Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Notes

The Notes app is simple in the extreme; it’s the digital version of a little lined 3 x 5 pad. Still, it’s nice to be able to jot down lists, recipes, driving directions, and brainstorms—especially because they all sync effortlessly to your phone, tablet, and other computers.

The first time you open Notes, you see what looks like a yellow, lined legal pad—complete with the ragged remnants of previous pages that somebody has torn off. Real cute.

To create a new page of notes, choose File→New Note (⌘-N), or click the button at lower left. Once the new lined page appears, type away (Figure 16-15).

Interior Design

You can dress up your Mac’s Notes pages far more elaborately than you can on the iPhone. For example:

• You have full control over fonts, type sizes, colors, paragraph alignment, and indentation, using the commands in the Format menu. Notes can even create automatic bulleted, dashed, or numbered lists; check out the Format→Lists submenus.

• You can paste or drag photos and other graphics into your notes, too—or even documents, like PDF files, Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets. Drag such a document into a note from the desktop; there it becomes an icon that you can double-click to open later.

• You can drag or paste a link into a note. Later, when you click it (or, on the phone or iPad, tap it), it opens into the corresponding Web site.

Note

Not all interior decoration gets synced ...