Apple Notes User Guide for Beginners (Mac)

We have covered Apple Notes on the iPad and iPhone and to help you really master the app, we’re now covering it on the Mac as well. This is my go-to note-taking app as of June 2024, and I use it on all three devices.

Contents show

Orientation

Like on the iPad, the homepage and workspace in Apple Notes on the Mac are the same page. You have your three columns: for folders, notebooks, and notes. The folders and notebook columns are resizeable (put cursor on the demarcation line between two columns, then drag to adjust). When you tap a folder, the notebooks it contains show up in the notebooks column in front of the folders column. To open and see the notes, tap on them, and they will appear in the notes section. This is where you write and edit your notes in Apple Notes. Tapping the sidebar icon (top left corner above the first column) toggles your folders column.

You might also want to get rid of the notebook column. To do that, simply double-tap the notebook you want to open it. The only downside to doing this, is that you won’t have access to your folders anymore. So you will be forced to close the app and reopen it. Another way is to change the this list view of your notebooks to a thumbnail one (thumbnail icon). In the thumbnail view, any document you open (double-click) will not have the sidebar. You can easily go back to the notebooks in your folder. For each notebook you open, you have a toolbar at the top with all the different features for taking notes in the app.

Folders

You can save your folders in Apple Notes in two main locations: iCloud or On My Mac. This MacBook currently doesn’t have a local folder, so let’s add one. Go to the menu bar, Notes, then Settings. Tick Enable the On My Mac account. Now that folder is there in my folders column. All the folders (and their notebooks) in iCloud sync across all your Apple devices that are using the same Apple ID. I have all these notes on my iPad. You can, therefore, see the notes on your iPhone and iPad as well. Notes under On My Mac are local; they don’t sync across devices. It is great for notes you want to keep on a single device.

Before you can take notes, you must first create folders for your notebooks. Go to New Folder (bottom left corner), name your folder and save (tap OK). The app has added it to the iCloud account because I already had a folder selected in that location. When I select a folder On My Mac, the new folder I create automatically goes there.

New Notes

Creating a new notebook in Apple Notes on the Mac is quite simple. Click the new note icon, or simply press command N on your keyboard. The first few words you type automatically become your notebook title. Typing is the only thing that makes sense on the Mac, and so naturally that’s what we’ll focus on first. As you can see, this text is very tiny so the first thing you might want to do is to increase the font size. After selecting all text (Command A), you can then increase the font (Command +). Another way to do it is by going to Format on the menu bar > Font > Bigger. To decrease the font, use Command – or Format > Font > Smaller. You obviously don’t want to do this with every notebook you create, so it helps to set a default font size for all your notebooks (Notes > Settings > Default text size). So, you have five default font size options for your text in Apple Notes.

Titles and headings

The Aa icon can add structure to your notes. Place your cursor on a paragraph, go to the Aa icon to change it into a Title (Shift+Command+T). Both of these are title, but they look a bit different. It’s probably a bug in my beta macOS Sequoia that is doing this. To make the top one bold, I just have to repeat my format. You can also make headings Heading (Shift+Command+H), or Subheading (Shift+Command+J). You can change them back to Body (Shift+Command+B), or convert the paragraph to Monostyled (Shift+Command+M). Whether you place a cursor or select a few words, all the options we’ve covered so far change the whole paragraph. So you can save yourself some time by not selecting anything.

Collapsible sections

In macOS Sequoia, titles, headings, and subheadings create collapsible sections in your notes. An arrow appears at the beginning of your title to indicate that you can collapse it (by clicking it). These sections can be nested, meaning they can go or be collapsed inside of each other. In these notes, Organisation is a title, so it collapses everything under it before the next title, which is Adding a title. Titles can collapse everything below them, except other titles. That is why the second title (which only has headings and subheadings) collapses all the notes. When I expand (click arrow) it, you notice that we have a heading below it. Clicking the arrow on the heading collapses everything below it, until the next heading. Logically, headings can collapse subheadings. Then you can also collapse subheadings. If you notice, the levels of the collapsible sections are easier to see just by looking at the font size of each. You have your titles, headings, and subheadings.

