Apple Notes is Shockingly Good – 30+ Features & Tips
Apple Notes has gotten really powerful, and I'm about to share 30 plus tips for Apple Notes, including attaching audio files to transcribe and summarize, scanning documents or text directly into a note, collaboration features, integrating it with reminders, why Notes is one of the few places Apple Intelligence is actually useful, and after all that, the one feature I still wish Apple would add. All right, let's jump into Apple Notes, and tip number one is quickly switching between notes. If you're working on multiple notes and you're on your iPhone, you can go back and forth to the list view, but you'll see if you tap the ellipses up in the top right corner, there's actually a list of recent notes. So if you want to go back to a note, you can just tap it, and wherever you are, go to the ellipses, recent notes, and then tap the note you want to go to.
Speaking of which, I'll go to my testing math note, which is number two. You can do equations and even currency conversions right here in Apple Notes. Whether you want to do division or maybe multiplication, just type an equal sign, and you'll actually be prompted with the answer right now. there and you can have the full equation in the note or just tap the answer and have that replace the equation right here. Same thing with currency conversions. I can type 70 something US dollars, type the equal sign and it will automatically start converting it to euros.
Or I can use a different symbol or I can start with another symbol like the pound start typing a number equals and it'll then show me USD as the answer. Type the whole equation or just the answer to place that in the note. By the way, If you use Apple Notes on the iPad, you can actually do hand writing. written math equations, and then those will be saved in a special math notes folder here in notes on your iPhone and across all your Apple devices. Number three, a powerful new feature is the ability to record audio directly in Apple Notes.
Now it's not readily visible here on screen, but if you tap the paperclip icon to attach multiple different things, which we'll get to those in a minute, you'll see the record audio option right here, and you can immediately start recording audio, but not just recording. You can also tap this little transcribe symbol here, it will transcribe what it's recording in real time. This is amazing for lectures, maybe like in a classroom, or if you're at a conference and you want to record everything the speaker's saying, but you can still get a transcription of everything too. Stop the recording and hit done, and then that audio file can be played right here, and the transcription is viewable right there.
Now this also works for audio files that you attach to a note but didn't record here. So I can tap the paperclip icon again, do attach file, and I'll grab an audio file to get it elsewhere, like here's a bonus episode of Primary Technology, that's my tech podcast with Jason Aten, subscribe above, new episodes every Thursday. Now I can play this audio file immediately, but it will also transcribe this audio file that I attached, so you don't have to record directly in notes in order to get the transcription.
After a few seconds, you have the transcription here, and if you have Apple Intelligence, this is one of the few places that's really useful on the iPhone, You can actually get a summary of any audio recording you attach to a note. Just a few seconds you'll get that paragraph summary. This is going to come into play later when we get to some shortcuts. Number five you can record phone calls and they will be attached to an Apple note. This works for both cellular calls and FaceTime audio. Once you're in a call you can tap this
symbol here in the top left and then it will announce to the other callers that the call is being recorded and then it will start recording the call. You see the Apple notes notification drop down at the top we'll get back to that in a second then it's recording both sides of the conversation and it'll actually be separated by speaker later. Now, once you're done recording, you can tap stop recording right here, or just end the call and the recording will stop automatically as well. Once you stop the call, you'll see that Apple notes notification, and then you can view that call.
You'll get the transcript or play the audio back all right here in Apple notes and all your recorded calls are saved here in your call recordings folder. Number six, You can scan a document or scan text from a document directly. Let's go back to that paperclip icon and you have two options.
You can scan documents or scan text. If you go to the scan documents tool, this is going to prompt you to take a picture of a page. It'll automatically snap a photo or you can manually snap it with the shutter.
You can preview it and you can take multiple pages in a row and it will combine it into a single PDF document. And then that document will actually be saved here in the note. Then you have the option to share this, save it to your files, And you'll see it comes across as a PDF document, but if you're just trying to pull text from a document or the page of a book, tap the paperclip icon and instead choose just scan text. Now you'll see the camera just opens where the keyboard is, and if I put text in view of that little keyboard section, it will detect text, I can tap insert, and now it just pulled the text from that physical book directly into the note. You
can do this page after page, and now you don't have to scan a PDF, you can just get the plain text. note or one with lots of information you can still search the notes for a specific word or phrase. Tap the three dots and then choose find a note. Type a word or phrase and it will tell you how many times it appears in this note and then you can tap the arrows to scroll through each search result. Number eight, within a note you can actually collapse sections that are under a heading or subheading. You'll see there's a tiny little arrow next to the episode summary and if I tap
Without that, I can collapse the section to save some space, but that content is still there. I can tap it and expand it as well. You can make any text a heading or subheading by selecting it here, tapping the little format tool down here, and then choose heading or subheading. Either one will work. I'll choose subheading for this one. And now I can collapse each subheading
in addition to the major headings. Makes organization across a note much easier. Number nine, you can highlight different colors within a single note. This was new in iOS 18. Let's say I wanted to highlight this section of text. Again, go to the formatting tool using that little A letter, and then right here is the highlight tool and color.
