Transcription
Apple Notes is ready on your iPad, and most people barely scratch the surface of what it can actually do. If you've ever wondered if the Notes app is the only notetaking app you'll ever need. This is the video for you. We're covering everything from the basics right through to handwriting, organization, search, keyboard shortcuts, and Apple intelligence step by step.
Before I make any tutorial, I go through the official guides, watch countless videos, and test every feature myself so that you don't have to sit through anything that isn't useful. It's a long one, so use the chapters below to jump straight to what you need.
One quick settings check before we go further. iCloud is turned on for notes. This keeps everything backed up and synced. Enable this if you want certain notes stored locally and kept private from iCloud. It's useful if you share an Apple ID with someone. Sort Notes by is set to date edited, so your most recent notes always appear at the top. Set this to title so every note has a clear subject line from the start, which makes searching and organizing so much easier later on. One more thing worth configuring now. Completed Checklist items automatically move to the bottom. Keeping your active tasks visible. That's all the set up you need.
Now let's look at how to actually use the app. Tap the Create a New note button to create a new note. The first line automatically becomes the title, so make it descriptive. English Lecture is more useful than today's notes, when you end up with hundreds of untitled notes.
To format anything, tap the Aa button in the toolbar to access the text styles. Use these to create clear sections in longer notes. They also create collapsible sections, which we'll cover shortly. Body is your standard note text. Then you have your standard formatting bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough options. Bullet lists Number list and indentation For quick formatting, without tapping the toolbar, select any text and the pop up menu gives you formatting options and some extra text direction options if you ever need them.
Here is a bonus tip that a lot of people haven't figured out. If you tap the date at the top of the note, you can switch between date edited and date created.
Once you have a color coding system set up, it makes finding things so much quicker. Select any typed text and tap the Aa button. You'll see a highlighter icon and a color dot. Tap the color to choose from purple, pink, orange, mint, or blue. This is more useful than it sounds. Use different colors to mean different things. Purple for key terms. Blue for things to follow up on and pink for definitions.
In the formatting menu, tap Blockquote to indent and style a section of text as a quote. This is useful for pulling out a key passage from a source, marking up a direct quote in research notes, or simply visually separating a reference from your own commentary.
Tap the checklist icon in the toolbar to start a checklist. Each return creates a new item. Tap any circle to check it off. You can also highlight text you want to convert into a checklist, which is a really quick way to turn a list you've already written into an actionable checklist, without retyping anything. And if you select the text of an existing checklist, you can also tick or untick multiple items at once via the pop up menu, which is really useful if you want to reset a recurring checklist quickly.
Tables work well for comparing options. It's great for anything that doesn't flow naturally into a list. Tap the table icon in the toolbar to insert a table. Tap the three dots next to any row or column header, to add, remove, copy, cut or format entire rows and columns. Long press the three dots to drag and reorganize them. Unfortunately, beyond basic text formatting, you can't resize columns or rows or realign the table within your notes.
Any line formatted as a title, heading, or subheading creates a collapsible section. Tap the small arrow to the left of any heading to fold everything beneath it. Tap again to expand it. For meeting notes, collapse or previous agenda items as you move through a meeting. And for study notes, you can collapse topics you've already reviewed and keep the current one open.
Type any mathematical expression directly into a note and Notes calculates the answer in line. It works for basic arithmetic and even currency conversions, if you type the currency symbol. To configure how it works, tap the three dot menu, select Math Results and choose between in Insert Results, which shows the answer automatically or Suggest Results which prompts you before calculating.
If you've ever had a really long note and spent ages scrolling to find one specific thing, this is the fix. Tap the three dot menu, Find in note, to open an inline search bar. Type any word and highlight every instance inside the current note, with arrows to jump between them. If you tap the search icon, you can customize your search, find or find and replace. Include attachments, match case, or whole words. Tap the blue tick to exit the search.
