Full transcript of “📲 How to Create a Smart Shareable Grocery List on iPhone & Mac”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Have you ever walked into the grocery store only to realize you left your list at home or come back from the store only to have your kids and your wife ask you, where's the milk? Where's the bread? Where are the eggs? And you're thinking to yourself. Those things weren't on the grocery list. Shopping at the grocery store can be super frustrating, but in today's video, we are going to solve it simply and easily, the MacWhisperer Way. I'm Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer, and I am obsessed with simplifying everyday tasks using technology. For today's video, we're going to solve a problem that has plagued families for generations. How to manage the grocery list. Make sure to stick around for my MacWhisperer power tip where I
0:47 drop a tool that ties this entire system up into a nice pretty bow. Every family solves the grocery list dilemma differently. Some families used post-it notes that are stuck all over the kitchen. Some use a dry erase board stuck right to the refrigerator, and some families just expect mom to be psychic and know exactly what's missing from the refrigerator and what we need in the pantry at all given times. However, your family solves the grocery list dilemma. We're going to simplify it today, and we're going to do it using a program called Reminders. It's already on your phone and most people don't even know it's there. Let's click on it and check it out. The Reminders app is a fantastic program for managing tasks and lists, and it can be used for all sorts of different projects like keeping track of your
1:33 bills or knowing what movies to watch, or what books you'd like to read. You can even use it to manage a honey do list, so you always know what at-home projects your wife wants you to tackle. It's your next free moment, however you use reminders. In today's video, we're not going to go into the specifics of how to use a lot of the tools. If you need help or more information about getting started with reminders, I recommend checking out this playlist right here that has some of my best reminders videos in it. For this video, I'm going to assume you know the basics. Our first step is creating the grocery list. We're going to do that by clicking the button on the bottom right side that says add list. Once you click that button, you can give your list any name . We're
2:21 just going to call it grocery. Once you've done that, you can scroll down a little bit and we can customize this list. There are a ton of pre-configured glyphs that you can use to create a nice icon for your list. Or you can always press the emoji button right here and choose any of your favorite emojis. For this grocery list I'm going to grab the grocery cart right here, and we're going to scroll up and choose a different color, like red, just like that. Once you've done that, click the done button in the upper right hand corner here. Now we find ourselves inside of our brand new empty grocery list. There's a number of ways that we can add things into a list. We can press the new reminder button down at the bottom, or you
3:07 can click on any open space on the list like this right here. As soon as you create the next item, you can just simply type it in, just like this. Pressing the return button will create another item on this list. In addition to typing, you can also use the microphone in the bottom right corner in order to dictate out the separate items you want to add. I love dictation, so I'm going to turn on that microphone. Remember that in between items you'll want to press the return button to create a new item. It looks a little something like this. Dog food, cat food, eggs. Milk ice cream, and when you're done, you just turn off the
3:55 microphone so it doesn't continue to pick up the things that you say. Now here we've got a nice grocery list with a handful of items, but there's a couple of other details we can add right here. For example, what kind of bread? Sourdough? Whole wheat? If you click on any item and choose the little eye that you see on the right side here, you can add additional information such as notes for the specific kind of bread. Once again, I'm going to use the microphone to dictate sourdough or multi-grain. And when you're done, click the done button up here. You can also add notes to any item by tapping on the item and clicking on
4:41 the add note button down below to add things like oat milk or almond milk. To make sure that whoever goes to the grocery store knows exactly what you want to purchase, and you can even add images. Sometimes there are some items that you want a very specific item and you don't want people guessing, pressing the little i, again, will allow you to scroll down to the bottom where you can add an image. You can use your camera to take a picture of the current item in your house, or if you have a picture in your photo library, you can click on the photo library button right here. Grab that item and add it right into this reminders list. Once again, let's click the done button here. We can see the notes show up under the items, and the image shows up under the items as well.
5:27 If anybody wants to know more details, they can click right on that image and it will zoom right in so that they know exactly what brand of cat food or what flavor to get for your picky kitty. In addition to those tools, there's another tool we want to talk about here that is called Columns. Columns is a way to organize your grocery list in different ways. For example, sometimes I need to buy something at Costco, or I need to buy something at Whole Foods instead of the standard grocery store . I don't want to manage an entire additional list just for some items from Costco or Whole Foods, so we can use columns within the reminders list by clicking on the three dots in the upper right hand corner here.
