How to (Actually) Use Apple Notes on Mac

Apple notes is not the simple note-taking app it used to be for starters I've just found out recently that when watching a YouTube video you can switch over to the notes app click the link icon in the toolbar and save that video for later gather with an integrated mini player so you can watch the video right here anytime and there's a lot more where that came from because by using Apple notes as my one and only note-taking app for years I've collected 14 surprising features that make the seemingly simple notes app on Mac one of the best note-taking apps out there oh and before we move on to the even more hidden stuff let's quickly get back to Links because once you're surfing the web in any browser even Google Chrome you can always hop into the notes app click the link icon in the toolbar and save the website you currently have open in the background to your notes for later much better than just pasting a plain and simple URL and let's take this one step further you probably already know that you can move your cursor into the bottom right corner of your screen to get up a quick note to quickly jot down some thoughts but what's probably new to you is that in Safari you can highlight any text right click and choose add to Quick notes now this blew my mind for starters you'll find the highlighted text from that website displayed as a beautiful quote but what's more when you visit that website Safari instantly jumps to your highlighted text from the quick note crazy useful and if you've up until now just use notes to jot down some text you'll be surprised that just like links you can save nearly anything to your notes or better set drag and drop anything into your notes like an image from the photos app or a video file from the finder which you can by the way watch directly in your note or an audio recording from The Voice Memos app which again you can listen to right from here or simply share anything to the notes app select a node and you can get back to it anytime now losing attachments is the real game changer when it comes to PDFs with the upcoming Mac OS Sonoma update we can do more than just view PDFs in your notes you can scroll along the pages inline and when you click show thumbnails you can do things like rotating Pages or even adding another existing PDF from your files some images and then fuse all those files together to one single PDF right from within the notes app what's more we can click markup to get a whole range of annotation tools exactly like when opening a PDF in the preview app very cool even more so because you can easily digitalize physical paper documents using your iPhone or iPad while it's in a note click the image icon in the toolbar and if your iPhone is within reach you should see it here choose scan documents which will instantly trigger a pop-up camera on your iPhone this will automatically detect the edges of any sheet of paper you put in front of it and when you're done you'll find the scanned document as a PDF inside of your note on your Mac and before I forget let me just mention that all those documents are fully searchable so you can only search for keywords from within your notes but also for keywords in those PDFs and even the handwritten ones you've scanned in or before even opening the notes app get up Spotlight search using command and space search for any keyword and filter for notes and you can open any node right from here this really makes a lot of things much easier but let's take a step back at its core each note taking app is all about writing down text and although this seems simple in Apple notes you can actually customize and format your text more than you might think let me show you each note starts with a title and continues with a body but with the AA icon in the toolbar you can always add a new title heading subheading or body oh and by the way you can select any text and hit command and plus to increase and command and minus to decrease the text size the point being you can really structure your thoughts especially with the list options here highlight a few lines and you can convert it into different types of lists like bulleted dashed or numbered or just hit command and seven command and eight or command and nine now one step to the right we've got the checklist option for any point you can hit the Tab Key to indent it what's more you can actually take those points and those are then automatically sorted to the bottom of your checklist you can enable this sorting feature in the notes settings right here by taking automatically sort checked items and it's good that we've landed here because you can change a couple of default settings like your preferred text size for each note or if notes should be sorted by date edited date created or title in each and every folder and speaking of folders I've just recently discovered that you can drag and drop any folder onto another folder to create a subfolder you can then hide or expand those making them quite useful for archiving notes and when creating a new folder you can always check make into smart folder this means your notes will automatically be sorted there when they meet the criteria you select like if they contain checklists attachments or a specific tag and on that note tags are probably the best way to let Apple notes do the automatic sorting for you for example this new smart photo will look for the tag recipe so whenever I add a recipe to my notes I can type hashtag recipe and you see that it now automatically lands in this smart folder because it has detected the recipe tag it's as easy as that speaking of which within each folder you can use your trackpad to swipe right on an important note to pin it to the top of the folder or with your mouse Sim the right click and select pin node Now by default each photo shows us our notes in a long list but if you've got a lot of attachments like images or PDFs you might prefer the gallery view which shows you a larger preview of each notes content you can then double click a node to open it in full screen and I'm honest with you I'm tired of typing out all those notes so I just let chatgpt take over for once and that's quite useful and I know what you're thinking wait a sec how did you get chat GPT to type natively in any app on his Mac well you will find out if you watch this video next alright I will see you there thank you so much for watching and have an amazing day thank you [Applause]

Channel: MacVince

Views: 105,694

Keywords: apple notes mac, mac notes app, apple notes tutorial, apple notes macbook, apple notes tips and tricks, apple notes hidden features, how to actually use apple notes, how to use apple notes, become apple notes master, apple notes app, you're using apple notes wrong, how to use apple notes on the mac, how to use apple notes mac, apple notes mac hidden features, apple notes macos sonoma, mac notes tutorial, best notetaking app for mac, best note taking app, macos apple notes

Id: jfVrzZUQ47E

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2023