Complete review of GoodNotes for taking notes on the iPad| Paperless X

hey guys it's rob sit back with paperlessx a channel that is all about digital productivity in today's video we will be going through everything you need to know about good notes in 2020. if you're new to my channel hello don't forget to subscribe if you're looking for a solution to go paperless with your studies work or business and if you already subscribed make sure you turn on your notifications so you know each time i release a new video [Music] this video is going to cover the following creating notes in good notes annotating pdfs presentation mode exporting your notes out of the app how your notes are organized and the settings in good notes goodnotes is a note-taking app that is available for your iphone ipad and mac and it costs 7.90 a one-time purchase for all the versions of the application a few weeks ago time-based technology limited made goodnotes a universal purchase for 7.99 you get the application on all your three devices just when some developers are going for subscriptions others are trying to find ways for us to pay less for their applications to start this review i will create a new notebook in goodnotes i can also add a new folder a quick note an image scan or take a photo with my camera or i can import a document from files i will create a new notebook so we can explore all the options you get when creating notebooks in goodnotes first you can get to choose a cover for your notebook now they have an option to have no cover which is something i personally prefer but you have options to choose covers under different types if you're unhappy with these you can always add your own and you can do this also for your page templates this allows you to add your own templates for both your covers and your page templates to the applications template library you then get the option to choose a paper template that you want good notes has essential writing papers with different column options and planner templates their planner templates are very simple and basic they're just page templates therefore they don't have any hyperlinks they're not really fully ready to replace your planners and so for my notebook i'm going to go for squared paper good note supports many paper sizes a3 2 a7 letter tabloid and good note standard paper sizes it has three colors to choose from white yellow and dark obviously dark pages for when you're using doc mode in the application these templates both covers and papers come in portrait and landscape mode and lastly i can name my notebook this notebook is going to be good notes for review 2020. if this is a bit too much to go through just to create a notebook in the application you can always use the quick note option to create your notebook in fewer steps or simply double tap this plus icon to create your quick note that's even faster you can then rename your notes by tapping the middle of this top bar when you create your notes with the quick option your default settings for your quick note are customized in your settings where you add your custom templates to the library good notes although it supports all of these pages unfortunately when you zoom in and out you can't really appreciate the size of your notebook and i wish that the application could give us the ability to see our zoom percentage when we're zooming in and out of the application because right now it's difficult to really appreciate the size of your page because good notes support so many paper sizes it should have a way for us to really understand and feel our page sizes in the application the pen tools and goodnotes has three options three different types fountain bowl and brush pen the fountain pen is my favorite it's the one that works best for my handwriting the ballpoint is my least favorite i find it too coarse the brush pen really does feel like a brush because the thickness of your strokes change as you write just like they do with paint brushes which is really cool what is your favorite pen tool in good notes let me know in the comment section down below the application has settings scattered throughout the application for easier access this really helps a lot so you don't have to exit the application to change the settings for better organization of this video i'm going to discuss all the settings in the last section of the video so i'm just going to ignore all of these settings that are scattered throughout each tool and i'm just going to focus on the tools themselves you can customize your pens at the end of this toolbar you get the option to change your pen color and its size goodnotes allows you to save three favorite colors and three size templates on the toolbar it has preset colors that you can easily access by tapping the template colors and you can easily add more to this palette by picking from this block here using a wheel or adding a hex code if you know it the pen sizes and good notes are measured in millimeters from 0.1 to 2.0 millimeters it is very easy to adjust your pen size to the exact width you need i find fixed pen sizes work better it's much easier to remember that you use a third thickness versus 0.20 millimeters the three print sizes you get are not bad for using and writing in your notes but whenever you want to use a different size from the ones that you already have on your toolbar you will be replacing one of these the handwriting experience in goodnotes is excellent the palm rejection is perfect there's no lag at all in the application when you're using the apple pencil the handwriting algorithm has improved dramatically since ipad os it's much smoother it's much more pleasant to write in good notes now than it was before you can use the zoom tool to add tiny handwritten notes to fit more information on your page the zoom window has navigation icons for moving the tool around as you write your notes the icons on the left create a margin on your page when you set to auto advance in the settings of the application the app will automatically move the zoom window as you are writing so you don't have to do this manually the highlighter goes behind your ink it makes your notes pop out of the page which is what a highlighter should do you can turn on the option to draw in a straight line for your highlights to look neater or you can turn this off if you want your highlighters to look more natural the text tool in goodnotes is the app's worst feature a text box appears around your text while typing and it disappears when you're done tapping on the text will allow you to customize it you have to select or select all the text so you can customize it also you can change it you can copy and paste you can make text bold or italic or underline it the application can also read out the text to you on the far right side of the toolbar you have color options for your text you also have formatting tools to make your text bold or italic as well as styling options for your text and these include alignment options font size font type background text border color text border thickness and text box padding goodnotes supports custom fonts and if you are curious to know how to add custom fonts to your ipad i have done a video and i will link it in the description the eraser can erase per stroke and per pixel turn on the erase entire stroke to delete a stroke you also get an option to clear the page if you want to delete