6:14 You'll notice the option to view as columns as soon as we do that. All of the items that are currently on this list go into a column called others. You can rename that column if you'd like, but we're going to add an additional column by clicking the three dots in the upper right hand corner and choosing where it says New column here. This is going to be our Costco list, and then we'll click the three dots and add another new column for our Whole Foods list. Just like that. And now you can press and hold on any items and move them into the separate columns. So if we know we want to buy the bread at Whole Foods press and hold on the item and just drag it over. I. And drop it into the Whole Foods column, just like that little power tip for you guys. Be careful not to click on the name.
7:00 If you click on the name, it thinks you want to edit that item instead of moving it. There are several ways to move items. I tend to click to the left of the little circle, and that allows me to move things pretty consistently around. Anytime I want to. In addition to that, if you press and hold on any item from the list right here, you can click move to column and choose any column that you'd like to move it to so you don't have to drag it. But sometimes it can get a little convoluted and complicated to manage all of these separate columns for separate stores because I might be in the market. I could still buy bread at the market. I don't have to be in Whole Foods for that. It's easy to do it without columns by employing hashtags.
7:47 Hashtags allow you to sort and search through any items in a reminders list. To add a hashtag you can tap on the item. Then down in the lower area above the keyboard, you'll see the little hashtag icon clicking that will open up the list of all of your existing hashtags. You can use any of these, or you can simply come in and create a new one. Just like this. Now that item is automatically tagged for Costco. Once you've created a hashtag, it's easy to add it to other items by pressing and holding on the item and selecting the tag section from the popup list. From here, you can grab any one of your tags. Add it easily. Now, once you start to add things with these tags, if we step out of our reminders list down at the bottom, you'll see all of
8:32 the tags you've got clicking on. Any one of these tags will show all of the items that are connected to that tag, making it easy to create an instant Costco or Whole Foods list anytime you want without having to manage a separate list. Now for this next tool, we're going to get rid of our Whole Foods and Costco columns, and I'm going to explain why. Let's click the three dots and choose delete. We'll do the exact same thing over on the Costco list here. The next thing that we're going to do is employ a tool that automatically categorizes things into the proper supermarket aisles. Let's add a couple more items here to make sure we've got enough to categorize.
9:17 Bread, bananas, salmon, Poptarts. That should do. Now let's click the three dots in the upper right hand corner and click where it says show list info. This is going to show us all the information about the current list that we're on. This is a place where we can change the name or change the image. But what I want to do is change the list type. Here it says, list type is standard. Let's click on that and instead of standard. Let's choose groceries. The grocery list type will automatically categorize your entire grocery list based on the aisles in most grocery stores. Now, from my understanding, if you live outside of the United States, you may want to leave this on the standard view, as I understand at the grocery aisles
10:06 in the United States are organized a little differently than overseas. But I'll leave it up to you to figure that out. Once you've turned on the groceries list type, let's click the done button again and right in front of us you'll notice that it breaks down our list into separate categories, seafood, produce, pet care, dairy, eggs, and cheese, bread, and cereal. This brings up another concern of mine, which is that the column view, while helpful, doesn't look great on the phone. I tend to use the column view more on my iPad or my computer. Since they're horizontal and since the phone is vertical, I tend to use the list mode a little bit more, but it doesn't matter. We've created these separate sections. We can still view them in the list mode by clicking the three dots
10:54 in the upper right hand corner and changing to where it says view is list. Now I've got my grocery list nicely organized in a vertical view, and as I walk into the grocery store, all I have to do is check off the items as I put them into my cart just like that. Which brings me to another tool that we can use to populate the grocery list. Most of us tend to get the exact same things every time we go to the grocery store. So what I like to do is before I walk in, I click the three dots in the upper right hand corner, and I choose where it says. Show completed. This is going to show me all of the items that I purchased in the past, and rather than typing bread 43 different times, I can just come in and uncheck cat food
11:44 and uncheck milk and eggs and bread, and I can add it right back into the list. So I don't forget to purchase it. When you're done with that, don't forget to hit the three dots and hide the completed items. You don't want that previously purchased list to be in the way of the things you need to buy today. So now we've got a nice, clean, organized list with all of the proper items on it, but I want to teach you another tool about how to add things onto this list. We talked about adding items manually by clicking the new item button and typing or dictating, but we can also use Siri to do this, and you can either use the magic words or. You can use the button on the right side of your phone.
