Draw & Use Custom Templates for the reMarkable 2 (No tools, no tech skills, just a simple workflow!)

hi there my name is Ben and today I'm going to show you how to make your own custom templates in the remarkable 2 using no technical workarounds no complicated processes or external apps just the functionality that came in the Box the tablet the marker and we're going to use the layers functionality specifically in the remarkable to accomplish a repeatable reusable template kind of workflow and I'll show you how that works here so here's an example of a template you run you have templates for many different reasons perhaps you want to take notes the same way every meeting perhaps you want to run a daily checklist whenever you start your shift or if you're like me you want to do some journaling every morning to kind of follow the same process regardless of your reason you want to run the same structure every single time and you want a custom template to help facilitate that remarkable comes with all these like lovely default templates and so create a new notebook and you'll see that the first thing that comes up is which template you want to select the problem is you can't customize those at least not without special workarounds and we're not going to cover those today but what we're going to do is like to to do this process we're going to select kind of a relatively innocuous template like a grid like a small grid here or a blank whichever kind of works best for you I like to have grids in the backgrounds of everything regardless create a new Fresh notebook like this and now you've got your kind of like blank canvas to create your template here's what we're going to do in the menu go down the left hand side and find the layers option and this looks like three little squares stacked on top of each other so click that and then you'll notice that there are two layers in there by default there's the template layer this is the remarkable stock templates that you can't change at least not uh in this video there's layer one which is where your notes go if you start drawing on here the first thing we're going to do is we're going to click new layer and this new layer is going to be where we put our custom template so I'm going to long press on this just to rename it so that it doesn't get too confusing I'm going to name it custom template all right hit return okay great now our layers renamed I'm also going to rename layer one I'm going to call it notes you don't have to do this but I just find it helps keep things straight so select the custom template and now draw whatever you need to draw to create the template that you're hoping to run every day so for example I'm going to use uh some of the marker tools up here I'm going to select this I'm going to close the menu just to make it easy and I'm going to draw a big old divider along here to sort of separate the heading for the day or for the for the instance of the template from the body of it and I'm just going to do like the first thing is like date and maybe like title of the meeting that I'm in or what have you and you know you can tell I'm going fast and being a little bit sloppy here you can go slow and take your time to make this as nice as you want if you have a checklist you can draw the boxes and things like that if you don't like the non-uniformity there's always a neat little secret where you can use the selection tool here to select a check box that you like or whatever element you like and then copy it and then tap again to place it and so you get the same thing over and over again so if you've got a lot of stuff that's repetitious you can just kind of Select it and then paste it over and over and over again like this uh maybe I'll put a divider here between the checklist get some nice blanks in there so I can write in those spots and I've got notes on the right and check list on the left header matter the date and the title at the top so that's my template and again you can you can do whatever you want with a template uh to actually use this template now here's what we're going to do we're going to take advantage of the fact that whenever you exit a notebook like this and you re-enter it it's automatically going to select the layer that is just above the remarkable stock templates so you'll notice that we we started out by by being up here in the custom template but when I reloaded this notebook it opened us back up into the notes layer that way that's why we're putting the custom template all the way at the top instead of maybe lower in the in the order that way it's always going to open up the notes layer whenever we open the notebook so just like a fun fact about why we did things the way we did them and so now in order to use this template after I've exited the notebook and opened it back up or alternatively I've reselected the notes layer okay well I just go about my day and I say okay well it's April 2nd oopsie Daisy I need to select the right tool there we go it's April 2nd and the title of meeting is meeting X and I've got a list of tasks a b c maybe agenda items for the meeting and then I've got some notes and so on and so forth right and just as a reminder we were taking we're running the instance of the template using the notes layer so if I make notes invisible you'll see the template remains yep and if I hide the custom template you'll see the notes remain that's what's going on here right okay let's say I'm done with my instance and I want to run this template again what do I do this is the workflow step that makes all the difference and at first it's going to look a little complicated but honestly it becomes second nature once you've done it a couple times so what we're going to do is on the left hand side find the page select tool it's this thing that looks like four squares and just tap that and you'll now you'll go into the page view all right I want a new instance of a template I want to run the template again here's what you do long press on the page and then hit duplicate all right but now we've got the pro we've got everything copied over to the second page but we have the problem of all that content being there so I'm going to tap twice on here to open up the second page or copy and remembering that we're already on the notes layer so I don't have to worry about erasing the wrong thing but what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the Eraser tool I'm going to tap it twice and then I'm going to erase all and you see what just happened everything in the notes layer has been erased but our custom template layer remains intact and so now I can just I can start immediately I can start writing okay well it's April 3rd meeting 2 or Y or whatever and you know oh I've got these same kind of like things that I want to do check check check check notes squiggles and so on this is different from uh meeting the the first instance of the template so you can see we kind of have like a record of each instance of that template that we used and if I want to do it again well same story open up the page select press and hold duplicate tap twice to open that third page hit the eraser erase all and boom you're ready to go for your next instance of the template so you can run that template as many times as you want fill out as many instances of it as you want if you notice something along the way that isn't working for you about the template because this is part of the reality of it is you make changes as you go all you have to do is like on your most recent copy so for us this is our third copy of the template just go into the layers again select the custom template make your changes maybe I don't want title maybe I want to have a scale from one to five I'm going to circle one to five um we'll just get this laid out nicely there nice enough okay go back to the notes layer boom continue with my day I'll fill out this template like I would fill out any other template and now when I go to fill it out right so maybe here's April 4th boom boom boom notes notes notes when I go to repeat the process I open up the page select now the first two pages represent my first two instances of the template and they use the old version of the template I can copy there's a rather duplicate this last page and now when I go through my process again opening that up erasing all the contents I'm retaining the changes that I made on the last instance of it so you can kind of keep revising as you go forward so that's a little bit of the fun uh kind of way that I do templates without having to do any technical like mess part of the reason why I went and bothered to do this kind of thing is because I got tired of uh doing all the like special like hand-coded stuff to get the right template PDF in to override remarkables default stock stuff and getting things named just right and then uh when the remarkable would update my my specially placed custom template would get overwritten and destroyed and so I just got tired of doing that like super technical kind of process that's why I did this manual handwritten one instead of the one that you would read about on those uh special Wiki pages and things like that so hopefully this has helped if you have questions or are curious about why I did things a certain way or need help kind of figuring out how to do this kind of template stuff feel free to leave those questions in the comments I'll make sure to get back to you um in the meantime I hope you are able to make many wonderful templates and run many wonderful instances of those templates in your life taking all the notes your heart desires I'll probably see you another video take care bye

Channel: ben at hiredthought

Views: 74,797

Keywords: reMarkable, reMarkable 2, reMarkable template, reMarkable tablet, custom reMarkable templates

Id: lT1wlvBhKWg

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2023