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0:00 The Apple Notes app is one of the most powerful and versatile tools in the entire Apple ecosystem, and it's my personal favorite app of all. Want to know why? Stay tuned. I'm Dylan Stewart, The MacWhisperer, and in this video and the videos that follow in this playlist, we're going to learn all about Apple Notes. Why to use it, how to use it, how to collaborate with it, how to organize your notes, and so much more. I absolutely love this app, and so I've created this playlist to make it easy for you to learn as much about notes as I know. Each video will cover a specific topic about notes so that when you put them all together you really get a well rounded experience of this powerful app.
0:47 Today's video is all about the basics, an overview around how to make notes, what some of our tools are, and what some of our capabilities are. It's going to tease a lot of the things we're going to learn in future videos without going too in depth into any of it. Make sure to stay tuned for the MacWhisperer Power Tip, where I reveal a tool that will make it simple to keep the notes you use the most. front and center whenever you need them. Let's hop on in and let's get started. This is the Notes app right here. Maybe you've used it a couple of times on your phone, maybe you've even used it on your computer or iPad, but did you know that the Notes app synchronizes across all of your Apple devices, making it super easy for you to have the things you need wherever you are. A lot of people use Microsoft Word or Excel or even Adobe Acrobat to create PDFs of documents
1:35 and then they have a hard time knowing where to put them and they have a really difficult time accessing them from their phones. If more people would take the information they need and put it into notes instead, you'd find that it's a much easier tool to take with you and to make sure you've got the information you need at all times. Let's hop on in and take a look. When you first open up Notes, you'll usually be inside of a folder in what we call the Notes list view. In this view, we can see the contents of any particular folder. Right now, we're in my All iCloud folder. But I'm going to click the back arrow in the upper left hand corner here to get us into the folders view because this is really where the conversation starts. Notes is a powerful tool that allows you to have different pages organized inside of folders so
2:22 that you can quickly and easily find exactly the note or information you're looking for. From this folders view, you'll see all of your existing folders. Don't worry if you don't have any folders here, it's easy to create one by clicking the plus button on the lower left hand corner here. This will allow you to create a new folder, giving it any name you want as you create folders. You can also create sub folders, either by adding a new folder inside of a folder or by taking an existing folder like this YT folder and dropping it on top of another folder, which will then add that folder as a sub folder of that parent. It's easy to organize with all these separate folders, but let's not go crazy into making a ton of folders yet. A lot of people create a ton of folders. thinking they're going to use them without
3:08 actually having anything to put inside of it. In order for a folder to be useful, it must have at least two notes. So don't make a folder for just one thing. It just doesn't work that way. So create a folder or two and get yourself set up. We'll talk a lot more about folders in video three of this series where we get deep into how to properly organize your notes. So now I'm going to click on a folder to show you the Notes List View so you understand how to work within that screen. In this case, I'm going to click on the YT folder. Let's click on it. When you first come into it, you'll see the name of the folder up at the top, and you'll see your search bar. You'll also see all of your notes sorted in a specific order. What order are these sorted in? Well, that's up to you. If you click the three dots in the upper right hand corner here, you'll see the sort by option.
3:56 The default is date edited, but you can change any folder to view in a different way. You can view things by title, which will alphabetize all the notes in a folder, by date created, which will make sure that older notes are farther down towards the bottom and newer notes are on top, or my recommended sort style, date edited. This means when you make a change to a note, it will automatically hop up to the top of the list. Let me show you what I mean. If I'm here and I come down to this note from June and click on it, and simply come in and give it a couple of spaces and click done, you're going to notice that that note is suddenly up at the top of my list because I just made a change to it. This makes it really easy to find the notes you're looking for . Under those three dots, you've got a couple of other options like the option to view
4:41 a folder as a gallery, which is a great way to see a bird's eye view of the images you've got for all of your notes. I think that most notes should be viewed as a list. It's just a little bit of an easier way to do it. If you see a note in this folder that you'd like to move into a different folder, it's easy to do by pressing and holding on any note and clicking where it says move. From this window, you can choose whichever folder you'd like it to move into and it will move there immediately, making it easy to sort and organize right from this view. Clicking on any note in the list view will open that note up, giving you all the details of that note front and center. When you want to create a new note, you can do it by clicking on the new button in the bottom right corner here. This will open you up to a note where you can do whatever you want. The first thing to do is give your note a title.
