Take Control of Notes, Second Edition
Unlock the potential of Apple’s Notes app!
Version 2.0, updated May 8, 2025
This book tells you everything you need to know about Apple's Notes app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the web, from basic features like formatting text and creating lists to advanced features like scanning documents, protecting notes with passwords, making sketches, and managing attachments.
Apple’s Notes has come a long way since it was first introduced with the iPhone as a simple note-taking app, but many users are still unaware of its expanded capabilities. Now available on iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and on the web at iCloud.com, Notes has become a surprisingly powerful tool for writing, sketching, organizing, and sharing information of all kinds.
In Take Control of Notes, originally written by Josh Centers and updated to its second edition by Glenn Fleishman, you get quick but thorough guide to this deceptively simple app, showing you how to master its many tools—and avoid or work around its limitations.
Among many other things, you'll learn how to:
• Choose where to store notes (iCloud, IMAP, or a device) and whether or how they sync
• Import notes from other apps and services
• Apply and modify character-level and paragraph-level formatting in a note
• Make lists (including checklists and lists with multiple levels of indentation)
• Create collapsible sections within a note
• Work with tables in notes
• Encrypt notes with a password
• Record and transcribe audio from phone calls in a note
• Add photos, videos, audio, maps, and other documents to your notes
• Scan printed documents into Notes and save them as PDF attachments
• Draw and sketch using your finger or an Apple Pencil
• Share notes with other users, and add @-mentions
• Use the Quick Note feature to start a note from anywhere, or start a note from your iPhone/iPad Lock Screen
• Organize your notes into folders, tag notes, and search their contents
• Use Apple Intelligence to refine your text or turn a sketch or description into a complete image
• Perform simple or complex math in Notes simply by typing
• Clean up handwritten text to look more legible (iPad only)
