Your iPhone Notes App Can Do THIS: 8 Tricks You'll Use Daily

0:00 Apple Notes is one of those apps that pretty much everyone has on their iPhone, but I think the majority of people are barely scratching the surface of what this thing can actually do. Because this thing is so much more than a place to store recipes or jot down ideas. There are some really useful hidden features in here that once you know them, make this one of the most capable apps on your device. So in this video, I'm going to show you eight of my favorites including a couple of brand new features in iOS 27 and I definitely think there are going to be some ones in here that might surprise you. Okay, let's get into it. So one of the best use cases for the Notes app is digitizing your life. Basically taking the paperwork that we have in our real lives and making stuff digital on your device. But I often find that people avoid this because they think it's really complicated. The reality is this

0:45 is extremely easy to do. So I'm going to show you exactly how. We'll start by creating a new note and I'm going to call this one fireplace instructions and you'll see why in just a second. I'm going to press the return key a couple of times to go into the body of the notes itself and then what I've got is a document that I want to scan with instructions. So I'm going to press the paperclip icon in the menu bar just above my keyboard and you can see that I've got a few different options. I can choose scan text and if I choose scan text, what I'll then need to do is just move my phone over some text and you can see that as I move my phone, it highlights different pieces of text that it's able to scan and you can see

1:32 that it also gives me a preview of what I'm about to insert. And if there's anything that I want to insert, I would just press the blue insert button and the text is inserted into my notes. I actually didn't want to do that for this example. I'm going to press the undo button up at the top and this time what I'm going to do instead is go back into the paperclip button and this time I'm going to choose scan documents. So I'll press scan documents and the process here is very similar, but this time I need to get the entire document in my scan. You can see that all I had to do there, and I'll show you again even though it's going to create a duplicate scan, was just bring my phone to the point where the yellow covers the entirety of the document. That's enough. I don't have to press the shutter button down at the bottom.

2:17 You can see that this has now created a scan. We can see a preview down in the bottom left corner. If I tap into it, you can see that this is two essentially identical pages. So, what I'll do is I'll press delete on one of those pages, and then on the other page I've got some options. I can make adjustments using the adjust button if I'm not happy with the way that it scanned. I can use filters by tapping into filters. And if I want to make this black and white, for example, or if I want grayscale, play around with this, see what works best for your documents. And I can use the rotate button to rotate the image if it's scanned in in a way that isn't quite right. There's a retake button up at the top. I'm not going to press that. I'll press the back button, and then I'm going to press the

3:04 yellow tick up in the top right corner of the screen. And you can see that my scanned document has now been added to this note. If this is a multi-page document, and you want to be able to move through the individual pages, you would press this little kind of preview button in the top right corner to view the individual pages of the document. And if you press the downward pointing arrow in the top left, you can see the information about this particular scan. So, the size of the file. You can save it to files. You can share it from here. You can change the way that you you view it. You can copy it, rename it. You can even print it from here if you want to. And then one more thing to show you before we move on from this tip. The great thing about scans in the Notes app is that they're searchable. So, if I go down to the search button at the bottom

3:49 of the the and I type in the name of the brand, you can see that it turns up a result for the scan that we just created. I'll tap into that, and you can see that it takes me right to the scan. Really, really useful feature. Definitely not as complicated as people make out, and absolutely worth taking a bit of time with. For this next tip, let's continue the theme of stuff being searchable within notes, and show you another way that you can quickly get information into your notes app, and then make it searchable later on. And that's recording audio. So, here I've got the skeleton of a note, and I want to add some content to this, but I don't want to type it in. What I could do is press the paperclip button just above the keyboard, and I'm going to tap record audio. And you can see that I have a new recording ready

4:36 for me to work on. I would just hit the red record button at the bottom, and then I would begin speaking. So, let's do that. We've agreed on a budget of 12,000 pounds for the kitchen. The electrician is coming on Thursday. The new worktop should arrive next Tuesday, and uh we've decided to go with the darker cabinet handles. Uh we still need to choose the flooring. Once it's recorded, I'll press the pause button down at the bottom. You can see that it says I can resume if I want to, or I can press the yellow tick up in the top right corner. I'm actually going to show you the little speech button down in the bottom left to show you how quickly and accurate this is at getting my recorded voice into a transcribed

5:22 text on my device. I'll press the yellow tick in the top right corner, and my kitchen renovation thoughts have now been saved to this particular note. What I'll then do is go all the way back to the original page of notes, tap on the search bar down at the bottom, and this time I'm going to type in the word electrician, because I know that I talked about an electrician in the recording that we just uh recorded. And you can see again, it shows me that it's found exactly the note that I was looking for. I can tap into the note up at the top, or I can go back and I can tap into the recording itself. I can tap on the little text preview underneath to see exactly what I was looking for. Oh, and one last thing to show you before we finish this particular note.