Formatting Notes

You can format your text in Apple Notes. To get started, select the text you want to format, go to the Aa icon and make it bold (Command B). You can also make it italic (Command I) , underline (Command U), or strikeout. Strikeout does not have a keyboard shortcut.

Fonts and Colours

Apple Notes on the Mac also lets you change your font colour. Select your text, go to Format on the menu bar, Font, and then Show Colours (Shift+Command+C). You can also change your font (Format > Font > Show Fonts). The keyboard shortcut is Command T. You can then choose the Font, Style, and Size. Font and Colour options don’t disappear until you have closed them. So you can use them multiple times at once. The iPad and iPhone versions of Apple Notes don’t have font and colour options. But these changes do reflect on these devices when you do them on the Mac. It could be a decent workaround if you want some colour in your notes.

Highlight

Lastly, you can highlight your notes. After selecting some notes, go to the Aa icon and tap the pen icon to use the already selected colour ((Shift+Command+E). To change the highlight colour, go to the dot icon instead (after the pen icon). You have five colours for your highlighter in Apple Notes: Purple, Pink, Orange, Mint, and Blue. The highlighter also changes your font colour.

Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence works offline, on your device. However, it is not available for everyone.

Proofreading

When you have written your notes, Apple Intelligence can help you proofread them. You can do this for the whole notebook at once, but I prefer to do it in smaller chunks; a paragraph at a time. Select your text and an AI icon should appear on the left side of your selection. If it doesn’t appear, or takes too long, bring up the right-click popup menu and go to Writing Tools, then Proofread. Apple Intelligence will tell you the number of changes it has made, and they will be underlined in your notes. Tapping a correction will give you a quick explanation of why it was changed. Tap Done to accept, save the changes, and close the AI proofreader.

Let us try this for a longer paragraph. If you don’t agree with the change, you can undo it (undo icon on the right corner of the popup). You can also toggle back to see the original text, without discarding the suggestions the AI has made. Revert removes all the changes and exits the AI. The arrows on the AI toolbar let you navigate through each suggestion, one-by-one. Tap Done when you’re satisfied with the suggestions.

Rewriting

Apple Intelligence also helps you rewrite your work in three different tones: Friendly, Professional, and Concise. For your rewritten work, you can toggle the original (arrow icon next to Revert), or you can rewrite (rewrite icon next to the Done button).

Summarising

You can also summarise the notes in different styles. The first one is simple, in prose. Key Points gives you a summary that is bulleted with the main points from your notes. List converts your notes into bullet points, and Table converts them into a table. For the first two summaries, Summary and Key Points, the app doesn’t automatically replace your notes. It lets you choose to Replace or not. You can also Copy your notes for pasting them where you want.

Lists

Unnumbered

Apple Notes supports numbered and unnumbered lists. You can convert a paragraph to a list (place cursor > Aa icon > Bulleted List). Shift + Command + 7 is the fastest way to do it on the Mac. You can also just create a new list from scratch. The tab key on the keyboard indents your lists to add levels to them. Your bullet type changes with every level you add to your notes up to nine levels on the Mac. Then they start repeating on your tenth level.

Numbered

You can convert unnumbered lists to numbered and vice versa. Select your notes, go to the Aa icon and choose Numbered List. These have one type of numbering that doesn’t change with levels. Shift + Command + 9 is the fastest way to create a numbered list on the Mac.

Dashed

Dashed lists are great for taking notes. Shift + Command + 8 converts a paragraph or other list into a dashed one. You can also go to the Aa icon, and choose Dashed List. The dash bullet doesn’t change with levels, like with your numbered lists. tab is for indenting, to outdent, use Shift-Tab. But, when there are no bullets, use delete instead. The long way to indent is going to Format (menu bar), then Indentation and finally Increase or Decrease.

Checklists

Interactive checklists add simple to-dos to your notes. Place your cursor on a paragraph you want to change and then go to the checklist icon on the top toolbar. Shift-Command-L is the fastest way to create one. Like your numbered lists, levels (tab key) don’t change the checkbox type. As you check off completed tasks, they move to the bottom. You can turn off this animation by going to Notes (menu bar), Settings, then tick Automatically sort checked items. When you untick this, your checked items remain where they are. I like the animation, so I’ll just go ahead and put it back.