To protect the sensitive note, tap the three dot menu and tap Lock Note. To configure how locking works, go to Notes settings, Password. From here you can use Device Password or create a custom notes password. if your device supports it, you can also enable face ID or touch ID. Locked notes are hidden in your notes list so no one can read them without unlocking them. It's useful for anything personal, financial or confidential that you want stored in notes.
This one is especially useful if you find yourself squinting at your notes. Or the text feels strangely large. Go to Settings, Accessibility, Per App settings. Add add Notes and set a custom text size just for Notes. This is useful if you want larger text whilst reading and writing your notes, but don't want to change the size across your whole iPad. You can also customize other display options for notes app here. Alternatively, add the text size control to your control center. You can then adjust size text on the fly from any app, without going into settings.
Before we get into the handwriting features, a quick word on which pencil you have because it affects what's available. All Apple pencils except the usb-C version give you pressure sensitivity, which means pressing harder produces a thicker stroke, making handwriting feel more natural. The Apple Pencil Pro also uses the double tap and squeeze gestures.
One feature worth turning on before you start is scribble. With scribble on, you can handwrite directly into any text field on your iPad and it converts to type text automatically. Scratch out any word to delete it. Draw a horizontal line through text to select it. Circle any word to select it. Draw a line between words to insert a space. Or join two words by drawing a vertical line between them to remove the space. Any stylus or even your finger works with Apple Notes. So whatever you have, you're good to go.
Tap the pen markckup icon at the top of any note to enter the mark up mode. Your toolbar can be moved to any side of your screen, and if you tap the three dots, you can enable Auto minimize so only your selected tool is visible rather than the full toolbar. And while we're talking about screen space, remember you can also resize the on screen keyboard and move it anywhere on your screen. It's really useful if you want to type and see more of your notes at the same time.
You can adjust the thickness, size and opacity of a tool by tapping it again, once it's selected. The tools you'll use most are the scribble tool, which converts your handwriting to typed text. The pen for general writing and annotating. The fine tip pen, which is better for smaller handwriting. The highlighter, and the eraser, where you can choose between a pixel eraser for precision, or an object eraser to remove an entire stroke at once. Then there's the ruler. Drag it onto your canvas as a physical guide for drawing straight lines. And if you want to get a bit more creative, there are some really beautiful expressive tools calligraphy, red pen, crayon, and watercolor tools which give your notes a really lovely personal touch.
And whilst were looking at creative features, you can also create a custom sticker from any image in your photos app. Press and hold on any subject in a photo to lift it. Save it as a sticker and then it appears in your emoji keyboard. And you can add your custom sticker anywhere. It's really fun for personalizing your notes.
Before you start to handwrite anything. Tap the three dot menu, lines and grids and set a background. Lined is the most useful for general note taking with the Apple Pencil. There are three line spacing options you can choose from. The grid layout is useful for spatial structure. Think diagrams, charts, and rough tables, and there are also three grid size options you can choose from. Set your default template for all new notes in Settings, Lines and Grids, so you're never starting from a blank white page unless you actually want to.
Draw any shape and hold your pencil at the end of the stroke for about a second. Notes will snap it into a perfect shape. And Notes subtly cleans up your strokes as you write. Smoothing irregular lines and tightening the overall look. Any misspelled looking words will appear underlined in blue. Tap to see the suggested correction.
If you've ever written something by hand and wished you could just move it somewhere else on the page, the lasso tool is what you need. Draw around any handwritten content to select it. Once selected, you can move and resize it anywhere on the page. Duplicate it. Change its color or straighten it. Or here's the really useful one. Tap copy as text and your handwriting is instantly converted to type text that you can paste anywhere.
And while we're on the subject of manipulating handwritten content, if you press and hold with your Apple Pencil In the space between two words, a small arrow symbol appears, which lets you push the text apart to create extra space. It's really useful if you finish writing something and you realize you need to squeeze a line in without rewriting everything.