6:07 If you think this would be more use to you as a transcript in the note rather than just a recording, you can tap the little ellipsis in the top left corner of the screen and you can choose add transcript to note. And when you do that, you can see that the transcript of our recording has been added directly into the note itself. And look, if you're sitting here watching this thinking there's probably loads more that your iPhone can do that you don't know about, number one, you're right, and number two, you should absolutely check out iPhone Essentials Plus, my dedicated training portal for the iPhone. There's more than 400 lessons in there complete with video, screenshots, and step-by-step guides, as well as Ask PHT, my own dedicated AI chatbot that allows you to interact with the course contents. It's all available for a one-time price complete with a

6:53 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're interested, click the link in the description to find out more or scan the QR code that you can see on screen. A really underused feature in the Notes app is the ability to have lots of different notes the way that I've got on screen now, and then create one master note that you can use to link into those individual notes. Let me show you what I mean. So, this is a hobbies uh folder that I'm working in at the moment. I'm going to press the new button down at the bottom, and I'm going to call this index. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the body itself. I'm going to tap and just pause for a second, and you'll see this little contextual menu appear. I'm then going to press the right-pointing arrow, and you'll see that it says add link in this menu.

7:39 I'm going to choose add link, and this now allows me to search for any of the notes within my notes app. I know that one of those notes about my hobbies was called guitar, so I'm going to type guitar, and you can see that we have guitar practice appear as a note that we can select. I'll select the note. I'll choose use note title because there's no point in changing it to a different title, although you could if you wanted to. And then I'll press the yellow tick in the upper right corner, and you can see that our index now has one note that we can jump into. Let's do it again. There was one in here for photography, so again, I'm going to tap for just a second to get the contextual menu, press the right pointing arrow, choose add link, and in here I'm going to type in photography.

8:25 You can see that we've got photography walk ideas, so I'll tap on that, press the yellow tick in the upper right corner, and we now have another note added to our index. I'll press the yellow tick in the upper right corner to show you that we've finished editing this note, and now anytime that I want to jump into the guitar note, for example, I would just tap on it, and I'll be taken straight there. I can then press the back button, go back into my index, tap on the photography link, and I'm taken straight to that particular note. I'll press the back button to take me back to the main hobbies page, and you can see we have our index sitting at the top. Now, one bonus tip to add in here, if I edit that index page, it's going to sit at the top of this particular folder, but if I edit anything else, that's going to replace this at the top of the folder instead.

9:12 So, one thing you should definitely get into the habit of doing, long press on your index note, choose pin note, and this will now sit in its own dedicated pin section up at the top. It doesn't matter what we do with editing notes underneath, that index is always going to appear at the top of this folder. All right, let me show you how you can minimize and hide content in your notes. Now, this is especially useful when you're dealing with a note with a huge amount of information. This example doesn't have a huge amount in it, but the process is exactly the same no matter what you're doing. What you want to do here is start getting into the habit of using headers for sections. So, you can see here in this example note, we have a section up at the top called important and that's where we put our important stuff.

9:57 I want to be able to hide the other information on this page and only see it when I need it. So, the way that I would do that is I would tap into the space just above the text that we want to hide and I would then press the little AA button in the menu bar just above the keyboard. I'm going to choose heading and then press the X to come out of this page and then I'm going to type less important. You can see that there's a downward pointing arrow just to the left of where it says less important and if I tap on that, you can see that all of the text underneath that has disappeared. It's now a right-pointing arrow, so I'll tap on that and you can see that the text returns. The same would work with the important section up at the top. I

10:43 can hide the text in the important section and I can show it again and you can see importantly it only hides the text within that particular section. It's a really useful way of managing some of those big, more cluttered notes that you might be dealing with. By the way, if you enjoyed discovering tips like these, I send out a lesson every single day for free in the Daily Swipe. Sign up using the QR code on screen or click the link in the description. I already showed you earlier on in the video how you can link to individual notes and create essentially an index document in your folders. Well, a new feature in iOS 27 is the ability to link to individual sections of a note and this one has got two. It's got an important section and a less important section. So, let me show you how we do that. I'm going to press back to go back to

