15 Mac Notes Tips

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for getting the most out of Notes on your Mac. So the Notes app on the Mac and also on the iPhone and iPad has become indispensable to a lot of people. So here are some tips on using it that you may not know. The main Notes window works just like any other window. If you click on a window behind it, it's now covered by that window. But you can get a note to float on top. The key is to have that note break out into its own window first. So double-click the note in the list on the left. And now it'll be in its own window and you can still work with it just like you can in the main window. But now you can go to Window and then Keep on Top. And with this window set to Keep on Top, even if you select a window behind, you can see this window is still floating on top and you can work with the note inside it. A note could be as long as you want and have lots of different information. One way to tame it though is to collapse sections. Anywhere you have a title, heading, or subheading, you can click to the left of that text and collapse the section underneath. So you can collapse all of the different sections like that and just focus on the one you want. In the View menu, you'll even find keyboard shortcuts for collapsing the section, all sections, or expanding all sections. By the way, if you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. If you have a lot of notes, it can be hard to organize them all. You can certainly create folders here in the left sidebar for that. But a better way to do it is often to tag things. So for instance, I can add a tag anywhere in this note by using the pound or hash symbol and then typing a tag and you can see it appears here in yellow. Now, if I look here under Tags, I'll see all the tags that I've used. And if I click on one, it will show me just the notes that have that tag in it. You can add as many tags to notes as you want and remove them just as easily. You can also link to other notes. You can do this by selecting any text that you want and then go to Edit and then Add Link or Command K. And then you can start typing the name of another note like this and it'll narrow it down and you can select the one that you want and it will turn this into a link that goes to that note. A shortcut for that is to simply type the greater than symbol twice and then you get a list here. But you can just keep typing like this until it narrows it down to what you want. And you can see you can also create a new note to link to or select this one like that. And now I can click here and it'll jump right to that other note and you can add a link in that note back to this one if you like. If you want to highlight some text in notes, you can do that by selecting it and then clicking the Style button here. Click this little color dot to select your color and this will highlight that text using that color. After you do that, you can select other text and use this tool here to highlight it. Now if that seems like a lot of work, note that under Format, Font, there's Highlight and you can see a keyboard shortcut, Shift-Command-E. So you could just select text and use Shift-Command-E to highlight it. But you can also style text directly if you like. So you can select text here and you can use Format and then Font and you'll see a lot of keyboard shortcuts that are used in other apps like Command-B for Bold. But you could also use Show Fonts or Command-T to bring up the font chooser here and you could choose any font that you want and then choose different styles like Bold or Italic and sizes right from this control. You could also click here and then it'll bring up the color tools and you can use this to select a different color for the text. You can also get to that under Format, Font, and then there's Show and Hide Colors or Shift-Command-C. Now if you have some text with a style you like, you don't have to completely recreate it every time. You can select it and then if you go to Format and then under Font, you'll notice there's Copy Style and Paste Style. Remember Option-Command-C and Option-Command-V. So just adding the option to Command-C and Command-V and you can copy that style and then select some other text and paste that style onto that text. Note that if you ever want to just remove the style and go back to whatever the default is, under Format, Font, you've got Remove Style as well. Now in a variety of different apps on your Mac, you have something called Data Detectors and that works in Notes too. For instance, here I've got a date, a phone number, and an address. Notice what happens if I move my pointer over the date. I get this little box surrounding it and this little button to the right. If I click that, it'll allow me to create a new event at that date and that time. If I do it with this phone number here, it will go to Contacts and allow me to create a new contact. Note while this box is shown, I can also Control-Click, Right-Click, or Two-Finger-Click and note that I can start a FaceTime call, FaceTime audio call, or I can message this number. And for an address here, I can use the Data Detector to actually bring up a map. I can even then open in Maps or go to Directions or add the address to my contacts. Another thing you can do in Notes is Math. You can type a math expression like 1 plus 1 and if you just put equals after it, you should see the answer there. Press Return and the answer is added. You can also do complex things like this. And notice how it calculates the result with these variables. You do have some options with this. Under Format, Math Results, you can have it automatically insert the results, you can just have it suggest the results like that, or you can turn it off completely. I've got a whole video on Math Notes and how you can use it. Let's say you add an image to your note by dragging it in. We'll add this image here. Notice how it's pretty big. It goes all the way from the left to the right side. But if you Control-Click it, Right-Click, or Two-Finger-Click, notice you can change View As to Small instead, so you can have a small representation of it. You can still select it at any time and then use the Spacebar to bring up Quick Look to see a larger version of the image. The same is true if you insert a link here. You can do that many different ways. I'll just do it by typing like that, and it'll make that a link. If I Control-Click, Right-Click, or Two-Finger-Click on this, I can switch it to Show Link Preview, and then it'll come up like this. I could also take this and change it back to Small, and it'll be a smaller version of that, or just back to a plain link. Now, your notes are just like any other content like files or photos or things in your Mac account. They're encrypted on the drive, and that's behind a password for your user account, so they're pretty well protected. But if you want to add an extra layer of protection for a few particular notes, you could use the padlock here and lock the note. Now, you can see the little lock there. Now, you can click here again and close all locked notes, or you can quit notes and come back into it, and you'll find that this note is now locked, and you need to use your password to get back into it. In Notes Settings, you can control this a little bit. You can have it use your login password so you don't have to remember a new password, or you can set a custom password. Now, you've got the ability to record audio into a note, and when you do that, if your Mac is new enough and meets these requirements, then you'll also get a transcript of it. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. And you can see I'll click Done here. If I double-click it, it'll open this up again, and you'll see the transcript right here. I can actually copy the transcript and then paste it in somewhere or just add it to this note like that. Now, I know people use a lot of lists in Notes, and you can set up lists to be bullet lists, dash lists, or numbered lists. So, for instance, I could change this to a numbered list. But what a lot of people don't know is you can easily rearrange the items in here, moving things up and down. You can find these controls in Format and Move Item, and you'll see Control-Command Up or Down will help you move items. So this second item here, I can move up to the first item using Control-Command and Up Arrow like that. And you can just use it multiple times, so Control-Command, Down Arrow, Down Arrow to bring that one to the bottom. Sometimes, instead of these kinds of lists, you'll have checklists, and with checklists, you can fill in this circle for each one with a checkmark like that. But you can also have something interesting happen when you check an item. If you go into Notes, Settings, look for Automatically Sort Checked Items. Turn that on, and now when you check an item, it moves to the bottom of a list. But even if you have that turned off, if you check some items, and you have your cursor anywhere in this checklist, you can go to Format, and then below Checklist, under More, you can manually select Move Check to Bottom to move all the checked items to the bottom. Or, you could also choose Delete Checked to remove all the checked items. It's great for a long list where you want to move all the checked items to the bottom to separate them from what still needs to be done, or just get rid of those checked items. So I hope you found these tips useful. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, click the thumbs up button below to let me know. I publish new tutorials each weekday. Hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out.