Quotes

macOS Sequoia supports quotes in Apple Notes. Place your cursor, go to the Aa icon, and then Block Quote. Command-Apostrophe is the fastest way to add a quote to your notes.

Tables

To add a table in Apple Notes, go to the table icon on the top toolbar. Option + Command + T is the fastest way to do it. The app creates a 2×2 table that you can add more rows (three-dots icons > down-facing arrow > Add Row Above/Below) and columns (three-dots icons > down-facing arrow > Add Column Before/After) to. You can check out the different shortcuts for this on our website. The shortcuts for that are as follows:

Row above: Option-Command-up arrow
Row below: Option-Command-down arrow
Column before: Option-Command-left arrow
Column after: Option-Command-right arrow

When filling your table, the tab key will move your cursor from one cell to another on the same row. The return key will move you from one cell to another in the same column. You can select rows and columns for formatting, like you do with text. It’s faster to place your cursor in any cell in your table and then go to the three-dots icon if you want to select a whole row/column.

To select multiple rows/columns, drag one of the yellow dots on the selection. You can pick up rows and columns to rearrange them. Just make sure that you have selected the whole row/column. You can also delete rows and columns (select > Delete Row/Column). Lastly, when you’re editing your table (that is if a cursor is active in a cell), you can convert it to text (table icon > Convert to Text). To bring back the table, simply click the table icon. The app deletes your tables in two steps where it first deletes all your content in it (select everything and press the delete key) then the table (press delete key again).

Photos and videos

The fastest way to add photos to your notes on the Mac is to drag and drop them where you want. This works for any attachment, not just images. The photos icon on the main toolbar also lets you add photos from the Photos app. Choose the photos you want to add and go to Add (bottom right corner). The app adds full-size images that you might want to resize. Right-click the image to bring up a popup menu, then go to View As and choose Small. The small size is very tiny, though.

Another way to add photos to Apple Notes on the Mac is using your iPad or iPhone camera. Go to the photo icon on the toolbar, and you can see that my 12.9-inch iPad is close to my Mac with a few options. We want to take a photo (Take Photo), then go to the iPad or iPhone and Use Photo. Here, it got added to the bottom of the notes. To move it up, grab the image and use the cursor to direct where you put it.

Right-clicking your image brings up a popup menu that lets you Cut, Copy, Paste, and Share your image. But we are more interested in the interaction you can have with your photos in Apple Notes. You can rename the photo (Rename Attachment > Save). A quick preview (Quick Look Attachment) opens a preview of your image with features to share (export icon) or use Live Text (live text icon, bottom right corner) for interacting with the text in your image. Open Attachment opens the image in a full Markup window, away from Apple Notes. As you can see, all your photos in Apple Notes go above or below your body text. They don’t mix at all with your body text. And their size options are not very practical either.

Apple Notes can also add videos to your notes. Under the photos icon, go to Attach File and choose the video you want. Unlike your photos, the right-click popup menu doesn’t have the option to resize your video. You can play the video in full screen, rewind or fast-forward 15 seconds, and adjust the Playback Speed (under the two-forward arrows). You can stop your video to extract any text or handwriting from the screen using Live Text. We will cover Live Text in a separate video. Live Text also works even when you’re not in full-screen mode.

Audio Recording

The audio-wave icon on the main toolbar lets you record audio in Apple Notes. You can resize the audio recording window. Tap the record icon at the bottom of the screen to start recording. To pause recording, tap the pause icon. Apple Notes transcribes your audio in real time when you turn on the option (speech-bubble icon).

The three-dots icon (top right corner) lets you Rename your recording. You can also add the transcript to your notes (three-dots icon > Add Transcript to Note), below your recording. Once in your notes, you can edit the transcription if there are any errors. Back to the three-dots icon, Copy Transcript copies it to paste it anywhere you like. You can search the transcript (Find in transcript…).

Save Attachment lets you save the recording on your Mac. You can also Share the audio recording or Delete it. Summary uses Apple Intelligence to summarise your transcript and you can share (export icon) or copy (copy icon). When listening to your audio recording, tapping any part of the transcript skips to that part in your audio. Apple Notes syncs the audio playback to the transcription. The app has 15 second rewind and fast-forward options. Tape Done to save your audio and exit the recording window.

