The Power of Apple Notes: Unlocking its Full Potential

When it comes to note-taking apps, Apple Notes is often overlooked as an alternative to popular options like Evernote and OneNote. However, with its robust features and intuitive interface, Apple Notes can be a game-changer for those looking for a reliable and efficient way to organize their thoughts and ideas.

One of the most useful features of Apple Notes is its ability to share notes with others. The process is straightforward: simply hit the three dots on the top right-hand corner of the note section, select "Share," and choose from various options such as sending a text or email, or creating a link to share with others. This feature allows users to collaborate with colleagues, friends, and family members in real-time.

Another often-overlooked feature is the ability to turn notes into PDF documents. To do this, simply click on the "Collaborate" button and select "Send Copy." Then, scroll down to the "Mark Up" section and click on the "PDF Mode" option. From there, users can edit the note as they would in a regular note-taking app, with the added benefit of being able to share the resulting PDF document via email or messaging apps.

But that's not all - Apple Notes also includes a clever feature that allows users to create notes using Siri. Simply pull up Siri and say "Hey, make sure to take this note down," followed by what you want to write in the note. This feature is perfect for those who prefer hands-free note-taking or have difficulty typing on their device.

For those who enjoy formatting text, Apple Notes includes a range of options for customizing font styles, sizes, and colors. Simply select the desired text by highlighting it, then press the "A" button on the top right-hand corner of the keyboard to access various formatting options. This feature can be especially useful for creating visually appealing presentations or reports.

In addition to these advanced features, Apple Notes also includes a range of basic but essential functions. For example, users can swipe left on notes to pin them to the top of their note-taking list, or use the three dots to pan and unpin notes with ease.

Finally, Apple Notes has one more clever trick up its sleeve: the ability to bookmark media files onto specific notes. This feature allows users to save articles, videos, podcasts, and even tweets directly into their notes, making it easy to reference them later on. Simply select the "Share" button on a supported app or website, choose Apple Notes as the destination, and watch as the content is automatically bookmarked in your note.

For those looking to take advantage of all that Apple Notes has to offer, one feature stands out as particularly underrated: the PDF scanner. This clever tool allows users to scan physical documents using their device's camera, converting them into high-quality digital PDFs that can be shared and edited with ease. Whether you're a student, professional, or simply someone who loves organizing paper clutter, the PDF scanner is an incredibly useful feature that sets Apple Notes apart from other note-taking apps.

In conclusion, Apple Notes is a powerful tool that offers a range of features and functions designed to make note-taking easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable. Whether you're looking for advanced collaboration tools, customizable formatting options, or clever tricks like the PDF scanner, Apple Notes has something for everyone. By exploring its full potential, users can unlock a world of possibilities and take their note-taking game to the next level.

