best note taking app for ipad, ipad note taking, best note taking app, apple notes tutorial 2021, how to use apple notes on iphone, how to use apple notes to scan a document, how to use apple notes on ipad

Id: 8HeFf5rRYfQ

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021