5:26 The first words you type will become its title. Once you've created a note, you're free to add anything else. There are a lot of great tools that you have. We'll go deeper into all of those tools in video two of this series. But the basic one is right here. This big and small A gives you the ability to format your text. Let's click on it and see some of our options. We can choose a title, a heading, a subheading, a body, mono styled. We can make it bold or italic or underline it or turn it into a numbered list or a bulleted list or all sorts of amazing tools right here. Easy for you to get to. When you're done formatting, you can click this little X in the upper right hand corner to bring back your keypad. You've got additional tools right here. You can create a checklist by clicking this button, which will allow you to make a really quick to
6:12 do list for anything that you need to accomplish. Don't forget that you can use your dictation button on the bottom right to speak out what you want to type instead of having to type it yourself. Let me show you what I mean. Overview. New line. Creating a new note. New line. Organizing notes with tags. And when you're done, click the microphone off and you're back to having your keyboard and you're ready to type. Above the keyboard, you'll usually see this formatting bar. If you don't see it, it's just gotten closed off and you'll see the plus button instead. Tapping the plus button will open it back up. On the far left, we've got formatting tools. Next to that, we've got our checklist. Next to that, we've got columns, which can give you a spreadsheet like experience with different columns and rows. Next to that, we've got our friendly paperclip. And the paperclip can easily allow you to attach a file from the Files app, to record audio into
7:00 this note, to choose a photo or video, to take a photo or video, to scan a document, or to scan text. All of these are amazing tools and can allow you to easily build your note and make it look perfect. This is a great place to add a photograph. If you click Choose Photo or Video, it will automatically open up your photo library, giving you the ability to click on any picture or pictures you want and then click the add button in the upper right hand corner. These pictures will get added into the note and you can choose whether you'd like your images shown large like these or small. Press and hold on any one, change the view as large to small and it will reduce the size of the image making it easy for you to have a lot of different images without overwhelming yourself. To the right of that we've got the Markup Toolbar which can allow you to draw onto a note.
7:45 with your finger or on the iPad with the Apple Pencil. And to the right of that, we've got Apple Intelligence, which we're going to talk all about in video number six of this series. And you can even instantly create a numbered list by simply coming to your numbers, pressing the number one and double tapping the space bar. That will put it into list mode, which will allow you to put different information down and it will add numbers for you just like this. Formatting tools. New line. Markup tools, Newline, Creating automatic numbered lists, and just like that you can create a note with all the separate information you need, whether it's text, whether it's attachments, whether it's photographs, or even doodles and drawings with your finger. Once you've created your note, there's several things you can do with it. Up at the top, if we click the share button, We'll get the option to collaborate
8:31 with that note. That means that we can share that note to other Apple users and they will see it on their devices and be able to make changes to it and collaborate with you on any project or idea. This is so much simpler and more convenient than using Google Docs to share information because it's right on your phone. You don't need to go to the Google website to do it and it looks great on your phone, your iPad, or your computer. That's one of the things I love about Notes. It looks great no matter what device you're on, which is not something you can say from Microsoft Word or Google Docs, especially when you're using them on a phone. If you don't want to collaborate with someone, that's okay because clicking this button will allow you to send a copy to someone. That way you can email, text, or share any of the contents of a note with anyone in your life, even
9:17 if they're not on a Mac. There are other things you can do from the share button that include the ability to print, or save this document into your files or all sorts of other tools that we'll talk about in a future lesson. Let's click the X button in the upper right hand corner to get out of the share screen. In addition to those functions, you can also move this note into a folder by clicking the three dots here, and choosing Move Note. And there's tons of other tools hidden right underneath those three dots. Right from here, you can easily scan a document with your phone using this button right here, or lock this note so that it requires a password for other people to open it, or use the Find a Note function to find a specific word somewhere within this note. You can even use the three dots to jump to another
10:02 recently opened note . or change the way your attachments are viewed. Are they small, large, or a little bit of both? All of these choices exist inside of those three dots. So once you've created your note, you can share it, save it, file it, or just create the next one. Now let's talk about some of the tools we have for organizing. We spoke a little bit about creating folders and you can use folders to organize your notes and you can even create folders with subfolders, and even folders with sub subfolders, etc. Making it easy for you to organize your notes in a way that you can find them without having to search for them all the time. And that's one of the great tools, making these folders and making sure they're simple. Don't create too many folders. I always recommend starting with five.