You can choose from multiple colors, orange, pink, purple, and turquoise. And now you can highlight different lines of text, and you'll color code your note. Number 10, in addition to highlighting, you can actually add block quotes within a note. I'll go back to the formatting tool here, and you'll see the block quote option right here. that and now whatever it is you're typing or transcribing using the little microphone on the keyboard that will become a block quote within the note. Little freebie tip here, you can also add tables with a note using that little icon here and create multiple columns and rows to have organized information within the note.
Now let's say this is some private information and you want to lock this note. So even if someone gets into your device, they can't read this note. Well, any note you're looking at tap the three dots and then you'll see the lock option here. Tap lock. Well, I've tried to lock two notes now and apparently you can't lock a note with a PD... for audio attachment or a note that has a tag in it, which we'll get to in a second.
So I guess we'll lock this note. Three dots, lock note. You can use just your iPhone passcode to lock or create a specific password just for this note. So even if someone has your device passcode, they won't be able to get in here. Number 12. If you start using notes more frequently, you might want a quick way to create a note. While quick notes are built into the operating system, You can trigger it on iPad from a corner, same with a Mac, but you can also add Quick Notes to the control center. You can customize your control center, which
I have an entire video on apps and customizing this. You can check it out above and down in the description, but I'm going to add a control, then search for note, and you can see here you can add a note note, meaning a full-on note, or you can add a quick note. A quick note is more of a handwriting type note, so if you tap that, this makes more sense on the iPad where you might actually have an Apple pencil and then scribble or write a note, but you can do that with quick note, even scribble something with your finger, plus quick note. If your notes get their own folder here, you might want to organize them that way. Now what if you'd like to add a note to a reminder, maybe for your planning or just to create a task? Well, I can hit the share button on any note and then scroll over to Reminders down here in the App Switcher. If you don't see it readily, you can tap the three dots and here's Reminders right there.
I might edit this list. This way Reminders will be added to the main sharing sheet. And when I tap Reminders, you can either collaborate with a link, I don't really want to do that, so I'm going to cancel it. Instead is sending a copy of the note. Now I'll tap Reminders.
I can expand the details of the reminder, even choosing a date or time to be reminded. I'll tap Add. And here in Reminders, I'll go to my Inbox, which is my default list, and there is now a reminder with that note's content. Interesting, you can do this kind of formatting in Reminders itself, but if you carry over from a note, then it works.
But you'll also see that note symbol there, and if I tap that, it'll bring me right back to that note in Apple Notes. You can also drag and drop notes over to Reminders. Maybe I want this note to actually be a reminder. Well, I'll start dragging it around the screen.
Keep my finger on screen while I'm navigating. Go back over to Reminders. You'll see the little plus button now next to the note. Let go. And now that note is also a reminder.
Tap the Notes icon. Brings you to that note in Apple Notes. Number 14, if you want to delete a bunch of notes or move them to a folder, you can quickly select multiple notes, dragging with just two fingers.
Drag top to bottom with two fingers on screen. And that's pretty much all at once. Number 15, you can create checklists or to-do lists right here in Notes. There's going to be some settings that we adjust for this in just a moment, but rather than going to the formatting tool, tap this, which is basically the task list symbol, or you can select text and then tap that symbol and it will make it check boxes. Now you can check to mark things off as done right here in Apple Notes. Also, if you have an important note, like a planning note and you want to pin it to the top, well, I can swipe over and tap the pin icon.
Or, when you're in the note, tap the... top right corner and choose Pin from up there, and now that note will be pinned to the top of your notes screen. You can swipe over and unpin a note if you would like, and another bonus tip, swipe from right to left, and you can have file into a folder, delete the note, or share the note all right here in these swipe gestures. Now let's check out some settings for Apple Notes that makes it a little more customizable. Let's go to Settings, and I'm just going to search for notes because
it's easier to get there. Now speaking of the checklist we just did, there is an option down Checked Items. You'll see here it's set to Automatically by default, meaning when you check off an item, it will automatically be moved to the bottom of a list. You may have seen that as I was checking it off before. If I check something, it automatically moves down, but you might want it to stay in place even when you check something off. Well, I can change it to Manually, and now when I check something off, it will stay put. It won't reorder
the list automatically. Another setting you'll see is Mention Notifications. This is great when when you're collaborating with other people in Apple Notes. You can do that on any note by tapping the Share button, and instead of sending a copy, choose Collaborate. And then you can text this or send the link to multiple people. They have to have an Apple device and be using Apple Notes, but then you can collaborate on these notes.
