Full transcript of “Never Start from Scratch Again: Mastering Templates in Apple Notes”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Hello and welcome back. Today we're talking about templates in Apple Notes. A great way to speed up your workflow. Let's get started. Well, first of all, let me say that Apple Notes doesn't come with templates. When would you need a template anyway? Well, in my case, for example, every time I write one of these videos, I go through the same process and I structure my notes in the same way. Videos usually start as an idea, as a synopsis, which briefly describes what the video will be about, and then over time it progresses uh with some uh title ideas, an opening hook, some key talking points, and finally to the actual script for the video. In situations like this, it is useful to have a template, not just to save me uh the the time to retype the section names, but also to have a structure that I can follow when
0:45 I'm writing to make sure that I don't skip any steps, for example. So, for consistency. So to save time, I've created a workaround that uses shortcuts to grab one of my templates and uh save it in the clipboard so I can then paste it into the note that I'm writing. As you can see, the solution works, but it's not perfect. And um I have, for example, a quick adjustment to make here. I need to highlight this section and make it mono style. But then I'm ready to start working on this note. And the benefit is even higher if you use longer templates. For example, I could load a meeting note template or a learning template for students or maybe this one. Of course, with um with this method, you will be able to create your own templates using the structure that works for you, whichever length you
1:32 prefer. And as you've seen, the system is not perfect. So, while I explain how to set how to set it up, I will also give you or maybe show you what it can or cannot be done. So, let's cover the basics first. The first step is to create a template by simply creating a new note. You give it a title and you tag it with a tag template. Then you can write fill the notes, style it the way you want. By the way, there is no need to save the templates in a specific folder. You can have them scattered across your notes. I just suggest you create a smart folder uh that displays all notes tagged with the tag template so that they are automatically collected by Apple Notes in their folder for easy retrieval should you need them. The second step is to launch this
2:19 automation when you need a template. So in this case for example I start a new note command N and then I launch the shortcut by going to share shortcuts Apple notes templates. This by the way works on phones and iPads as well. I have a global uh shortcut set up for this on my Mac which is Hypert. So I will click on that instead. And now, as you can see, the automation says, "Pick a template, then paste it into Apple Notes." Super simple. This is what you do. You see the full list of notes that you've tagged with uh the keyword templates. You pick the correct one and it will be copied to your clipboard. You can now go ahead and paste it into the new note that you created and you can simply start working on it. By the way, you can download this automation for free as usual. Just follow the link in
3:06 the description. As you can see, what gets pasted is the body of your template, not the title. And that is why I recommend placing the tag template in the title of your note instead of the body. If you placed it um inside of the note, it will be copied to and you will have to manually remove it from your next note, which of course is a waste of time and we're trying to minimize effort. Now, let's move to some examples. I've created a few templates as examples when I was preparing this video. This one is a daily planner, for example, a fairly long template with different sections and lots of things. And note that I'm including emojis uh where needed so that when using the template, you can simply copy and paste
3:52 those emojis in the in the right places. In this case, for example, the white circles are placeholders for the eight water intakes. And when you drink a glass, you can copy the black circle, which is there at the end, and paste it in the right spot without having to open the emoji picker, which to me is a timesaver. This one is a film review template. This one is a habit and mood tracker template. And in this case, I'm using a table, and I've added the key and the correct emojis at the bottom again to ensure consistency. This one is a study template. This one is the meeting note template that we probably saw earlier. This one is a template for research notes and this one is a weekly planner. Now note that in these templates
4:38 sections are collapsible. For example, if today is Thursday, I could compress the previous days to reduce clutter on the page. As you've probably noticed, these are very long templates. Actually, there is no one stopping you from creating shorter templates. Maybe single sections. For example, you may want to add a single text tracker, let's say, to your diary or to another note. And in this case, you can simply create that section like a standard template and select it in the automation and just paste it as you would normally do. Now, what exactly can be pasted? As I said at the beginning, there are some limitations with this method. Not everything can be pasted. Not everything happens the way you would expect. So,
5:24 let's review what the limitations are with this method. Because as usual, working with shortcuts and automations on the Mac is not as straightforward as you would expect. For example, you would expect that copying and then pasting the content of a note to another one, you know, would be easy. It shouldn't be that hard. And yet, when I was experimenting with this video, I discovered that not every bit of formatting gets pasted correctly. And actually some bits don't get pasted at all. So let's review what sort of stuff you can include in your templates. And for this I've um created a sample note with basically everything. Different headers, uh styles, quotes, mono style text, bullets, highlighters, uh text styles, and so on. Everything. Now I'm
6:12 going to launch the shortcut and I'm going to place this template in another note and then we can compare them side by side. Okay. As you can see, um, many of these things have been copied across, but not all of them. Let's review everything one by one. This title, this heading, and this subheading have been were copied correctly. However, the title can be collapsed. The heading can be collapsed, but the subheading, the one that is here, cannot be com uh collapsed because it's being copied as body. If I convert it back to a subheading, then now it's collapsible. Now this one is the body text and this is fine but this one is a quote and it was copied as body text. So we've lost
6:58 the block quote and if we want it back we need to select it like this. Monosty text again lost the formatting. So we need to style it this way. Surprisingly lists were uh copied um correctly. bulleted list, dashed, and even numbered list, including uh several levels of indentation were copied across correctly. Highlighters don't work. So, every highlighter I placed here wasn't propagated correctly in uh via the shortcut. Text styles, bold, underlined, italics, track off, and so on were uh propagated correctly, but fonts weren't. Um I have something written in Ariel uh Bradley hand den alternate and so on.
7:45 They were all converted to to um body text. The same happens to colors. I have some red, blue and green text here that wasn't replicated correctly in the other node. Tables were um propagated correctly. But look at what happened to checklists. Very strange behavior this one. the open checklist item was converted to a bullet list, a bulleted item. Whereas the uh checked um checklist item was converted to an open unchecked checklist item. Which basically means that if you want to uh include a checklist like an unchecked list in your uh template, you need to um convert these bullets, these points, these these items to checked before you
8:34 propagate your uh template and they will be converted to open unchecked items. Surprisingly, links work in um in this shortcut. So any link you include in your template will be propagated in this um folder here. The layout so centered or left aligned or right aligned is propagated as well. But files, images um don't even appear in as part of the template. So don't use them in your templates because they won't be copied across. A similar thing happens to tags. Although they are copied across but they are not active. So these tags here don't look orange as they should normally be. But if you go beside one and then you um just insert a space, it'll be converted
9:20 to a live tag. Very strange behavior. Well, I hope you found this video on templates useful. Let me know in the comments below if you have suggestions. But for now, thank you very much for watching and see you soon.