**Additional Resources:**

For those interested in learning more about Apple Notes and its features, I recommend checking out my freeform walkthrough video, which provides an in-depth exploration of the app's capabilities. You can find this video by clicking on the link below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso in this video what I want to do is talk about 10 features that go relatively unnoticed and under the radar for the Apple Notes application between Apple notes and Apple's new freeform application those two applications basically Encompass all of my note-taking my ideating my jotting down kind of putting all my ideas from my brain all the way down to digital pen and paper so like I said in this video let's talk about these 10 features that go relatively unnoticed and leave some comments down below of anything that you learn that's new to you or if these are all things that you use on a daily basis but you might be surprised let's get into it foreign so the first tip or feature that I want to show is you click on the little camera button and press on scan documents and that's exactly what it's going to do it's going to look for a document and you have two ways to actually do this you can do it automatically or manually the automatic version pretty much just looks for what it thinks is going to be a document that you want to scan and it scans it automatically versus manually you scan it it still looks for a document but then you can resize it just in case there's some areas that were missing with the automated version of this but you can scan any as you can see I scanned an actual sticker here but you can scan receipts actual documents letters whatever the case may be anything that you need and it turns it into a PDF the next one is very similar so you go back into the camera and this is going to have to be scan for text so you can see that the bottom turns into a viewfinder for your iPad and these work on your iPhone as well you can see that it's going to look for letters and you can see it tries to convert those letters into actual text and you can see it's doing it live now it didn't get this perfectly because yes the font is a little bit weird it should say press publish but at least gave it a go and normally with normal text it's going to go very quickly and very accurately now the next one is going to be for the new quick note feature so if you go into your settings go into your notes scroll down to Corner gestures you can actually decide where you want the quick node to come from either the bottom right or the bottom left I like to keep it on the bottom left and you can use your finger as well as your apple pencil for this but then you can also activate the quick note feature inside of your control center so add it to your Control Center and then a new toggle is going to show up for you to activate that so go into your control center hit the new quick note feature and then boom your quick notes jump up at you from the bottom left but you can also drag with your finger or your ample pencil and actually use the quick note feature as it's intended to be used as a little way to jot down notes like a notepad so let's say you're on an actual document let's say you're at a website and you want to take some notes of that website by all means you can do that with a quick note and the quick note actually works great because you can actually save let's say you are on a website you can save links on there that turns into actual bookmarks and it's going to open those links for you to revisit them whenever you go back to that note now this next one is very very familiar to a lot of people it's just to share the note with anybody else in iOS so you can collaborate on any note just by purely sharing it via an iMessage or an airdrop or a slack whatever the case may be it's basically just a link that gets sent in order for you to actually collaborate in real time and it works perfectly and now this next one is relatively new to iPad OS 16 and it's the ability to lock a note so if you go into the three dots you press lock it's going to ask for you to put a PIN number in there and then you can lock that note and actually enable face ID so you can lock notes behind a pinwall or you can lock it behind a face ID wall and you can see that it's unlocked right there and there's a lock button on the top right hand corner you just press and it's going to lock that note and then to unlock that note you just press view note you hit face ID and then that note gets fully unlocked for you to view which is amazing to see and then you can easily get rid of that lock as well and now this next one is actually very very important and it's one that it's going to save a lot of time for you and it's going to be smart folders so you can now create a new folder name it whatever you want I'm going to name it tasks over here but then what it basically does is you can set criteria so it creates so pretty much any note that fits inside of that criteria that you set whether it's time based whether it's tag based or whatever the case may be all those notes are going to be smartly put into your new task folder and you can do this for anything whatsoever so it works extremely well when you start adding tags in there which is very very cool so smart folders are a must know when it comes to navigating iPad OS 16 and Apple notes now this next one is actually pretty interesting it actually goes back to the sharing idea so first you can share actual notes but now you can actually share actual folders now one thing to caveat which we see here is if you try to share a folder that has a locked document in there it will not allow you to share that folder so you have to go to a folder that has no log documents but it's very simple you hit the three dots on the top right hand corner of the note section and then you can share the same way that you share an actual note just by sending a text or an email or a link to any of these people this next one is actually very very cool and I learned this one recently so you can actually turn any notes application into a PDF document which is kind of crazy so there's a little bit of a workaround for this so what you're going to want to do is actually go into the top right hand corner then click on where it says collaborate so when you click on that collaboration button a little drop down menu is going to come up and it says send copy then you're going to scroll down to where it says mark up and now you're in this PDF mode so you can mark this up however you see fit or use this as a workaround like I mentioned to actually just press done and make it a PDF so once you're done with this PDF document other markup you press done save as a