Nothing but Apple Notes: Exploring Hidden Features

Why most of these gems are not advertised by Apple?

Introduction

Apple Notes is a versatile and powerful app that often goes overshadowed by its more function-heavy counterparts.

In my view, going with Apple Notes as a main part of your information management system is like driving manual. You don’t rely on those God-knows-what-sorcery-is-that automations — sometimes you just craft things by your own hands.

You don’t get backlinks — you manually choose where to put the links to the original note. You don’t get dataviews, but you can create efficient Smart Folders by using the tags smartly. Horizontal separators? It’s there, just be creative! The list goes on.

And there’s a certain beauty in that, boys and girls

This article will explore the hidden gems within Apple Notes that can enhance your note-taking and organization experience. From advanced search workflows and smart folders to text formatting options and YouTube video embeds — Apple Notes offers a range of functionalities that can boost productivity and creativity while not always showing all that on the surface.

Let’s dive into the lesser-known features of Apple Notes and uncover how they can simplify your digital note-taking journey.

What is Going to Be Covered

To save you some time and make sure you can make a conscious decision whether to continue reading or not, the functionality I’m going to cover is this:

1. Spotlight integration: why is it important and some hidden features out there
2. Using keywords to improve search results
3. Nested tags alternative
4. Smart Folders and some real-life examples
5. Advanced text formatting on MacOS
6. Horizontal separators (seriously, its fun)
7. Quick Notes and how to link content correctly
8. Linking Notes with Apps
9. Integration with Reminders
10. Watch YouTube directly from your Apple Notes
11. See all your Attachments at once
12. AI features and contextual suggestions

Spotlight: Discover More

The whole point of taking notes in the first place is to get this information later when needed. When it comes to finding specific information within your notes, Apple Notes goes above & beyond in making it convenient.

The real value of Spotlight in the Apple ecosystem is to be able to extract information fast. For most note-taking applications, you won’t even find the notes you’re looking for when you hit ⌘ + Space. In the best case, you may successfully find the note title (in case of Craft, Agenda, UpNote, or TickTick) if you remember it precisely.

But in the Apple Notes case, you can do 1-click search both in Title and the note Content.

Let’s say you’re looking for all the recipes containing tomatoes. Just hit ⌘ + Space no matter where you are in the system, and enter “tomatoes.” Apple Notes will display all the notes containing “tomatoes” — not only those with “Tomatoes” in the subject.

What’s not obvious is that pressing the SPACEBAR over a specific search result in Spotlight item lets you preview its contents without opening it, allowing for a seamless browsing experience:

Hit the Spacebar while you’re in Spotlight to preview the result

Using In-Text Keywords

And even if you’re unsatisfied with the results provided by Spotlight, you can always get into the in-app search and use the whole search magic there. Apple Notes understands both normal and “exact” search queries (the ones in the air quote “…”), so if you use the note content wisely, you can always find exactly what you’re looking for.

In this example above, I’m using a unique keyword combo inside the body of the notes to find the relevant entries. It is not a replacement for tags but something that would allow you to improve search results drastically.

As we speak of the in-note search, Apple Notes is also good at searching the content of the attached documents, like PDFs, handwritten text, and also OCR text on images.

Tags and Some Hints about Them

For a long time, Apple Notes has been a folder-first application. That was the only way to categorize your notes. But nowadays, Apple Notes allows you to assign tags. Tags act as labels that help you organize and find notes with ease. In this article, we have extensively discussed how Tag usage can differ from Folder usage — make sure to check.

In some apps like Bear or NotePlan, you can find something even more advanced — nested tags. It is basically multi-level tags — like #Color/Green or #Source/Email. Officially, Apple Notes does not support them. But can you live without them? Certainly:

2-word tags work perfectly well (for less-than-enormous note collections)

Smart Folders

It was obvious to Apple that the real advantage of tags resides in the ability to combine them in endless combinations. So, together with tags, Apple introduced Smart Folders, which allow you to automatically filter your notes based on specific criteria you choose — not only by a combination of tags but also by other notes’ properties.

