OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

Notes

For many years, the Notes app was a simple bucket for pages of text: lists, recipes, driving directions, and brainstorms. They all synced effortlessly among your Apple phones, tablets, and other computers.

In El Capitan, though, the Notes caterpillar has emerged as a beautiful, far more versatile butterfly. After years of boringness, Notes has suddenly sprouted an array of formatting features that practically turn it into OneNote or Evernote. Now there’s full type formatting, bulleted lists, checklists, web links, and pasted graphics, videos, or maps. All of this gets synced automatically to your iPhone or iPad, too, if it has iOS 9 on it.

Note

The first time you open Notes in El Capitan, it invites you to upgrade your Notes collection to the new, more flexible format. There’s no downside to accepting this one-way conversion—if all your Macs run El Capitan or later, and all your phones and tablets run iOS 9 or later. Earlier versions, however, won’t be able to open your Notes once you’ve performed this conversion.

Creating a Note

To create a new page in your digital notepad, choose File→New Note (⌘-N), or click the button on the top toolbar.

Once the new page appears, type away (Figure 10-27).

Tip

Notes works with Handoff (Handoff). So if you’re editing a note on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, you’ll be offered the chance to jump to the same note on any other Mac, iPhone, or iPad you own ...