This one is a game changer if you still have physical documents, notebooks, or printed materials that you want to add as a digital attachment to your notes. To scan into an existing note, tap the attachment icon and tap Scan Document. Or you can long press the notes app icon to create a new note with the scan directly. When the scanner opens, you can choose between auto and manual mode. Auto mode detects the document and captures it automatically as soon as it's in frame. Manual mode lets you align the camera exactly where you want it and tap the capture button yourself. If you're scanning multiple pages, just keep going. You'll see small thumbnails appear at the bottom of the screen as you go. Tap any thumbnail to make adjustments. Change the filter mode. Rotate the page or delete it, if the scan didn't quite work. When you're happy with everything, tap the tick and the whole document lands in your note as a neat attachment.
For grabbing text specifically, use the Scan Text option, which lets you point your camera at printed text and insert it directly into your notes as typed text. It's useful for capturing text from any physical books, packaging, or printed materials without having to manually type the text.
Tap the attachment icon and select Record Audio, to record directly into a note. Here is the part that really surprised me when I first discovered it. Your recorded audio can be automatically transcribed. And because it's text, it's fully searchable. So you can find things you said in a recording by keyword, just like any typed note. And if your iPad supports Apple Intelligence, you can select Summary to get a condensed version of the audio.
Before we move on, everything we've covered the scanning, the audio recording and adding photos, videos or files, all live in that one attachment icon. It's worth knowing, so you always know where to go when you want to add something to a note.
Whenever you share something to notes from another app, whether that's a file, a PDF, a song, a playlist, or even a map. You can always choose to create a brand new note or add to an existing one. You can send things straight there without having to move them afterwards. If you just want to add something to an open note, you can simply drag a photo, video, map, or text directly into a note from another app, whilst in the split screen view. And because everything is connected across your Apple devices, you can even copy something on your iPhone like a piece of text, an image, or a link and paste it straight into a note on your iPad. Make sure to enable handoff.
In the main notes sidebar, tap New Folder to create a folder. Tap and hold any folder and drag it into another to nest it as a subfolder. Tap the three dot menu at the top of any folder and select View as List or View as Gallery. Inbox can be a folder where everything lands first. Active, for projects and topics you're currently working on, with any subfolders per project and Archive for finished projects and reference material. Tap edit and you can easily move folders with the handles.
You can easily move a note to a folder, by dragging it from the list into a folder in the sidebar, or by tapping the three dot menu within the notes and selecting Move Notes. You can also create a brand new folder on the spot. Now, if you want to move multiple notes at once, I'll show you how to do this in type 26.
Tap and hold any folder or note, tap the share icon. You can set the sharing parameters before sharing the notes by tapping the text below Collaboration, and decide who can access the folder and whether someone can make changes or view only. Anyone you invite may invite others to collaborate unless you disable this option. Tap the shared icon within the notes to view the latest updates, current participants. You can also see a full history of edits made to a shared note. In settings notes, Mention Notifications. With this enabled, you can receive notifications when your name is mentioned in the shared notes.
Type hashtag followed by any word inside a note to add a tag. Tags appear in yellow and are automatically collected in the sidebar under tags. You can long press a tag within the section to rename it or delete it. In the notes settings, if you enable Convert to tag, typing a space after hashtag text, will automatically convert it to a tag, rather than leaving it as plain text. And if you're working in handwriting mode, you can actually write a hash tag directly in your notes, and Apple Notes recognizes it as a tag.
You can also drag any note directly into a tag in the sidebar to assign it instantly, which is much faster when you're doing a quick organizational tidy up, rather than opening each note individually. Tap a tag to view all notes with this particular tag. You can also tap a tag again to filter for notes that don't contain any or all of the selected tags. You can also filter your notes by multiple tags, this way, notes that match or any of the selected tags will be displayed in this view.