When you don’t turn on live audio transcription, your three-dots icon only give you the option to Rename your recording. But the transcription is available for your recording and you can see it. Double-tapping your audio recording opens up the recording sidebar and with your transcription. You can now interact with it as you would the audio recording you transcribed in real time. The right-click popup menu is similar to the one you get for your photos. But, the quick preview (Quick Look Attachment) and open (Open Attachment) options will use different apps than that for images.

Handwritten Notes

You can add handwritten notes to your Apple Notes using an iPad. Under the photo icon, go to Add sketch. A blank page appears on your iPad, where you can handwrite using your Apple Pencil. Tap Done to save the notes to your Apple Notes on the Mac. Here are the notes I just wrote, at the bottom of your notes.

You can’t interact with your sketches, though because the Mac is not designed to work with handwriting. You will get more out of this from your iPad, so, let’s switch over to an iPad. These are the notes that have synced to the iPad, and our handwritten notes. If you notice, these are proper handwritten notes, in the handwritten section of Apple Notes.

Scanning Documents

Like your handwritten notes, scanning requires either your iPhone or iPad. To get started, let’s go to the photo icon (main toolbar). You can see if you have an iPad or iPhone close by, and it will have an option to Scan Documents with it using the iPadOS or iOS scanning engine. When you Save, the scan gets added to your notes and it’ll probably at the very end of your notes.

You can change the size of your scan (down-facing arrow > View As), which can be Small, Medium, or Large. All the options available we have seen for other attachments before. The Markup option is new, though, because we are dealing with a PDF document this time.

Collaboration

You can work on your notes with others in real time using the collaboration feature in Apple Notes. To get started, go to the share icon (top right corner) on the main toolbar, then choose Collaborate on the dropdown menu. Below it, you can set the permissions to determine Who can access your document: Only invited people or Anyone with the link. You can also control who edits the notes. Can make changes allows everyone to edit your document and View only lets them read without editing. Lastly, you can tick or untick Allow others to invite people if you also want to control who gets invited to work on your notes. This option is only available if you’re only sharing with specific people, who can edit your notes. It disappears when you change those options.

The best way to share notes you’re collaboration on is via Messages. So, that’s the one we’re going to use. Once you start collaborating, you can see everyone’s cursor when they are typing. It can help you follow along, but if you find it distracting, you can turn it off by going to the person icon and ticking off Participant Cursors.

The person icon has more collaboration options. You can message, anyone working on the document and Messages automatically creates a thread under the notes. You can also audio or video call anyone using FaceTime. Apple Notes tracks all the Latest Updates (below your communication options) made in your absence. At the moment we’re all caught up, so there’s nothing there. When there are new changes, Show Updates will highlight them for you.

You can also see all the activity in the app (Show All Activity, a bit further down). Apple Notes tells you who did what and when they did it. It’s pretty much the same as the previous option. This, only works on typed notes, though, not handwritten ones. See, it’s not picking those handwritten changes we just made in the handwriting section. So, it’s best to use this for typed notes.

Show Highlights marks the changes on the left side of the screen. You can bring this up by swiping to the right (with two fingers) and hide it by swiping to the left. Tapping on the participant’s name focuses on that change and dims everything else out. When you Manage Shared Note (at the bottom of the popup window under the person icon), you get the same permissions you get when you first share the notes. Tapping on a person’s name gives you similar options for that person, but you can also view their contact information (Show Contact Card), copy their email (Copy Email) or stop sharing the notes with them (Remove Access). You can also choose to Hide alerts for the notebook. So you don’t receive updates every time something changes. Lastly, to share the link for your notebook so anyone can access it, go to the share icon and Copy Link (bottom of popup menu).

Links

Linking your notebooks makes them easier to navigate, so you can skip from one note to another. You can create independent links (on blank space), or add them to the already-existing text in your notebook. Let’s start with creating an independent link. Place a cursor anywhere, go to Edit (main menu), then Add Link. Typing something (Link To) will start suggesting notebooks you can link to. When Use Note Title is ticked, you can’t add a Name for your link. The link is using the notebook title for its text.