PDF save it into your file system and then you're good to go and you have a full pdf version of your entire notes or that notes section and it's all PDFs as you can see right here in the folders application go there and I have a PDF of that note this next one is actually relatively unknown to a lot of people you can actually use Siri to activate a note so you just pull up Siri whether you use the actual naming or you hold down the hold button and you say hey make sure to take this note down and then you speak what you want the note to say then you can see right there and then it's interactive so you can click on that note that Siri created and it's right there this next one is actually relatively new to me too so you can actually format the text in a bunch of different ways all you have to do is highlight the text and then press the a button on the top right hand corner of the keyboard you can actually change the actual type of size when it comes to like a title heading a subheading a body you can actually bold italicize underline strike through and actually change indentations and things like that so a nice little way to manipulate what text looks like and now we're rounding this off really soon here but if you go into any actual note you can actually swipe left on that note to pin it or you can pan or unpin with the three dots as well so something to take note of if you have a note that's very important and then one of the final ones that we have here is that you can actually share a note in bookmark pretty much any Media or any media type onto any note so here you can see that I'm on Twitter we're going to bookmark Trent text tweet and all you have to do is press the share button share it into a note go into the note and you can see that there's a badge there for the Tweet you can click on it it's interactive and then it takes you right to Twitter and those are all the things we have to go through guys because the notes is very robust and these are just some of the things that I wanted to share with you to make sure that you're aware of these features to fully optimize and take advantage of everything that the notes app can do so those are the features that I wanted to show everybody hopefully you learned at least one new feature and we're able to walk away with something that you're going to use on a daily basis moving forward I think one of the most underrated features is the PDF scanner I mean we've come such a long way from just taking a picture of a piece of paper to now literally it's scanning it's a different type of picture that's being taken because it's extremely clear especially if you have some decent lighting so the PDF scanner and then converting notes into regular PDFs to be able to share moving forward I think those are all great features that are must knows if you are trying to use Apple notes as your main note-taking device which is what I use overall between Apple notes and freeform like I mentioned earlier and I will leave a link down in the description below if you guys do want to check out the freeform walkthrough that I created a couple months back when it first released but that's gonna do for this video if you did make it to the end and you learned something new leave it with a dolphin in the comments down below so I know you made it to the end and if you guys want to watch more Mac OS iPad Os or iOS videos click on one of these right here and until next time I'm Fernando and I'm out of here and all these features will work on iOS as well as iPad OS peaceso in this video what I want to do is talk about 10 features that go relatively unnoticed and under the radar for the Apple Notes application between Apple notes and Apple's new freeform application those two applications basically Encompass all of my note-taking my ideating my jotting down kind of putting all my ideas from my brain all the way down to digital pen and paper so like I said in this video let's talk about these 10 features that go relatively unnoticed and leave some comments down below of anything that you learn that's new to you or if these are all things that you use on a daily basis but you might be surprised let's get into it foreign so the first tip or feature that I want to show is you click on the little camera button and press on scan documents and that's exactly what it's going to do it's going to look for a document and you have two ways to actually do this you can do it automatically or manually the automatic version pretty much just looks for what it thinks is going to be a document that you want to scan and it scans it automatically versus manually you scan it it still looks for a document but then you can resize it just in case there's some areas that were missing with the automated version of this but you can scan any as you can see I scanned an actual sticker here but you can scan receipts actual documents letters whatever the case may be anything that you need and it turns it into a PDF the next one is very similar so you go back into the camera and this is going to have to be scan for text so you can see that the bottom turns into a viewfinder for your iPad and these work on your iPhone as well you can see that it's going to look for letters and you can see it tries to convert those letters into actual text and you can see it's doing it live now it didn't get this perfectly because yes the font is a little bit weird it should say press publish but at least gave it a go and normally with normal text it's going to go very quickly and very accurately now the next one is going to be for the new quick note feature so if you go into your settings go into your notes scroll down to Corner gestures you can actually decide where you want the quick node to come from either the bottom right or the bottom left I like to keep it on the bottom left and you can use your finger as well as your apple pencil for this but then you can also activate the quick note feature inside of your control center so add it to your Control Center and then a new toggle is going to show up for you to activate that so go into your control center hit the new quick note feature and then boom your quick notes jump up at you from the bottom left but you can also drag with your finger or your ample pencil and actually use the quick note feature as it's intended to be used as a little way to jot down notes like a notepad so let's say you're on an actual document let's say you're at a website and you want to take some notes of that website by all means you can do that with a quick note and the quick note actually works great because you can actually save let's say you are on a website you can save links on there that turns into actual bookmarks and it's going to open those