How To Use Apple Notes Like Alex Albon

Seven tools you can use to become a pro Apple Notes user

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Alex Albon is an F1 driver.

He drives for Williams, a team with one of the worst cars in F1 this year. He has to push as hard as he can in every race to even have a chance at scoring points.

Using Apple Notes is like driving a Williams - it can do certain tasks but it’s terrible compared to competitors.

Despite its flaws, however, Apple Notes has seen some major improvement over the past couple of years.

After doing some research, I found 7 powerful features that’ll help you maximize the potential of Apple Notes. Here they are:

Quick Notes 🏃

Quick Notes is, as the name suggests, a way to quickly take notes.

To open a Quick note, swipe diagonally from the bottom right corner of your screen (↘️), using either your finger or an Apple Pencil.

(quick note: screenshots have been weird on my iPad, so some photos in this post are recycled from old posts)

Like a standard note on the Notes app, you can add both typed and handwritten notes.

To view past Quick Notes, just go to the Notes app and tap on the Quick Notes folder.

If you’re interested in learning more about Quick Notes, you can check out this video by Apple’s support team.

Tags 🏷️

Tags are a pretty cool feature introduced in iPadOS 15.

With tags, you can organize your notes by typing or writing #TagName.

With tags, you can sort through your notes to search for notes that contain a specific tag (or a combination of multiple tags).

Exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about using tags in Apple Notes. If you want to learn more, you can check out that post here.

Locked Notes 🔒

Anyone who keeps sensitive information in Apple Notes will love this trick.

To lock a note, tap more and tap Lock Note.

After choosing your password settings, you should be set. Tap lock note now, and here’s what your note will look like:

Collaboration 🤝

To share a note, tap the share button (see below) or swipe left and tap the +👤 button.

Choose where you want to share the note or who you want to share it with.

Additionally, you can also edit the share settings:

If there’s an orange dot to the left of the title of a note, someone has changed the note since the last time you looked at it. You can open the note and swipe right to see who made the changes and when.

For the full details of collaboration in Notes, you can check out this webpage from Apple Support.

Apple Pencil Tricks ✏️

If you’ve used an Apple Pencil for more than a few months, you probably know the basics (pop quiz: what does double tapping the Apple Pencil do?).

However, Apple still has a couple tricks up its sleeve. Despite using an iPad for nearly 2 years (and having a family iPad for nearly a decade), I just learned that you can copy Apple Pencil writing as text in Apple Notes.

Simply select a drawing, tap it, and select “copy as text.”

A few months ago, I wrote a post about some cool Apple Pencil tips (those specific to Apple Notes are towards the bottom). You can find the post here.

Formatting 📜

Apple Notes has a surprising amount of formatting available.

While it isn’t close to Notion/GoodNotes, it’s a big improvement from older editions of Apple Notes.

For people working on basic personal projects (like planning a trip or making a grocery list), the customization offered should be more than enough.

Organization 🏗️

In addition to tagged folders, another key organization feature is the availability of sub-folders.

With Apple Notes, users can create up to 5 levels of sub-folders (far better than the note-taking apps that frustratingly don’t allow sub-folder creation).

To create a sub-folder, tap the more button inside an existing folder and tap add folder.

A Final Thought

“I’d prefer the struggle of learning, over the shackles of studying” - Samuel Suresh

Thanks for reading!

Adi