everything on your page you can erase the highlighter only when you turn this option on and you have the option to auto deselect good notes automatically reverts to the tool that you were using before the eraser and at the far right side of the toolbar you can select the size of your eraser and it has three options that are fixed and these you cannot adjust or change the lasso tool can selectively pick your handwriting only images only text boxes only or it can pick all the three at once having this much control over your lasso tool is amazing and once you have selected a section the lasso tool allows you to take a screenshot of that section to share with other applications or other people resize the section and while you're resizing your section you can also rotate it change the color of your notes you can convert that section of handwritten notes to text or you can cut copy and delete the section strangest thing though about the lasso tool is the fact that you can't move selected sections across pages in good notes you can't even drag and drop between pages of the same notebook one of you guys brought this to my attention when we did the wishlist for good notes if you've not seen it check it in the description when you want to move sections across pages in the same notebook you either copy or cut that section onto the new page seriously the shapes tool can fill your shapes your fill color and shape edge have the same color they can't be different i hope that we'll be able to have more control over our shapes and our fill for now you only get a transparent one you can't change anything about it and i think it's always good for you to have as much control on how you create your notes and as many options as possible so let's hope this is something that they will add in a future update the option to snap to other strokes is very useful to turn on if while you're drawing a triangle for example you lift your apple pencil off the page then draw the third side of your triangle as a single line it will automatically snap to the other strokes you have already drawn if you make a mistake you can just continue drawing and you don't have to start all over again and it's really been very useful and i like it you can insert photos from your library once edit you can resize it rotate it stretch or shrink it and you can crop your image as a rectangular or fixed cropping or you can use a free hand to create fancy irregular edges for your image you can also share the image just the image only out of the page and i think that's a cool option to have if you just want to share a photo or a part of your notes you can take photos sometimes there's just not enough time to copy a diagram so just snapping a picture and annotating on that photo is more useful and it really just saves you time in good notes your notebook can have different page templates each page can have a different color a different size even and it can be a different orientation you can change the page template of the current page now you can scroll your pages horizontally or vertically whichever you prefer you have the option to rotate your page you can skip to pages in your notes or bookmark them under favorites you can view the information about your notebook you can see its title or rename it see its location in your notes when it was last edited and you can move it to a different folder handwriting recognition for converting your handwriting to text in good notes is really good you can select your language from the lower bottom corner and good notes supports a total of 17 languages once your section has been converted you can export it to other applications or copy and paste it into your notes goodnotes doesn't automatically replace your handwritten section with the converted one so after pasting your text you have to manually delete the handwritten section this is a lot of work and it definitely needs to be done in one step you can search your notes and good notes will search through your handwriting text in your pdf and add the typed notes it will also search through your scans split view in good notes makes multitasking in the application fantastic especially because the application already supported multiple tabs i've done a video to demonstrate the six ways you can open good notes in multiple instances and i'll have that in the description down below so your split view will work with the 25 50 and 70 split views which are apple's standard ratios and this multitasking in goodness has really made goodness an amazing application especially because goodnotes is also a very good pdf editor dark mode at the moment only applies to the user interface in the application so you have to use dark mode paper and white ink for a true dark mode experience in good notes and the goodness team has explained to me why this is so would you guys like to know the explanation for this let me know in the comment section down below so good notes is an excellent pdf reader enough to compete with other pdf readers on the market goodnotes is not just a note-taking application it is also a pdf reader it gives you all the functions for a reasonable pdf reading experience on your ipad as long as you don't really need any complicated features for your pdf annotation you can view the pages in your pdf as thumbnails favorite pages which are your bookmarks your favorite pages are those you have bookmarked in the application you can also bookmark each page by simply tapping the ribbon icon on the top right corner of the page templates if your pdf has an outline good notes will recognize it and you will be able to navigate through your pdfs with much ease outlines displays the contents of your document this section will of course be empty if your document doesn't have an outline not only does goodness recognize outlines it can also export them out of the application with their active hyperlinks and for this i've done a full video for this i'm not going to go through it in this video because this is already a very long video each page thumbnail has a down facing arrow with editing options for individual pages you can add a page before after the current page duplicate the page add that page to the outline export that one page open that page in a new instance or a new window or you can just delete that page but you can also select multiple pages for copying rotating exporting and deleting editing pages in your notebooks or pdfs is a breeze in good notes and it's just amazing to know that you can edit all your pages all at once if you want to good notes supports hyperlinks and it can recognize hyperlinks so after deactivating the inking tool in the top toolbar you can tap on hyperlinks on your pdf this prevents any accidental activations of your hyperlinks while annotating on your pdf goodnotes converts documents into pdfs offline when you import them into the application so you can convert your word powerpoints your application will do this and make them ready for annotating goodness was the first application to introduce presentation mode to note-taking applications they effectively changed the way we do presentations they added a laser pointer to the app which lets you point at things you're talking about during your presentations and you can also decide what your audience sees when you are presenting your work so you can have them see your entire screen which includes your user interface or just