The shortcut for creating links is Command K. This time let’s untick Use Note Title and not add a Name. The app still used the notebook title but skipped the notebook icon. When ticked off, you can add a Name for link. You can also select some text, bring up the popup menu (right-click), then Add Link. The text you select becomes the title for the link. You can then look for the notebook you want to link to.

Tapping on a link opens the linked notebook. You can use this for all sorts of things. A very practical way is a contents page to link all the different notebooks in a folder, for example. Let us create that for our ‘Mac Course’ folder which has four notebooks, but we’ll be linking only three. To see the notebook name, we’ll need to bring up the notebook column. Now, instead of navigating to different folders, you can move to your different notes from this notebook.

Apple Notes can also link to notes from other apps on your Mac, or to websites. For websites, simply type or paste the URL. Tapping on the link will take you straight to the website. You can also link to other apps, if those apps can create links. Let’s use Craft as an example. I will copy the link to this block and paste it in Apple Notes. Tapping on the link now takes me to the block. The way Craft does it is a little convoluted, so, let’s try another app that is more direct. I copied a link from Goodnotes, pasted it into Apple Notes, and now, tapping on it opens the notebook in Goodnotes.

Right-clicking a web link or links from other apps gives you a pop-up menu with options to open (Open Link), edit, copy (Copy Link), or preview the link (Show Link Preview). It turns the link into a thumbnail of the website. Right-clicking on the thumbnail will let you change how the link looks (View As). Plain Link is what we had before; only the text has changed. By default, the thumbnail is Large, but you can also make it smaller (Small).

Right-clicking a notebook link that’s in Apple Notes has slightly different options. You can open the notebook (Open Note) or open it in another window (Open Note in New Window). You can also Edit Link, which is a link available for all links. It just takes you back to where you created links to make some edits if you want. Lastly, you can remove the link (Remove Link).

Search

Apple Notes can search through all your notes in the app, or a single notebook at a time. We’ll start with searching a single notebook. The long way to do that is going to Edit on the menu bar > Find and Find again. Now you can search for anything in this notebook. The found terms are highlighted throughout your notes if they are text. Apple Notes on the Mac is terrible for searching your handwriting. The term you’re on is yellow, while all the other terms are white. You can navigate through them using the arrows on the search bar (far right corner) or using the return key on your keyboard.

Apple Notes can fine-tune what you’re searching for (search icon, far left of the search bar) to focus on:

complete words (Full Word).
words starting with what you’re searching (Starts With)
words containing the word you’re searching (Contains), no matter where it is in that word.

You can also untick Ignore Case if you want the search to filter your results respecting the case; whether it’s a capital or not. Wrap Around is not making any changes that we can pick up. You can also choose not to Include Attachments. Lastly, you can Insert Pattern to look for words associate with several items in your notes: a Tab, Paragraph Break, Line Break, Page Break, Any Character, Any Word Characters, Word Break, White Space, Email Address, Web Address, or Phone Number. Some are a hit-and-miss, though.

The fastest way to search your open notebook is using Command-F. Ticking Replace (far right corner), lets you find and replace the word you search. Let’s replace ‘to’ with ‘humans’, and let’s choose to only affect complete words. The Replace button under the navigation arrow replaces a word a time. It’s good when you don’t want to replace all the words. But, All replaces all the found terms at once. It’s faster and will save you a lot of time. Shift-Command-F is the shortcut for Find and Replace.

To search through all the notes in the app, go to the search bar (top right corner), on the main toolbar. Searching takes you away from your notes to show you results that are grouped in different ways depending on what the app has found. We have Top Hits, some Notes, and one Attachment. You can fine-tune your search to focus only on Shared Notes, Locked Notes, Notes with Checklists, Notes with Tags, Notes with Drawing, Notes with Scanned Documents, or Notes with Attachments. (different criteria). Let’s refine our search to focus on notes with tags and the word ‘demo’. You see how easy it becomes to find items when you narrow what you’re searching through.

Apple Notes even does this with the accounts in the app. So far, we were searching all the accounts (All Accounts). But you can turn on the Current Account, which is where your current selected folder is located. I am tired of Apple Notes crashing on me lately. Have any of you guys also experienced this as well? Anyway, the current account in this case is iCloud because that is where my folder is located. The folder that contains this notebook we have open. But if I open a notebook on my Mac, for example, that becomes my Current Account.