Google Keep, Why I use it every day.

if you're looking for a great personal note-taking app you can't do better or maybe you can but i don't think you can do better than google keep than taking a good solid look at google keep i know i know i know everybody says wait a minute steve you're an evernote guy evernote's awesome isn't it yes evernote is awesome but evernote is not a great personal note-taking app it's not great for quickly capturing notes keep is terrific for quick capture of notes and being able to do something with that information once you've captured it i will show you that all today on dottotech [Music] google has done a terrific job putting together keep and making it a terrific personal note-taking app now are there are better apps for long-term storage and research and some other vertical tasks but for a basic personal note-taking app that works the way you work especially if you work inside of the google ecosystem if you use gmail and google docs and google chrome as a browser if that is your personal mix regardless fair on windows or mac or android google keep is going to be a terrific choice for you so let's dive in and take a look at the features that really impressed me with it keep and some of the ways that i use it because i do use google keep on a day-to-day basis now if you have a google account for gmail or for google calendar you have access to google keep you'll find google keep under the waffle menu if you haven't yet used it you click on google apps and you scroll down until you find keep if you click on that you'll be brought into your version of google keep and it's attached to your specific google account so if you have multiple google accounts you will have multiple versions of keep depending on which account you are signed into i'm signed into my business account here i've also got a personal account that i also have another version of keep in so that will allow you to avoid confusion in the future if you say wait a minute i thought i saved a note in keep well you might have been in a different account when you saved that note now it is a simple note-taking app it try it doesn't try and be too too much it's really designed to facilitate note-taking on the fly while you're online while you have ideas and then quickly accessing those notes when you need a big part of the of google keep is how it integrates with the mobile app which we'll be showing you in a moment but for to begin with we'll just start on the desktop here with it in chrome two types of notes you can have just a plain text note and you can also have a checklist now i this checklist here i created in order to make sure that i hit all of the right points that i want to cover in today's demo so we'll be able to keep track as we go through the demo but you can see that we've got a nice little checklist here i've already said that it's a good personal note-taking app so i can check that off you can obviously keep notes in it i'm talking about we can keep lists in it and you can see every time i check one of these things off within it it's checked off down here in the bottom of the checklist but it also works terrifically just as a text-based note-taking app you can be clipping things from the web clipping ideas typing ideas in and you can save text into notes as well you can also if you choose to add images to notes let's add an image and let's make it unbelievably cute today because we have the new puppy in the house so you can also include images in the notes should you choose to add images to your notes uh so you have a lot of flexibility as far as what you save of course you can save anything that's text based urls anything like that now the view that i'm in right now within google keep is the one that i like i like to work in a list view but you can shift from list view to a grid view should you choose to where you have a lot more information density appearing on the screen so you've got that flexibility one nice feature within list view is if you have a certain list or a certain note that's really important that's top of mind or that you're working on you can pin it to the top and that's going to keep that note at the very top regardless of how many new notes you add in the future now i'm going to point out right now that google keep is great at taking notes at collecting notes but it isn't as good a tool as say evernote at archiving huge volumes of notes and organizing them into notebooks in different subcategories you don't have multiple notebooks within google keep instead what google keep does is it gives you labels you have labels that allow you to attach a label to any one of your notes which allows you to sort the notes into different groups if you choose to do it that way you can sort your notes by all of your notes or you can add new labels and they can become the organizational structure but it doesn't do a job of creating project notebooks and the sort of thing that you might do is say in an evernote now one thing that google is very good at is really their strength is it's terrific they have terrific search capabilities so it doesn't matter if you've got a lot of notes and maybe they're not super organized you can always find what you're looking for through the very robust search you can see that i can search based on tags i can search obviously based on text images all of that sort of stuff i can search based on any different criteria so search is something that you're going to master if you use google keep and it will become your best friend especially as you start to collect a large volume of information in keep when you need to return and when you need to recover it in the future so the labels are i think they aren't as robust obviously as what we find in evernote but they do a good job of creating some good structure that you can work within now any of the notes that you have you can convert into a checklist or you can convert back into text if we just click down here in the very bottom of this checklist we can make it a regular note we can delete uh sorry we can hide the tick boxes there it is there and it will convert it into a straight text note and if i want to turn it back into a into a checklist i can ask it to show the check marks and we can see them all listed out here as well the checklists work really well but i want to point something out to you that's quite cool i'm going now they have the ability for you to collaborate using the notes as well so you can take this note and you can share it with another individual now i've shared it from my business account here to my personal account i've shared this checklist so let me just show you how that looks because that's a pretty cool feature i'm going to jump over here and i've got that my personal uh google keep is i've got it in dark mode so we can tell the difference between my personal account and my business account and here we see the exact same checklist that we're working on because i shared that with this account as soon as you share a a checklist or as soon as you share a google keep note with another google account it will appear in that person's google keep account and if i go through here and i want to say oh i've done this this task if i check it off here in my personal account when we go back to our business account we see that it is now checked off see it's gone from here and if we open the full note we see that the convert a note to google docs has indeed been checked off so as a collaborative tool it works fairly well i wouldn't say it's an ideal collaborative environment for managing your tasks high-end task managers like asana are going to do far more for you but for simple processes again i i think that might be the the overriding uh term for google uh keep is simple if it's what you're looking for is simple clean not complicated google keep excels at those sorts of processes now along with choosing different labels for your notes you can also choose any of your notes and you can add a colored background you see down here along the bottom you have a list of the different attributes that you can apply to notes this is where we used we set up collaboration with the note but i can also change the color of the background of this note i can