the content on your page and you can also decide how they see your pages as a full page or they see exactly what you are seeing on your screen this will help your audience focus on what really matters which is your presentation and removes all the distractions that come with the user interface and once you're done creating your notes you want to export them to other applications or share them with other people you can choose to share the one page you're currently working on or you can export the entire document you also have the option to export individual pages selective pages if you wanted to the application doesn't really limit that but that's also another option that you have good notes exports notes in four formats you can export your pdf as a flattened or editable pdf you can export images or a good notes format pdfs and images allow you to export your notes to other applications and to non-good notes users the goodness format only opens in good notes it is therefore suitable for sharing with goodnotes users or for backing up goodness generally creates huge files you want to bear that in mind when choosing a note-taking application and the files that contain photos and scans are generally bigger this pretty much covers everything about creating notes in good notes now let's talk about the organization in your app on the home page you can arrange your document according to name or type this is from their latest update that they released a few days ago and i'm liking how it's organizing the notes into different types your documents can display as thumbnails or as lists and goodnotes supports folders within folders you have an infinite number of folders in goodnotes and this allows you to be highly organized in the application this is the most effective way for most users to organize their notes in note-taking applications the selecting tool on the top left corner selects multiple documents with options to export duplicate move or delete the selected documents under favorites you can selectively view your favorite pages only folders only documents or you can just view all your favorites in the application universal search lets you search all the documents in the application both handwritten and text documents your search results are organized according to written notes titles pdfs document outlines and typed notes so if you know what you're looking for you can really save a lot of time by just going through the type of note you are searching for under settings you have notebook templates which takes you to the page templates in the application this is where you set your default settings for your quick note and this is also where you add your custom pages to the applications library next you get settings to customize the following handwriting recognition document editing stylus and palm rejection icloud settings email to good notes this is a feature that they haven't rolled out yet it's in beta so i will not talk about it backup data automatic backup search index and troubleshooting you can select the default language for your handwriting recognition in the application under handwriting recognition under document editing you can prevent your ipad from locking the screen automatically when you turn this off your ipad will not sleep when goodnote is open and this will drain your ipad batteries i suggest turning this option on turning off status bar hides the time and battery level on your ipad this gives your application and minimalist look i find it useful to know what time it is when i'm using my ipad pull to edit page is a shortcut for adding new pages the new page will have the same template as your previous page if you turn this off you will need to add new pages using this plus icon you can choose the position of your toolbar if you want it at the top or the bottom for the zoom window you can turn on auto advanced the application automatically moves your tools as you write automatically open new imported document does exactly what it says when you turn it on so if you turn this on then every new document you add will automatically get opened in the application open document as new tab lets you open your documents in new tabs if you turn this off the application will replace your opened notes with the new note you are opening so if you want to be using tabs and good notes then turn this on stylus and palm rejection gives you options to choose your smart stylus and some customization for your apple pencil like single finger panning sensitivity and writing posture under smart stylus goodnotes only supports the following styluses the apple pencil the first and second generations logitech crayons and all the non-bluetooth capacitative styluses single finger pending allows you to scroll through your pages with your finger when your apple pencil is connected and active turning this off means you can only scroll with two fingers it is more comfortable to scroll with one finger so i suggest turning this option on you can set the sensitivity of the abs palm rejection they are three levels high medium and low for the best handwriting experience the highest sensitivity is best but this really doesn't affect your apple pencil i think it would mostly affect third party styluses you can choose your writing posture the application has eight possible positions for some weird reason i always struggle picking one from these i know how i hold my pen i just can't make a decision when i'm asked the question you can enable icloud to sync across your devices goodnotes syncs all your documents without a problem though sometimes you have to wait a few seconds when you open the application you can actually see your document syncing in good notes backup now is manual backup automatic backup is better obviously you can auto backup to dropbox google drive or onedrive when you turn on your auto backup you are asked to sign into a cloud service of your choice you can name your destination folder choose to backup as pdfs goodnotes file or both exclude some folders or files containing certain words view folders that are queuing waiting in line for backup and you can also empty the queue to stop backing up your notes or pause the backup the home page now has a new shortcut it gives you details on your last backup which is the date and time and it lets you pause or see progress details of ongoing backups and it's refreshing to see a progress bar in ipad os search index gives you the option to allow goodnotes to index your pdfs and handwritten notes when you disable this you can't search through your documents at all this has to be turned on definitely troubleshooting lets you restore default templates and regenerate missing thumbnails in your application this is where you restore your documents that you accidentally deleted and the application doesn't really tell us how long it will how long it will keep your notes you can import data from good notes four moving from good notes four to goodness five is a walk through the puck and that is everything there is to know about good notes give this video a thumbs up if you liked it let me know what you guys think about good notes in 2020 thank you guys so much for watching i will see you in the next video

Channel: Paperless X

Views: 45,412

Keywords: paperless student, digital note taking, ipad studying, app review, how to

Id: bqqz0zhCgSE

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020