Tap edit and scroll down to the tags section. You can now easily delete multiple tags. Tap New Folder and choose to make into Smart Folder. Then go ahead and set the rules. Notes will automatically populate it with any note that matches the rules. Smart folders act like saved searches, which means notes within a smart folder are only references, and they stay in their original folder location. You can also convert any existing folder into a smart folder. Just remember, when you convert a folder, it's notes moved to the main notes folder. They are automatically tagged with the new Smart folders name. This change is permanent and cannot be reversed. You can have a pinned notes folder, a notes with checklists, notes with recent attachments. And this is where smart folders get really powerful. You can combine multiple conditions. And it gets even more specific than that. You can choose whether you want to see all attachment types or just one specific type of attachment. then a folder with notes created or edited in the last seven days. and notes from specific folders, which is great for specialized searches. And one of my favorite smart folder setups is filtering by a specific tag. And every note with this tag will be automatically added to the smart folder.
Tap the three dot menu at the top of any folder and select View Attachments. This shows a grid of every photo and video scan, map, website, audio and documents attached to notes. Swipe right on any note in the list and tap pin or tap the three dot menu and tap Pin note. Pin notes will stay at the top of your folder regardless of the sort order.
In the notes folder view, tap the three dot menu, Select notes. Most people don't know about this one. Two finger Swipe down the notes list and select multiple notes instantly without having to tap each one individually. At the bottom of the sidebar, tap Recently Deleted. Deleted notes will stay here for 30 days before being permanently removed. Long press any note to Move it or delete it immediately.
The Notes app searches across all your notes simultaneously. You can also filter your search by shared notes, lock notes, checklists, tags, drawings, scan documents and attachments. When you trigger search, you'll see a top hit section at the top which shows you the most relevant result. If you name recurring items consistently, always writing action before action items or lecture before lectures, they become much easier to retrieve.
Go to Settings, Notes, Search. Make sure Show App in Search is enabled. If you can't find a note when using the spotlight search, make sure Show Content in Search is enabled.
When you're working inside a note, tap the three dot menu from within the note and tap Recent Notes. And you'll see a list of your recently opened notes. This is really useful when you're moving back and forth between several notes during a session, without needing to navigate back to the sidebar each time. Tap clear menu if you want to clear this history.
Swipe up from the bottom right corner of your iPad with your Apple Pencil, or your finger to open a quick note. The corners of your iPad screen become shortcuts. Now there are two app link settings in the note settings worth turning on. The first being suggest app link when composing quick note, suggests a relevant link so you can attach it instantly. The second setting, suggest notes with app links, the note gets suggested at the bottom of your screen as a handy reminder that you already have notes on it. But there are also three other quick notes methods worth knowing about, too. The first method is to add the Quick Note button to your control center. One tap from anywhere on your iPad opens a quick note instantly. In Notes settings, Lock Screen and Control Center. Choose between always creating a new note or resuming the last one. And if your iPad screen is off, you can still tap the lock screen shortcut to instantly create a quick note, so there's no need to unlock your iPad first. When you're in Safari and you want to save something as a quick note, tap the share icon and select Add to Quick Note.
Before we move on to the next tip, you can also add shortcuts to your control center to open your recent notes, pin notes, or jump straight to one specific note. You can create a simple Apple shortcut that automatically creates a new note with the current date as the title. One tap and your daily note for today is ready and waiting.
Long press the notes app icon on your home screen or dock. Inside any note, tap the share icon and tap Reminders. This creates a reminders entry using the notes title and text. You can edit the information before saving, and the reminder carries a deep link back to the original note. Tap the notes icon within this reminder and it will open the note instantly. You can also drag a note directly from the notes sidebar into a reminders list to create a linked reminder instantly. Highlight specific text inside a note. Tap share from the pop up menu and then select reminders. The resulting reminder uses the note title as its name and your highlighted text as the reminder content. This is useful when only part of a note is relevant to the action you need to take.
Inside any note, if you type or write a date or time, it appears underlined. Long press it and you'll see the options. This one is for anyone who wants their notes to actually link to each other, rather than just sitting in separate folders with no connection between them. Type two of these arrow symbols anywhere inside a note, and your five most recently edited notes appear as quick link options. Tap any one of them to insert a link directly, or type the symbols followed by the note title, and it will show you matching options to select from, or give you the option to create a brand new linked note with that title, if it doesn't exist yet.