Let’s see some of the examples this may work well with:

1. Meeting Notes: Suppose you regularly take meeting notes and want to create a smart folder that automatically collects all notes related to meetings held in the past week. You can set up a smart folder with the criteria “Tag: #Meetings” and “Date Modified: Last seven days.” This way, any note tagged as “Meetings” and modified within the past week will be automatically included in the smart folder. It provides a convenient way to access and review recent meeting notes without manually searching through your entire note collection.
2. Open Action Items: If you use checklists to track tasks or action items in your notes, you can create a smart folder that gathers all the notes with open checklist items. This can be useful for staying organized and ensuring that no pending tasks are overlooked. You can set up a smart folder with the criteria “Checklist: Open.” This will automatically include any note containing a checklist with open items, allowing you to quickly identify and address pending tasks across your notes.
3. Combine p.2 with p.1, and you’ll get all the action items from your meetings from the past week.
4. Active Projects: Let’s say you have various projects and want to create a smart folder that shows only the active ones. You can set up a Smart Folder with two tags — “#Project” AND “#Active” — to include all the relevant notes.
5. Alternatively, you can set up a smart folder with the criteria “#Project” and “Checklist: Incomplete.” Both options provide a consolidated view of the projects in work and help you prioritize and manage them effectively.
6. You can also exclude specific tags from the criteria — just add the exclusion criteria to the list (e.g., double click on #Completed to exclude the notes tagged #Completed)

As you can see, leveraging multiple criteria in smart folders allows you to create sophisticated filters to organize and manage your notes via various properties.

Advanced Text Formatting

Apple Notes provides a surprisingly long list of formatting options to enhance the appearance of your notes. However, as Apple never intended “feature parity” between platforms, specific options vary between macOS and iPadOS / iOS.

On the macOS, you have much more extensive text formatting capabilities. The revelation to me was how far you can really go with the Rich Text formatting: you can change the text color, font style, font size, and even text alignment to suit your preferences. Can we consider it a compensation for the lack of Markdown support?..

When you press ⌘ + T in Apple Notes on macOS, a font formatting window will appear, displaying options to select the font, font size, and font style. You can choose from various font families and adjust the size and style to your preference.

But it’s not only that — to change the font color, select the text and go to the “Format” menu at the top of the screen. Choose “Font” and then “Show Colors,” or use the shortcut ⌘ + Shift + C. A color picker will appear, allowing you to select the desired font color.

Additionally, you can adjust the overall text size using the ⌘+ and ⌘- shortcuts per note, allowing you to customize the reading experience.

Finally, the macOS version goes as far as providing the ability to align the text to the left, right, and center and even justify it to make your lines look evenly loaded.

And all of that works fine even inside tables.

On iPadOS / iOS, the text formatting options are more limited. You can’t change the text color or adjust the text size within the Apple Notes app itself. However, you can sort of “use” the text preformatted on macOS. If you made a text, let’s say yellow, and aligned it to the right, continuing editing this text on iPadOS or iOS will use the same colors, fonts, and parameters you chose on macOS. Until you completely remove the paragraph, of course.

Separators

One tiny little extra I always like to use to make my notes visually appealing is horizontal separators. You can find them in Bear, UpNote, Agenda. And Craft even offers various designs of them…

But Apple Notes is driving manual, remember?

If you’re seriously ready to get dirty, open up Photoshop or Pixelmator and create a project of 800 pixels by 1 pixel size.

Now, take a line tool and carefully create a 1-pixel line end to end. Open up the color settings and take the 50% grey color right in the middle. Add 60–70% opacity to taste. Now export it to PNG.

Here it is. That’s right — it’s the little line above ^

That’s it — you can copy and paste this image into your notes where needed; it weighs nothing (98 bytes) and won’t even appear in the attachments. However, it will give the result like in the picture above.

Obviously, it’s nowhere on the toolbars, but if you love separators that much, will it stop you? 🙃

You thought drawing lines was nerdy?

Quick Notes: Capture Ideas on the Fly

Available from macOS Monterey and iPadOS 15, Quick Notes allows you to create notes in a couple of clicks from anywhere inside your OS without fully opening the Notes app. Whether you come across an inspiring article or need to jot down a sudden idea, Quick Notes lets you capture thoughts on the fly, ensuring you never miss a moment of inspiration.

In Apple Notes, there are some really smart features related to linking content to your Quick Notes.

How to paste links correctly

Example: let’s say you’re browsing the web and coming across a helpful article you want to reference later. The thing about Quick Notes is — if you store the article’s URL in the Quick Note, when you later open this URL again, you’ll see a preview of the Quick Note in the lower right corner of your screen (valid for all of your Apple devices). By tapping this preview, you will immediately access your Quick Note without leaving the browser interface or searching for this note in Spotlight.

To link content correctly, you don’t just copy the link and paste it into the note — you have to use the “Add App Link” button (or the standard Share menu) to paste a link into your note. If this is a Quick Note, it will automatically appear in the lower right corner the next time you browse the linked website.

Based on the above, Quick Notes may serve as suitable containers for any research where you need to dump information from multiple sources into a single note that would later be transformed into something more solid. By having a direct connection between the source and the note, you just cannot get lost.