12:31 Most people use the words to trigger Siri, which is fine when the phone's not in your hand. But if you're holding the phone, the button on the right side of your phone was made to trigger Siri silently. And it works faster and more efficiently than doing it by voice. So for this example, I'm going to press and hold that side button and continue to hold it while I speak. When I'm done telling Siri what I need, I'm going to let it go. When you're adding things into the Reminders app, you can do it by just saying, remind me, and then whatever you want to be reminded about. But in this case, we need to add things to a specific list inside the Reminders app. So you want to use the following phrase, add whatever you want to add to my, whatever it's called, list. In our case, it's going to look a little something like this.
13:19 Add rotisserie chicken to my grocery list. Notice that it added it perfectly. Just like that. You can do it really easily by pressing and holding the button. Remember, add blank to my blank list. Let's do it again. Add blueberry muffins to my grocery list. Once you've added it and you can see the Siri notice up top, you can press and hold and add additional things like this. Add watermelon. Add Kiwi, add cilantro. But once the Siri screen disappears, you'll have to go back to saying, add blank to my blank list. Or it might pop it in the wrong place.
14:05 Now with these brand new tools, it's going to be so much easier for you to manage your grocery list for you and your entire family. There's one tip that I've left out before I drop my power tip. If you've already gotten great value from this video, give it a thumbs up that makes it so much easier for other people to find this video. And if you've got a question, a comment, a suggestion, drop it in the comments section. I love to hear from you guys. And if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, that's like forgetting to put ice cream on the grocery list. Don't do that. Everyone likes ice cream and everyone likes this channel. So hit that subscribe button and that notify bell so that you're always alerted whenever I drop new content and whenever I have an ice cream party. And now let's check Milk off the list. Let's check bread off the list and let's check the power tip off the list.
14:55 All right. We have learned a ton in today's video. You've learned how to use the Reminders app to create a groceries list, and you've learned how to add different items either by voice or by Siri. You've also learned how to add details, like notes or hashtags or even photographs you've learned how to manage. Both the column view and the list view, and you've learned how to turn on the smart grocery list so that everything is automatically in the right aisle for your grocery shopping run. But there's one thing that we're missing, and that's getting the rest of your family on board. So for this tip, all we've gotta do is share this list to everyone who consumes groceries in your household. Or who shops for groceries in the household? Leave no stone unturned.
15:41 You absolutely should share this list with your wife, with your son, with your daughter, with your sister, with your brother, with your parents, if they live with you. Heck, if the dog has an iPad and needs to add things to the grocery list, you should add the dog onto this list, and we're going to take care of that super easily by hitting the share button in the upper right hand corner here. Now from here, you can either share via text or email and you can share to any of your frequent recipients. Or anybody in your address book . I'm going to share it with my wife right here and click the share button. Once she gets that message and joins that list, she'll be able to share this grocery list with me and add additional items . Go ahead and share it with everyone in your family and just give them these basic guidelines the next time you finish the milk or finish the cereal or run outta bread.
16:32 Put it onto the grocery list yourself, either by typing it in or by using Siri on your device or on any of the family member's device in the household. And then whoever goes to the grocery store first uses this list right off their phone, checking off all the items as they purchase them, and put them in the cart so that everything gets bought. And no one is sad because we forgot the ice cream. Don't forget the ice cream, and don't forget to subscribe to this channel. That's what I've got for today's video, all about how to use your phone and your reminders app to simplify grocery shopping for your entire family. I hope you learned a ton, but there's always more to learn. Check out this video over here for even more amazing tips and tricks about how to make the most out of your apple technology.
17:19 I'm Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer, and I'll see you in the produce aisle.