10:49 Aim for what I call the five folder fix, which is create five basic generic categories that allow you to sort the majority of your notes. Maybe one is work or personal, writings or family, maybe travel, whatever you're doing the most of, just create a couple of folders to hold on to those notes to make it easier to find things, without having to search all the time. But don't forget, anytime you need to, you can come to the top of any page and come right in to search for anything you need. Just like that. Just by putting a word or two up at the top, you can find any note that contains those words anywhere in your entire notes app. But I still recommend getting used to filing notes and putting them away rather than searching
11:35 for everything, because as your notes library increases, and you can see I'm about to hit 4, 000 notes, the more you have in one place, the harder it is to find what you're looking for without searching. which is where another organizational tool called tags come in. If you scroll down to the bottom of your folders view, you're going to see a list of what are called tags. Tags are hashtags that you add to notes to make it easier to find those notes. The way that I recommend you think Think about hashtags is sometimes there's a note that could be in multiple places. For example, I do a lot of different things with my wife, and so there might be a note in recipes with her, and there might be a note in work or in personal or in family or in travel. If I create a hashtag for her. which we can see right here. It can help me find all notes that have to
12:22 do with Julie without having to search. If I just click right here, it will automatically pull up all of these Julie notes inside of all of these different folders without my having to fight. You can also use multiple hashtags in a note to make it even easier to find specific things. For example, if I came in and clicked on Julie first and then up at the top, I added an additional hashtag like writing, it will show me all of the poems I've written to Julie, regardless of what folder I've decided to store them in. And it makes it really easy to locate those things by using tags. It's super simple to add a tag onto a note. Let me show you. Let's come back into my YT folder. Let's come into my iPhone master class. You can put a hashtag anywhere on a note.
13:07 I like to put them down at the bottom so they don't get in my way. So I'm going to put my cursor right here and open up the numbers keyboard. and the symbols keyboard and grab myself a hashtag. As soon as I do that, notice right above my keyboard it's giving me suggestions of some of the most common tags that I have used in the past. I can pick one of those or I can create my own. If I start typing and the one that I create already has a hashtag, it will auto fill. If I start typing and it doesn't, it will create one. Let's start typing T M A for MacWhisperer Academy. And as you can see, right above my keyboard, it's offering me that hashtag. Let's click on it. Notice that it goes into yellow. If I wanted to create another hashtag, I could just start the hashtag again. And this time, this one is going to be a class note.
13:55 Remember that you can't have spaces inside of a hashtag. So if you want to separate a word, come and bring your cursor into the middle and you can either use a dash, or an underscore, or an asterisk, or something that breaks the words up, but you can't use a space. When you're done creating it, simply hit the return button and you'll notice that it goes yellow and goes live. So now let's go check out our tags list and see if we can find this note. Click the back arrow and go into the folder section. I'm going to scroll down to the bottom where I'm going to start by clicking on TMA here. And it's already found the note right there. But, for the sake of argument, let's pretend that it didn't and that we need to add the additional tag in. Simply swipe on the top bar where you see all the tags, find the one that you want, and tap it. Now it's showing us that that one note is the only
14:42 one that has the class notes and the TMA tag, and it's easy to find. So now you've got some great tools between folders, and hashtags to start organizing all of the notes that you're creating. Remember, we're going to have a whole video all about how to organize notes a little later in this series, so do a little bit of organizational work now, but know that I've got your back and there's more info coming. So what do you think so far? Notes is pretty cool, right? It's got some amazing tools, and now you know how to get around on the app and how to do some basic organization and basic formatting. And there's so many more lessons coming. But if you've already gotten value or learned something new, give this video a thumbs up. It helps other people find this video and get the same value that you're getting. And if you have questions, comments, or things you need to know more about, drop it into the comment
15:29 section and I'll get back to you and give you all the information you need. And if you want to stay tuned with all of the videos that I'm bringing, hit that subscribe button and that notified bell, so you don't have to wonder. Whether the MacWhisperer's got something new, it'll get delivered to your inbox and you'll always be up to date with my latest videos. And now, I know you've been waiting. You've been patient. You've been good. It's time. It's time for The Power Tip. I'm super excited for all the amazing power tips I'm going to bring to you during this entire playlist and series of videos. But this one is key and it's critical to find the note you're looking for. If you've only got a couple of notes, it's not that big of a deal. You can always search, you can always scroll,
16:15 but as you start having more and more and more notes dating back. Some cases years. You can easily overlook very important notes because they haven't been edited recently and they start to fall down the list. But you can solve that super simply by doing what's called pinning a note. It's really easy to pin a note. Simply swipe from the left side to the right side of any of the notes in this list just like this and if you do it slowly you'll notice the little pin icon. If you do it quickly it'll just pin that note and put it all the way up at the top and of this page. But what's even cooler about pinned notes is if you come out of this folder and go into the all folder, it'll pin it there too, making it easy for you to get right into that note without having to hunt around.
17:00 You can unpin a note the same way by swiping from the left to the right, just like that. You can also press and hold on any note and choose pin from this section. Pinning your most important notes is one of the best ways to make sure information you need. is easy for you to find. But be careful, don't pin more than 10 or 15 notes because then it becomes impossible to find something within the pinned note. You want to keep it to about 10 pinned notes at any given time and if you're having a hard time finding a note consider putting it in its own folder or adding a hashtag to make it even easier to find. So that's what we've got for today's video all about the overview for notes. If you click to my right over here, you're going to find another awesome video that's going to teach you even more about how to be productive, how to be organized, and how to get more done with less time.
17:48 I'm Dylan Stewart, The MacWhisperer, and I'll see you in the comments.