You'll see a little person icon when you're sharing a note with someone, and you'll also see their icon up here on the shared note. Tap it, you'll see the latest updates they did, you can see Show All Activity for any changes made, and you can also show participant cursors if you're working on the note actively. You'll also see all the edits in a list right there. But you can mention someone with an @ symbol and then that note you just saw appeared on my phone will have a little dot next to it. Plus you'll get a notification that someone mentioned you in that note.
Tap on that notification and you'll be brought to where they tagged you. Then you can tag someone else collaborating on a note. Just tap the @ symbol and then you'll see automatic suggestions here above the keyboard and you can start typing a name and it will filter that. tap it and you'll tag them.
right here in the note. A couple other settings. If you use the Apple Pencil a lot with Apple Notes, you can actually choose to have lines or grids in different styles when you create new notes. So if you do a lot of grid work or you just want lines for handwriting, you can choose that here. Another setting here is Auto Convert to Tag. I have this toggled on because sometimes I might want to tag a note and to do that I'll just simply do a number symbol and then any of my other tags will automatically be suggested here or it might be something new.
I'll type projects and... ...and hit return, and now I've created a new tag where I can organize my notes. Those tags are separate from the folders that you see in the main notes window. Go to the very bottom, you'll see tags, and then you can filter your notes by tag, even if they're across different folders.
So typing that number symbol, creating a tag, I like auto-converting those. A setting you might want to change here at the very top is under search. When you search using Spotlight on iPhone, you can have the content of notes actually to show up in results or just the app. For instance, if I swipe down from the middle and I search for something like YouTube planning, well that note is actually going to show up as content within notes as a search result. Then I can just tap it and then I'll be brought right to the note. But if you don't want the contents of your notes to be found
in search, you can toggle show content in search off. Alright, let's go back to the notes app for some organization tips. You can create folders in Apple Notes just by tapping the folder icon here, creating a new folder, and then move to that folder. But you can also nest folders within each other. So these
podcast summaries, I actually want to nest that in my personal folder. So I can tap and hold on that folder. I can drag it up and down, but if I hold it over another folder, I can let go. And now that folder is nested in my personal folders. I can expand or collapse that folder. And if I wanted to, I can tap and
drag that folder out and unnest it out of my personal folder. Speaking of folders, There's number 23, you can actually... ...share a folder and collaborate with others, just like you do an individual note. If I tap and hold on a folder, I can tap Share Folder here. Or I can go into that folder, tap the three dots at the top, and you'll see Share Folder here. You can also share how you view folders, little pro tip there.
You can move the folder or add a folder within the folder, but if you go to Share Folder and then choose Collaborate... ...then you'll be sharing all the notes within this folder with someone you're collaborating with. they can make changes and you can make changes and you get all those shared notes features like I showed you. Number 24, like I mentioned, tags are great for organization where you want notes across your folders to come up with the single tag.
So like podcasts, anything you tag with podcasts will show up there. Same thing with projects. Everything shows up there. Let's go into a note and add a tag real quick, like video planning, and you can have multiple tags per note. And so I'm going to start typing projects, which is one of my tags already.
You'll see it's suggested here. I can tap it, hit done, and now projects tag, and now I have those two notes come up right here. I can also quickly switch between the tags or filter by multiple tags here, so it has to have both YouTube and the projects tag in order for it to show up. And this is also helpful when you make shortcuts because you can pull from tags in addition to folders. Alright, number 25. When you go into a note that has attachments, if you tap the three dots here at the top, you'll see "attachment view" as an option. If you have something with attachments like images, you can change how this is laid out.
Maybe you want attachments small or maybe you want to make them larger, you can change how they are displayed using attachment view. Now, one setting that's kind of hidden within the note is if you're doing math here in the notes, you saw how it suggested both the answer and the equation or if you expand this menu with the three dots and expand math results, you can choose suggest results, just straight insert the results or turn math results off entirely. So if you don't like the equations happening, maybe use the equal sign a lot, you can turn that off, here under-- Math Results in the three-dot menu. Now that's so much going on just in the Notes app, but let's go over to Shortcuts where I can show you four actions that really supercharge notes. All right, let's create some shortcuts, and I'll link these down in the video description below, but the first thing we can do is append to an Apple Note. The first action I'm going to actually
choose is Dictate Text. This is basically going to start listening as soon as I run this shortcut, and whatever I say, it's going to convert it to plain text. And then let's search for Apple Notes actions, and we have a bunch of options here.
And one of the really powerful ones is "Append to Note". This means if you want a note, maybe it's a brainstorming note, and you're just going to keep adding data to it over and over again, I can append the dictated text to, and I can choose a specific note. I'll tap here, I'll see my notes list, and let's add it to my YouTube planning note.