11:30 the original page or the original folder that we're working in, and I'm going to create a new note, and I'm going to call this today. And then, I'm going to repeat the same steps that we used earlier on. Tap for just a second to bring up the contextual menu, press the little right-pointing arrow, and then choose add link. The note that I'm looking for is called project info, so I'm going to type project, and you can see that project info shows up, so I'll select that. And because this has different sections, you can see that link to section underneath now becomes available. I'll tap into that, and I can choose from important or less important. I'll choose important, and then press the yellow tick in the upper right-hand corner, and the link has been created for me. But,

12:16 the really good thing about this is that when we tap on the link, it doesn't just take me to this particular note, it takes me to this particular section of the note. Obviously, this works a lot better with notes that have a huge amount of information, you can see exactly how this works. A really good feature of notes, in fact, pretty much any text edit feature in your iPhone is the ability to complete calculations without needing to go into a calculator app. So, you can see in this example that I'm working on a budget for a decorating job, and I've got a load of numbers in here. And what most people I think would do is, once they've written these out, they would then open the calculator app, but they'd then have to jump from notes to calculator, notes to calculator, inputting each individual number.

13:02 There is a much easier way to do this right within the notes app. All you would do is, in the regular text field, just type in the numbers. So, I'm going to type 85 plus Now, look what happens when I press the equals button. You can see that my phone works this out for me. So, the calculation is shown just above the keyboard, and you've got a few different options for how you might want to insert this. If you choose the option on the left, you're going to type in exactly what you've written. The sum itself without the value showing at the end of it. If you choose the option in the middle, you're going to type in the sum as you wrote it with the value showing at the

13:49 end. And if you choose the option on the right, you're going to get rid of the sum, but replace it with the value. So, I'm going to tap that, and you can see that the combined value gets added. Obviously, you're not going to use this for extremely complicated maths, but for the kind of simple everyday stuff that most of us like to do on our phones, this is really useful. The Notes app is a little bit like the Photos app on your iPhone, where it stands to reason that there is going to be some deeply personal content in your Notes app. So, I think every iPhone owner needs to know how to lock a note. So, let me show you. We'll use this one as an example. I'm going to tap the ellipsis in the upper right corner of the screen, and then I'm going to press lock. One thing worth knowing is that this only works for notes that don't have hashtags. If you have hashtags,

14:36 unfortunately, for whatever reason, you won't be able to lock your note. I'm then going to type in the passcode for my iPhone, and a lock has been added to the note. This is really important, and it's a distinction that you really do need to understand. You haven't locked the note at this point. What you've done is you've applied a lock to the note. You still need to actually lock it. So, the way that you would do that is you would tap on the open padlock up at the top of the screen, and you can now see that you have locked the note. What I can also do is go back and show you the way that a locked note shows in your notes list. You can see there's a little padlock next to that particular note, and you can see that there is no preview information showing about this particular note because it's locked, and therefore, it's hidden. If you want to get back into it, tap to

15:23 go into the note, and then tap on view note, and you'll need to input your passcode, just like we did previously. When you do that, you can see that the note unlocks and becomes completely visible again. And if I come back out of this note, you can see that it is showing as an unlocked note. If you want to completely remove the padlock at a later date, you would tap on the ellipsis up in the top right corner, and you would choose remove in the top right. Okay, and the last thing that I'm going to show you is how to share a note with another person, because you can edit, update, view notes in real time with other iPhone users. So, the way that you would do that is on the note in question, you would press the share button up in the top right corner of the screen. You need to tap into this drop-down menu that says share a link, and choose the correct version

16:10 here, because if you choose send a copy, all you're going to do is send the contents of this note as a text attachment in a message. That might be what you want to do, but if you're wanting to collaborate with somebody else, and have them be able to view and edit in real time, you're going to need to choose share a link instead. So, we'll leave it as that. You can see that it says underneath people that you choose can edit. You can tap into that, and you can choose the sharing options for this particular note. Once you're happy with that, you would then choose how you want to send the link to the other person. I'm going to choose messages, and from here it is just a case of choosing the person, sending them the link, and as soon as they accept, they'll be working on the note with you in real time. So, there you go. That was eight tips for the Notes app, including some new

16:56 iOS 27 features. What about you? Anything that you think I should have included in this video, but didn't? Drop me a comment, and let me know. And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like, and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future. See you on the next video.