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.
Take Control of Notes offers a thorough grounding in this deceptively simple app, showing you how to master its many tools—and avoid or work around its limitations. This version is updated for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, but also includes working with previous iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 Sequoia.
Learn the basics of Notes:
- Use the Quick Note feature to start a note from anywhere, or start a note from your iPhone/iPad Lock Screen
- Apply and modify character-level and paragraph-level formatting in a note
- Move text around with keystrokes
- Add highlighting to emphasize portions of a note
- Share notes with other users, and add @-mentions
Get advanced insight into formatting and creating rich entries:
- Make lists (including checklists and lists with multiple levels of indentation)
- Create collapsible sections within a note
- Work with tables
- 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
- Perform simple or complex math in Notes simply by typing
- Clean up handwritten text to look more legible (iPad only)
- Use Apple Intelligence to turn a sketch or description into a complete image
Understand organizational and system features, like how to:
- Organize your notes into folders, tag notes, and search their contents
- Use the system password/passcode or a separate password to lock your notes, keeping them encrypted and private
- Choose where to store notes (iCloud, IMAP, or a device) and whether or how they sync
- Import notes from other apps and services
- Create internal references to link notes together
- Record audio and transcribe a phone call from the Phone app
Take Control Books Executive Editor Glenn Fleishman spent 30 years writing for publications like The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Economist, The New York Times, Macworld, and TidBITS. Glenn now focuses his time on Take Control Books, Six Colors (as a columnist), and his own micro-publishing endeavor, Aperiodical, where he writes books about type, printing, comics, and language history, like Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made. You can find Glenn on Mastodon and Bluesky. Reach him by email at glenn@glennf.com.
What’s New in Version 2.1
This update covers all the changes introduced in Notes with the release of Apple’s new version 26 operating systems for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Most of what’s new in these updates relates to the interface, with Apple’s adoption of the Liquid Glass metaphor across their operating systems, and iPadOS’s introduction of windowing and a new form of multitasking.
Where appropriate throughout the book, I’ve added instructions on using menus or multiple windows in iPadOS 26, since that is now an option and you might prefer them to other interactions.
Here are other updates to this version:
- Markdown support: Notes now offers limited support for the standard Markdown format, including embedded images. You can import and export Markdown format, but not edit using Markdown. See “Markdown at a Discount.”
- Search within a note: Previous editions of this book somehow omitted how to search within a note. Sorry! That’s been fixed in “Search Within a Note.”
- Move paragraphs up and down: I added a short section explaining how to use this text movement tool. See “Move Paragraphs Up or Down.”
- Phone extensions: The Phone app was overhauled in the latest operating system releases, and call recording/transcription now reach to the iPad and Mac as of iPadOS 26 and Tahoe. See “Record and Transcribe Phone Calls.”
- Control Center in Tahoe: The addition of Control Center customization to macOS 26 Tahoe means you can add a Quick Note control on a Mac just as you could previously on an iPhone or iPad. See “Add a Control in macOS 26 Tahoe” and “Make a Quick Note on a Mac.”
Note: Apple hasn’t improved the lackluster Writing Tools that are part of their Apple Intelligence suite of features introduced in late 2024. I covered them in the previous edition of this book, but given how weak they are and that they work the same in all apps on supported devices, we decided to remove that section for now. We’ll revisit these tools if Apple improves them.
What Was New in the Second Edition
The second edition thoroughly updated the book for significant changes made by Apple to Notes in macOS 15 Sequoia, iOS 18, and iPadOS 18 (including macOS 15.4, iOS 18.4, and iPadOS 18.4).
The most biggest addition to Notes was how it handles audio. The app can now record audio directly and produce readable and searchable transcripts in real time. On an iPhone 12 or later (with the right combination of language and country/region), you can record a call directly from the Phone app or FaceTime audio into Notes. With Apple Intelligence—on supported devices—these transcriptions can also be automatically summarized. For more on this set of new features see “Record and Transcribe Audio.”
This revision also overhauled the increasingly complicated options of using passwords to lock notes, a subject that, if not fully understood, can put you in jeopardy of losing access to past locked entries. See “Password-Protect Notes.”
Other updates that appeared in the course of these operating system releases include:
- Lock Screen Notes: You can add a Control Center control that lets you start a note from the Lock Screen. See “Make a Note in the iPhone/iPad Control Center.”
- Section divisions: You can create collapsible sections within a note to show and hide portions to make a longer note easier to browse and read. See “Add Collapsible Sections.”
- Highlighting: Notes now supports five different highlighting colors for text. See “Learn Basic Formatting.”
- Math: Enter expressions in a note and the app solves them for you. Two-variables formulas can be turned into graphs. On an iPhone or iPad, you can handwrite expressions and they’re recognized. See “Perform Math.”
- Sync Calculator Math Notes (iPad only): If you use the Calculator app to create Math Notes, these appear in Notes in the Math Notes Smart Folder, but only on an iPad. See “Perform Math.”
- Apple Intelligence: Notes incorporates the general Writing Tools available starting in iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 throughout all apps and text-entry fields. It also supports a new Image Wand tool in Markup that converts a rough sketch or a written description into a drawing improved by or created by Image Playground. See “Edit and Proofread with Apple Intelligence.”
- Attach files: You can now add more than image files to a note. An attachment option lets you use the iPhone or iPad Files app browser to select files. See “Manage Attached Files.”
- Smart Script (iPad only): Notes cleans up your handwriting to look more legible when you write with an Apple Pencil. You can also turn pasted text into something that looks like it was written in your hand. See “Work with Freehand Writing.”
David Forsyth (verified owner) –
Thank you very much for the book Take Control of Notes. I had not used the Notes app until I read about this book and bought it. I now use Notes daily for keeping track of a wide variety of information, adding photos, etc. I was using Evernote for many of these things but found that Notes works just about as well so have cancelled my Evernote account and saved several times the cost of the book.
Thanks, David Forsyth
Mike McGraw (verified owner) –
Josh, I’m reading your Notes book to learn the tool. One small issue I’ve found is that I cannot use your method to upload phots to notes. You say “In a note tap the “plus” icon and choose Photo Library to bring up the photo browser.” However, there is no plus icon in my version of Notes. (iPhone XR, all updates installed) I have found that I can open Photos, select and copy what I want, and then paste directly into a note.
Jeff Andrews (verified owner) –
Josh, I’m moving from EverNote and after reading your book was certain that Notes would make the most sense. Then I read a review that mentioned a shortcoming…no highlighting capability! Yes I can have highlighting in PDFs and other docs, but not in the note itself. I could use bold or italics, but that doesn’t stick out the way highlighting does. My notes in EverNote have critical information highlighted throughout all my notebooks.
Am I missing something? Is there some simple work around for this? Your book is very complete except for no mention of this limitation. Thanks for your time, Jeff
Josh Centers –
Hi Jeff, unfortunately, Apple doesn’t allow highlighting in the text of a Note. There are a couple of workarounds: you can change the font color on a Mac or you could export the Note as a PDF and highlight that. You can also request that feature from Apple: https://box.apple.com/feedback/notes/