It can be a two-step shortcut, and now, when I run this shortcut, it's going to start listening, and maybe have some ideas that I want to jot down. It's gonna make that into plain text and then automatically append it to that note. I'll hit stop. It's automatically gonna take that text, add it to the note, and if I go over to my video planning note there's the block of text I just dictated over in shortcuts. This is a fun shortcut to have maybe on the action button or in a menu so you can quickly grab ideas but as text so they're searchable and attach it to a note. Let's create another shortcut and if we just search for notes we'll see all the actions available for that app. And one of them is show notes folder. If there's a folder of notes that you access fairly often,
you can select that and then choose the folder like podcast summaries and this can automatically open that folder wherever you are. This could be a widget on your lock screen or today view or something in the action button and now when I tap it it will jump me right to that apple notes folder. Let's create another shortcut and one of the most powerful actions with notes is called find notes. Find notes allows you to filter by whatever you would like. You can find all notes, add a filter and this can be name contains anything or it could be full or tags So if you want to search by tags instead, you can do tag contains They will automatically pull the tags that you have here Choose a tag and then you can do whatever you want with the note You can sort by limit to a number and then when you press play it's gonna show you that note right here Then you can pair this with other actions and you can actually add the open note action And it will open the note that you have specified in the find note action So, if I run this, it's automatically going to open that one. And finally, if I run this, you'll see a list of all the notes that you have in that folder, and then you can tap a note and it will automatically open it. I'll choose my podcast summaries folder, and then let's search for an action, choose from list. That's going to show us a list of all the results of the different notes, and then it will open the note that we choose from the list. Now, if I run this, you'll see a list of all the notes that you have in that folder, and then you can tap a note and it will automatically open it.
And finally, my last shortcut. I actually featured this in a recent shortcuts video, which I'll link above and down in the description, but I have an entire shortcut here that will transcribe and show a summary of a podcast episode. I have a bunch of podcasts here already programmed. If the podcast includes a transcript in the RSS, like mine, Primary Technology, it will add that automatically with a summary from ChatGPT to Apple Notes. I'll run this in the background so you can see what it does. Choose your podcast. It will give you a choice of the most recent three episodes.
And then it's going to work to summarize that in the background. If the podcast doesn't include a transcription in the RSS feed, then it will attach the audio to an Apple Note. And like I showed you before, Apple Notes will automatically transcribe and Apple Intelligence can summarize it for you all within Notes. Now, I was talking to try and show you this shortcut in real time. No cuts or anything. ChatGPT is taking a little while because this is an entire podcast episode transcript, but now we have it. In our Note, we have an episode summary.
and the entire transcript already attached using that one shortcut. That's if a podcast includes a transcript in the RSS feed, like primary technology, but if it doesn't it will attach the audio file to an Apple Note. This is one of the recent episodes of The Talk Show with John Gruber and as you can see it transcribed the audio file automatically and if you have Apple Intelligence on your iPhone then you can get a summary of that entire transcript all right here in notes. Now it's a pretty long summary because it was a
pretty long episode of The Talk Show, but then with that summary you can share it, copy it. I'll just choose copy and now that it's on my clipboard I can go back to the main note, hit paste, and now I have the summary here on the note as well as the audio file and I can still click play and just listen to it. And finally this is a kind of a bonus tip number 31. If you have Apple intelligence on your iPhone or iPad, Apple Notes is one of the few places it is really worth it.
For instance, I can select a bunch of text and then I can open the Apple Intelligence Writing Tools here and I get the option to rewrite, proofread, but I can also summarize it even further. I can choose the Key Points option and then based on the text I had selected, which was already a summary of a podcast, I can get key points from the summary. And you can play with those Apple Intelligence summaries in different formats, rewriting it all right here in Notes. And if you integrate it with ChatGPT, you can even prompt ChatGPT to generate things based on the transcription as well. So you can see notes. It is super powerful, but there is still one reason I still use bare notes as my default.
It's because of Markdown. If you have no idea what Markdown is, then it shouldn't bother you and you should just use Apple Notes as your notes app, because it's incredibly powerful. But Markdown allows you to format things quickly by using asterisks and brackets, and Notes does it sometimes.
For instance, if I want to do a bulleted list, if I do an asterisk, it's going to create a bulleted list automatically. That's great. And with Markdown, you can do things like add-- headings by using two number symbols and then typing a heading.
So I'll do test here, hit return, but as you can see that does not make it a heading. In order to do a heading, you actually have to select text, tap the format button, tap heading, and now it's a heading. If I could do things like add headings or hyperlink things using brackets, and just use all the Markdown I'm already accustomed to, I think Apple Notes would be my go-to. But I'm still using Apple Notes more and more, especially for OCRing tech. And if you want to learn more about shortcuts, I have literally dozens of videos on the channel about that. Check out this playlist right here.
And you know what? I think you'll find a shortcut that's worthwhile for you. Thanks for watching. I'll catch you next time.
2025-03-14 21:38