3-dot menu near Quick Notes is less than obvious, but can enable two completely different workflows

Links to Apps

But the real magic happens when you realize that some Applications allow you to link them, like in the example above — you can put a link to a specific app screen into your quick note and later access this note again from within this application.

Along with Things 3 I’ve found Apple Mail, Messages and Safari can do the same. If you know other applications that support this — please share

How do you like them backlinks?

The “Links in Quick Notes” feature in Apple Notes allows you to create connections between your Quick Notes and external content, providing a convenient way to access additional information or resources related to your notes. It enhances the efficiency of your note-taking workflow and ensures that you have all the necessary information at your fingertips. It also unblocks completely new workflows in building and operating your Note Collection.

Integration with Reminders

As we are on the topic of linking, if you select the text in your note and share it with the Reminders app, it will create a reminder with a backlink to the original note. I can’t stress enough how useful it might be to get a 1-click connection between the actionable information (a reminder) and the related context (that may reside in the note).

Select the text → Right click → Click on Share → Choose Reminders…

…As a result you will see a Reminder created with the direct link to the source note (little icon on the right)

To make things much easier, you can create a shortcut that would automate all the steps on the previous screenshots — you select the text, hit a key combination, and see the magic happen

YouTube Embeds: Seamlessly Reference Videos

Incorporating multimedia content into your notes is effortless with Apple Notes. By simply adding a YouTube video link, the video will be embedded directly within the note. This means you can reference or watch videos without leaving the app.

Again, for that to happen, you should use the native link-pasting button within the Notes UI, not the copy-paste commands on your keyboard. This way, you’ll get rich links across the board.

Attachments: Keep All Your Files in One Place

As your note collection grows, having an overview of all the attachments across your notes becomes increasingly challenging. This is where the “Browse attachments” button in Apple Notes becomes useful. By clicking it, you can see a consolidated view of all the attachments from your entire notes collection, grouped by type.

The magic button in the top left corner, marked in yellow, will display a grid view of all the attachments, allowing you to quickly locate the document you need. This feature saves you time and effort by providing a centralized location to browse and access all your attachments.

AI / ML Features

While Apple Notes does not extensively advertise AI or machine learning features within the app, some elements look to incorporate these technologies for improved user experience. As I’ve learned, the benefits of these features are subtle but accumulate over time the longer you use the application daily.

The benefits of AI features in Apple Notes are subtle but accumulate over time.

Sorry Danilo, you’re the only celebrity in my contact book

1. Contextual Suggestions: Contacts. When mentioning a contact in Spotlight, not only will it recognize you are talking about a person — but it will also show you the Notes relevant to them.
2. Contextual Suggestions: Dates. If you mention a date in your text, Apple Notes will recognize it and offer you the sort of an “iframe” of your Calendar app for that day.
3. Sketch Recognition: Apple Notes may use machine learning algorithms to enhance the recognition of sketches and hand-drawn shapes, making them more accurate and responsive.
4. Search Relevance: The search functionality provides more relevant results based on your past interactions with Apple Notes. The more you use Spotlight and Apple Notes, the quicker you get to the relevant results.
5. Text Recognition in Images: The ability to extract text from images may involve optical character recognition (OCR) technology, which is also a form of machine learning for recognizing and extracting text content from visual data.
6. On the iPad, it’s a separate kind of magic that your handwritten text is recognized as good as if typed on the keyboard. You can search for text in handwritten notes in Spotlight and copy the handwritten text as a regular snippet to paste to other apps.
7. Tags suggestion — as I noticed, when I hit the # symbol, the list of tags that appears afterward is different each time and seems to somehow depend on the context of a note you’re invoking it from (but that may very well be my fantasy, need Apple folks to confirm). It is especially handy on the iPhone, with limited screen space.

I wish Apple Notes would recognize the dates in ISO8601 format — but nope :(

I’m sure this list is far from being exhaustive. In the near future, the integration of AI capabilities will likely be the focus and, hence, will evolve further. So I would definitely expect Apple to introduce new productivity features that leverage machine learning technologies as soon as in 2024.

Conclusion

Apple Notes is a feature-rich app that goes beyond basic note-taking functionalities. By utilizing its hidden features, such as advanced search in Spotlight, smart folders, tags, text formatting options, Quick Notes, and more, you can elevate your note-taking and organization experience. Whether you’re a student, professional, or creative individual, Apple Notes provides the tools to streamline your digital note-taking journey.

Take advantage of these hidden features and unlock the full potential of Apple Notes to boost productivity and creativity in your daily life.

Hope that was useful!