links for you to revisit them whenever you go back to that note now this next one is very very familiar to a lot of people it's just to share the note with anybody else in iOS so you can collaborate on any note just by purely sharing it via an iMessage or an airdrop or a slack whatever the case may be it's basically just a link that gets sent in order for you to actually collaborate in real time and it works perfectly and now this next one is relatively new to iPad OS 16 and it's the ability to lock a note so if you go into the three dots you press lock it's going to ask for you to put a PIN number in there and then you can lock that note and actually enable face ID so you can lock notes behind a pinwall or you can lock it behind a face ID wall and you can see that it's unlocked right there and there's a lock button on the top right hand corner you just press and it's going to lock that note and then to unlock that note you just press view note you hit face ID and then that note gets fully unlocked for you to view which is amazing to see and then you can easily get rid of that lock as well and now this next one is actually very very important and it's one that it's going to save a lot of time for you and it's going to be smart folders so you can now create a new folder name it whatever you want I'm going to name it tasks over here but then what it basically does is you can set criteria so it creates so pretty much any note that fits inside of that criteria that you set whether it's time based whether it's tag based or whatever the case may be all those notes are going to be smartly put into your new task folder and you can do this for anything whatsoever so it works extremely well when you start adding tags in there which is very very cool so smart folders are a must know when it comes to navigating iPad OS 16 and Apple notes now this next one is actually pretty interesting it actually goes back to the sharing idea so first you can share actual notes but now you can actually share actual folders now one thing to caveat which we see here is if you try to share a folder that has a locked document in there it will not allow you to share that folder so you have to go to a folder that has no log documents but it's very simple you hit the three dots on the top right hand corner of the note section and then you can share the same way that you share an actual note just by sending a text or an email or a link to any of these people this next one is actually very very cool and I learned this one recently so you can actually turn any notes application into a PDF document which is kind of crazy so there's a little bit of a workaround for this so what you're going to want to do is actually go into the top right hand corner then click on where it says collaborate so when you click on that collaboration button a little drop down menu is going to come up and it says send copy then you're going to scroll down to where it says mark up and now you're in this PDF mode so you can mark this up however you see fit or use this as a workaround like I mentioned to actually just press done and make it a PDF so once you're done with this PDF document other markup you press done save as a PDF save it into your file system and then you're good to go and you have a full pdf version of your entire notes or that notes section and it's all PDFs as you can see right here in the folders application go there and I have a PDF of that note this next one is actually relatively unknown to a lot of people you can actually use Siri to activate a note so you just pull up Siri whether you use the actual naming or you hold down the hold button and you say hey make sure to take this note down and then you speak what you want the note to say then you can see right there and then it's interactive so you can click on that note that Siri created and it's right there this next one is actually relatively new to me too so you can actually format the text in a bunch of different ways all you have to do is highlight the text and then press the a button on the top right hand corner of the keyboard you can actually change the actual type of size when it comes to like a title heading a subheading a body you can actually bold italicize underline strike through and actually change indentations and things like that so a nice little way to manipulate what text looks like and now we're rounding this off really soon here but if you go into any actual note you can actually swipe left on that note to pin it or you can pan or unpin with the three dots as well so something to take note of if you have a note that's very important and then one of the final ones that we have here is that you can actually share a note in bookmark pretty much any Media or any media type onto any note so here you can see that I'm on Twitter we're going to bookmark Trent text tweet and all you have to do is press the share button share it into a note go into the note and you can see that there's a badge there for the Tweet you can click on it it's interactive and then it takes you right to Twitter and those are all the things we have to go through guys because the notes is very robust and these are just some of the things that I wanted to share with you to make sure that you're aware of these features to fully optimize and take advantage of everything that the notes app can do so those are the features that I wanted to show everybody hopefully you learned at least one new feature and we're able to walk away with something that you're going to use on a daily basis moving forward I think one of the most underrated features is the PDF scanner I mean we've come such a long way from just taking a picture of a piece of paper to now literally it's scanning it's a different type of picture that's being taken because it's extremely clear especially if you have some decent lighting so the PDF scanner and then converting notes into regular PDFs to be able to share moving forward I think those are all great features that are must knows if you are trying to use Apple notes as your main note-taking device which is what I use overall between Apple notes and freeform like I mentioned earlier and I will leave a link down in the description below if you guys do want to check out the freeform walkthrough that I created a couple months back when it first released but that's gonna do for this video if you did make it to the end and you learned something new leave it with a dolphin in the comments down below so I know you made it to the end and if you guys want to watch more Mac OS iPad Os or iOS videos click on one of these right here and until next time I'm Fernando and I'm out of here and all these features will work on iOS as well as iPad OS peace\n"