change it to yellow to make notes stand out this works really well especially when you're in the grid view of being able to identify immediate tasks that you want to accomplish say by choosing a color for the tasks so that works pretty well as far as coloring your background and again organizing your notes a little bit more effectively now the next thing i want to show you is reminders and reminders is going to start to introduce how well it works in the mobile space to us if i turn this note into a reminder i can choose to set it up to remind me that i have something to do in this task later today i can assign a time and i can assign it any way i choose just as far as time based basic reminders but there is something way cool really cool about using google keep reminders if i select a place to be reminded of then what will happen is i can go and because this is integrated in the google ecosystem it then integrates with our location services and google maps and if i choose to say you know what i want to be reminded when i go to the local drug store when i go to london drugs that i have to pick up something and if i start typing in london drugs you see i've got all the different locations and they don't have my personal location here so i'm going to keep going and there it is there's there's my local london drugs so if i say i want to be i want to be reminded that i have this task to do next time i walk into london drugs my phone is going to ping me and say steve remember to pick up toothpaste next time i'm at london drugs this feature is ever so cool if you apply it correctly and it introduces the whole concept of the mobile app to us which i want to show you now so if we go and take a look in the mobile app we see it right here this is it on my iphone it's identical on the android phone and you're going to find all the same basic features as we find in the desktop version in the mobile version we can change the view from list view to grid view you can search your notes and if you tap on that you can see that you can access the different labels and all of the different navigation here in the notes but the mobile version the real strength of the mobile version is retrieving information that you want when you're on the road which we can see will do a very good job just using the search in the normal navigation but it's also creating new nodes and collecting new information when you're on the go now the they've got one aspect of google keep is really powerful and super impressive and the other is to be perfectly honest kind of pedestrian and still a little bit disappointing i'll start with the disappointing part to begin with we can add images to a google to our notes in google by just tapping on the camera and either choosing an image that we've taken a photo of already or using our camera to take a photo but here as i say it is kind of just average because it just takes a photo the evernote camera has way more features as far as document capture and scanning capabilities etc whereas the google keep camera is just the straightforward camera take a picture you can store it we can later convert the text the image into text if we want to it will do those things kind of post processing but the camera itself as i say kind of disappointing and i look forward to when google ups their game as far as cameras in google keep now having said that and saying that is somewhat disappointing what is not disappointing is how it works as far as voice capture goes oh my oh my you are going to love this if we add a new voice memo it will automatically start recording whatever memo i am doing but comma it is also converting my voice into text which is just straight up awesome exclamation mark [Music] it captured the note i can listen back to the audio note at any point in the future i can give the note a title and i'm going to call this awesome awesome idea and i'm going to save this now it has saved this note let's go back to our desktop and you see i said a where id i typed it wrong but isn't this amazing i've got that same note here on my computer but the conversion of your dictated text i've always had an issue with using voice memos voicemail is because knowing what's inside of the memo isn't obvious just by browsing and looking at it even if you title the memos very well but if you can actually read the text what's said inside of the memo a winner winner chicken dinner this is one of the most amazing features that's built in have a listen back it will automatically start recording whatever memo i in my opinion this feature alone makes google keep an outstanding mobile note-taking app being able to capture voice memos convert them into text automatically and integrate them with our system as you can tell i'm a pretty big fan of that particular feature of this particular feature i'm already recognizing that this demo is going on a little bit longer than i planned so i'm going to truncate things shorten it up now if you want more information on google keep if you want me to do more videos by all means let me know in the comments if you want me to do more with google keep or if there's things that google keep does that you use that i haven't yet showcased uh be sure to let me know in comments but the last thing i want to show you is how well google keep integrates with your email and with with your other with the rest of the google system so for example if you look down here in the sidebar google keep is available to you when you're in gmail along with things like google calendar it's all available to you here so if you are in an email if you're working within an email and or this is just notification that i just shared that note but if you want to take any email that you that you receive and you want to create a note based on that email if you go here take a note when you have the email open and you're in the sidebar within the google within the google sidebar it then attaches that email to the note so that when you are later in google keep you've got access to that note and you've got access to the originating email that was the basis for making that note so that's a great productivity system where keeping the information that you need where you need it and accessing it when you need it google keep it's free it is not as full featured as an evernote and some of the other note-taking apps but you can see that what it does it does very well it does it simply it does it elegantly and it does it very predictably and the integration between the rest of the google apps and your smartphone and the desktop version of the app are is is profound it makes it a really valuable app and unlike some of the other apps you're not limited to the number of connections you can have you can have google keep on multiple devices sharing data between multiple devices and of course you also have the ability to collaborate sharing your information with others as well so google keep uh it's it's be it's a keeper on my desktop i didn't really want it to be the note a note-taking app that i used i wanted to be able to do everything in evernote but evernote's not as good at doing this kind of stuff google keep is i hope you found today's video to be useful and as i said if you have any comments or suggestions of other aspects of using a tool like google keep please share them with me in your comments i appreciate all of your feedback one last thing before we go every week here at dottotech we host a free weekly tutorial webinar called webinar wednesday on some aspect of productivity or content creation you are invited i hope to see you there until next time i'm steve dotto have fun storming a castle [Music]

Channel: dottotech

Views: 707,842

Keywords: 2018, dottotech, google docs, google docs tutorial, google drive, google tips, google tricks, google tutorial, how to use google docs, how to use google drive, productivity tips, steve dotto, Google keep tips and tricks, google keep features, google keep vs evernote, is google keep better than evernote?, google keep tutorial, how to use google keep, creating tasks in google keep, creating notes in google keep, getting started with google keep, google keep

Id: J6R8sh4HJig

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022