Highlight any text in your notes and tap link from the pop up menu. From here, you can link that highlighted text to another note. So instead of a link appearing as a full note title, you can have a clean, readable word or phrase that you tap to jump somewhere else. It's much neater if you want your notes to feel more like a proper document. You can also have an index note like this one as your central hub for everything. This is how you build a connected note system rather than a pile of isolated notes. I've put the full list on the screen now, so you can pause and take note of anything useful. Or check the list out in the description below. The ones I'd highlight as most useful for your day to day notetaking are command N for a new note. Command F to search or find within the notes. Command B I or U for bold, italic or underline and Command Z to undo.
Place your cursor at the beginning of any line and hold down command and control. Then use the up and down arrow keys to move that line up or down within your note. It's also worth exploring the menu bar at the top of your screen. From here, you can customize the notes toolbar to remove buttons you don't use. Access recent notes. Create a new folder and use the format menu for quick access to formatting options.
Safari and Notes work together in a few useful ways. The quickest method is Tap the share icon and tap Notes. This saves the page title, URL directly into a new note. And it's not just web pages. You can share a video directly to notes too, which means you can watch the video and take notes alongside it at the same time. And here's a really cool one. If you highlight specific text on a web page in Safari and then share it to Notes, it saves the link together with your highlighted text formatted as a quote. And when you tap that link, Safari jumps straight to that exact highlighted text on the page. And here's one that most people don't know about. When you take a screenshot of a web page in Safari, you can switch to full page at the top of the screenshot editor, which captures the entire page as a PDF. Share that PDF to the Notes app and you can annotate it directly. highlight sections. Add handwritten notes. Circle things. It's really useful for saving and marking up long articles or web pages.
Tap the share button. Collaborate. Invite with link. Type in your own email address. Then the link will be copied and you can go ahead and open the calendar event and paste it into the URL field. From that point forward, tapping the URL in the calendar event will open the note directly.
In the mail app, you can drag any email directly into an open note to create a link back to their email. and tapping it reopens the original email in the Mail app.
However, you use Siri. Whether that's voice activated, pressing the home side button, or typing, all these work the same way, so use whichever you prefer. You can ask Siri to create a new note. Create a note called Weekly Priorities. You can also ask Siri to open a specific note by name Open up my life hub note. or open notes created in the last week, for example. Show notes created this week. If you're reading a note and want to come back to it later, Remind me about this note tomorrow at 8 a.m.. Siri creates a reminder Link to the note, saved straight to your default reminders list. One thing worth noting is that Siri can't edit an existing note directly. So if you want to add something to a note you've already created, you'll need to open it first and add to it manually. But if you want to get around this, you can go ahead and create an Apple shortcut.
If your iPad supports Apple Intelligence, this is where the Notes app gets really smart, because there's a whole set of AI powered features built right in. Select any text in the note and tap Writing tools from the pop up menu. The ones I find most useful or rewrite and make professional for tidying up any rough notes and key points for pulling the most important information out of something long. Then there's the image wand. Draw a circle on any blank area of your note with your Apple Pencil, and it generates an image based on the context of what you've written around it. You can even choose from different styles. and it works from your handwriting too. You can also circle an existing sketch to transform it into something more refined. It's a really impressive feature. Great for visual thinkers or anyone who wants to make their notes feel more creative and personal.
And that is everything. The Complete Guide to Apple Notes on iPad in 2026. 40 tips one free app. Apple Notes has everything most people need built right into your iPad, syncs across all your devices, and completely free. The gap between the notes and paid apps is narrower than most people think. For a lot of people, it's not a gap at all. If there's one thing to take away, you don't need to use all of these tips at once. Start with the basics. Get comfortable, then add features as your needs grow. The best note taking app is the one you're actually going to use. If you found this video helpful, a like and subscribe really do help my channel grow. Let me know in the comments what you'd like to see next. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.