Get the most out of the Notes app for iOS and iPadOS

Everyone takes notes regularly. There’s a good chance this will be done on your iPhone or – during a meeting or lecture, for example – on the iPad. In its most basic form, you simply type text via the virtual on-screen keyboard. Problem starting Notes app and tapping new note button on top right.

You can create as many notebooks (or books if you want) as you want. As soon as you start tapping, the text is solidly placed first. In fact, this first line is intended as a title for your note. Press Enter to move to the next line and continue typing your original note in a much more modest font size.

by Ah You can adjust all sorts of text formatting related things by pressing the floating button bar at the bottom (with the physical keyboard connected) or in the upper right corner of the onscreen keyboard. First, you can choose from several headline text profiles. What’s particularly useful for ‘code hammers’ is, disproportionate† This makes the code look much neater with everything properly aligned.

There are also standard text options such as bold, italic, underline and strikethrough. Via the well-known key combinations on a physical keyboard or, again, the floating menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Changing text color or fonts is lacking in possibilities. It’s not entirely unreasonable, because you usually want to start tapping quickly without fuss.

However, numbered or lists or point lists are available via the floating toolbar. By the way, tables can also be added via the same floating button bar using the appropriate button if desired.

Conveniently, if you copy a url from the browser and paste it into a note, it will be activated automatically. That way, you can keep together a collection of related web links, for example, from that meeting or lecture.

Your note doesn’t have to stay completely colorless, far from it. The app supports the use of Apple Pencil. No Pen? Don’t worry because ‘finger painting’ is good too. Tap the pen-shaped button circled in the upper-right corner of the screen.

tap the button † on the open panel and turn the key finger draw It’s on if you don’t have a pen. Or if you have a Pen, turn it off to avoid unintentional drawing work with your fingers.

You can then choose one of the available drawing tools and a color. Then you draw what you want on the screen. Or take the built-in ruler and draw clean lines at any angle.

Are you someone who constantly procrastinates tasks? Or did you forget to do important things? Then the to-do list will definitely come in handy. To do this, tap the button in the top right toolbar, just to the left of the camera button (we’ll come back shortly). You can now make a to-do list; each item gets a circle.

When you complete a task, tap the circle and it will get a checkmark. If you want, this completed task can be automatically scrolled down so that the tasks that are still to be performed and those that have already been completed are neatly organized. To do this, tap the option Enable sorting when requested.

The Notes app also includes a built-in ‘photo scanner’. For example, it’s ideal for attaching a document you received during a meeting. Especially if you have a lot of ‘measurements’ in a day you usually lose stuff like this. By taking one note per meeting and scanning and photographing the accompanying papers, you keep everything neatly together.

By this we mean that a photographed paper is properly flattened and – if desired – converted to black and white; this will improve readability in print condition.

Tap the camera button and select the option Scan documents† In principle (default setting) everything works fully automatically and the photo is taken as soon as the document is recognized and corrected. Then you can immediately photograph the next pages that run nice and fast.

Also read: Scan with your smartphone – tips and apps

If you touch the page added this way (and it contains text), you can select the text and copy it for later use. Also known as OCR which by the way only works with newer supported devices. Scanning directly to text is also possible via the camera button: select the option Scan text† This allows you to convert text on a sheet of paper on the screen into text that can be pasted into your note in real time.

Tap the button as soon as a yellow frame appears around the text. Add and it finished. Usually this trick works surprisingly well, but make sure your text to be scanned is clear enough. Text recognition, click the photo button and then Choose photo or video† The visible text on an inserted photo can then be selected and copied. After that you can paste everything back as plain text.

Normal photos (and videos!) can also be taken with the camera button or added from the camera roll. Finally, you can further organize your notes and keep them together in smart folders; To do this, tap the button in the upper left corner of the screen in the notes overview and do your thing.