Apple Shortcuts 101 — Intro

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What is this all for?

To be honest, it has taken a while getting this started. Where to begin? What is too simple? What is too complex? What kind of audience will discover this? How will it be received? Why do this? Where does this go? All these questions and more floating around since first thinking about starting this. Many of those questions will ultimately be answered and shaped by you. To answer why, that falls on me. Part of it is trying something new in writing and putting it out there. Another piece of the why centers around the hope that I can share some of the knowledge that I have with others out there to provide some help and teaching. I need to start somewhere.

What is Apple Shortcuts?

Let’s first start at a very high level. For those not as familiar, Apple Shortcuts is a free app that allows you to create shortcuts and automations. A shortcut is a way to run a series of actions quickly and easily. An automation is a way to automatically tell a shortcut to run. Apple Shortcuts is available on Macs, iPads, and iPhones. Most of my experience using it is from an iPad or iPhone since those are my primary computing devices. Many iOS apps have shortcut actions available allowing you to automate many actions you may want to do. As I start getting to examples, the main focus initially will be built in applications.

How can Apple Shortcuts do?

I’m not going to do an exhaustive list of how I’ve utilized Shortcuts, but here are a few of my more frequently used ones:

1. Generate a new Apple Note for meeting notes based on a template.
2. Generate a new daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly note in Apple Notes based on templates.
3. Automated travel logs.
4. Saving weekly job search logs.
5. Bookmarks — in Apple Notes.
6. Medication tracking in Apple Notes.
7. Home automation.
8. Dev Tool. Calling REST APIs, running Python scripts, running JavaScript…

There is a lot of possibilities for making your life easier using Apple Shortcuts to automate even little tasks for you. It may take some work to get a shortcut to do what you want, but in the end it will be worth it. The documentation is not always the best or most helpful, but hopefully as this series evolves it will help others out there take advantages of Apple Shortcuts.

How is an Apple Shortcut created?

You do not need to know programming to create shortcuts. Apple has really created a powerful tool in an approachable package. There are a few steps to think about when creating a shortcut that will be beneficial:

1. Write down what you want to do. Do not think about it in terms of actions in Apple Shortcuts. Just describe what you want to do. This will be the starting point for moving forward.
2. Write down the steps you think you need to do to accomplish your goal you defined in the previous step. Again, do not worry about Apple Shortcuts yet. Just think about what you want to do in general. What apps do you need information from? What information do you want to get from the app?
3. Now start looking at actions within Apple Shortcuts and try the actions out. Do not start making a shortcut that does everything you want from start to finish. Take it one step at a time and run ad it progresses to see the results are. This will help make sure you already have the information you think you have and are doing what you think you are doing without having to find where things are broken later on.
4. Keep shortcuts simple if possible. Large, complex shortcuts are error prone and hard to make sure they keep working. You can always use the Run Shortcut action to run other shortcuts. Another benefit you get breaking up pieces of functionality into their own shortcut is that you create it once and re-use that shortcut in multiple other shortcuts.

Future articles will use the outline above to work through creating more complex shortcuts, but here is how you can use the steps outlined above to create shortcuts:

What is the objective of the shortcut?

Create a new daily note in Apple Notes

How would a daily note in Apple Notes be made?

What will the daily note to look like?

Date

Notes

Musings

Reflection

This is a very simple text example for a note with no formatting, but it is a starting point. Future examples will have more complex formatting.

What do I need to make this note?

1. Current date for the subject.
2. Format the date as 2024.06.25. This format will make sure daily notes will always be in order by sorting them by title.
3. The rest of the text outlined above.

What actions are needed to make this shortcut?

To get the current date, it is already a provided variable in our shortcut, so nothing need to be done.

For formatting the date, use the Format Date action using the Current Date and specify a custom formatting for the date to match how we want things to look. To understand how to format dates in more detail, look through this section of the Apple Shortcuts User Guide. Custom date formatting in particular can be found on this page, which contains a link to this standards page explaining the different formatting letters.

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To provide the content of the note, use the Text action. Using the Formatted Date from the previous step along with the other text for the note.

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Finally, create the new note using the Create Note action. In this case, the note will be created in the default Apple Notes folder unless you specify a different folder. By default, the Open When Run option is turned on. It has been changed to prevent opening Apple Notes when this shortcut is run.

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Looking at this all together, the shortcut looks like this:

Screenshot by author

For those interested in downloading this shortcut, it can be found here.

A question for you

Now, it is time to ask those of you reading this for some input to help guide this series moving forward. Please reach out in the comments or directly to let me know what you may like to see as example shortcuts, questions you may have about Apple Shortcuts, or topics you might want more details about moving forward. There will definitely be articles going through some of the shortcuts I use, but I also want to be able to help others out there with interesting suggestions or questions you may have.