Tech Tip - GoodNotes - A Versatile Note Taking Application
Finding a great note-taking application for the iPad has been a continual search for me. Not because there are not useful applications for the act of note-taking, to the contrary, there are several, and they continue to make improvements. Capturing ideas and information is one of the things I use my iPad for the most. I love the fact that I can have everything in one place and not have to search for different notebooks for different reasons. Having the ability to capture ideas or notes from various sources and quickly organize them becomes very helpful in a fast-paced world.
Last year I wrote about the note-taking application Notability. It is an excellent tool for doing everything I mentioned above. However, I have found another outstanding note-taking tool that is equal to or better. Good Notes is another note-taking app that has been available for many years in the App Store. It has continued to improve and add new features. It can be used on the iPhone, iPad, and last year became a handy Mac app as well. It has become my go-to note-taking application.
Good Notes has become my daily notebook for everything I need. I use it for the regular notes I take for meetings, I use it for a ‘paper’ planner, and I use it as a way to record information for specific meetings on a template. I will not be able to touch on all of its features here, but I will share the ones that I have found to make my life much easier on a daily basis.
Taking Notes
If a note-taking app isn’t good at making it easy to capture notes, that would be a complete failure. Good Notes makes it easy to jump right in and begin writing. The application opens to your last-used note page. If you have fully closed out the app, it will open to your selection of notebooks so you can quickly jump to the notebook you need. The application works exceptionally well with the Apple Pencil - making it a natural process to write notes on a glass surface. This is a combination of the Pencil and the software working in perfect harmony. It may be the best implementation of the Pencil of any app I have worked with.
One of the other great things I really like about Good Notes is the ability to have tabs for the different notebooks available on any page you are working on. The tabs are always visible across the top of the page. This makes it simple to move back and forth between notebooks very quickly. I often refer back to a different notebook while in a meeting where I am capturing notes in a separate notebook.
Organize With Notebooks
As I mentioned, Good Notes allows you to have an endless number of notebooks to work with. The main landing page shows your available notebooks. From here, you can add new notebooks, tap to jump to any specific notebook or organize further by adding folders for arranging multiple notebooks within a similar subject.
Search Your Notes
Good Notes has a very powerful search capability. It can search across all of your notebooks, not just the one you are currently working in. Not only does it search the typed words, but will also search your handwritten notes, making it very useful in finding something you know you wrote down, but can’t quite remember where. The search will present the matches it found and then allow you to jump right to that notebook and page.
Navigate Your Documents
Moving through your notebooks and information can be a challenge once you begin to build up a collection. Good Notes allows you to view your documents in many different ways to find specific pages are key items you want to have easy access to.
The Thumbnail view allows you to quickly scroll through all of the pages in the current notebook. In the example below, I have sixty-one pages of notes; I can scroll through quickly to see thumbnail views of each of the pages.
The favorites option allows you to make pages as favorites and then use that for quick reference and navigation later. In the screen capture below, I have favorited two pages that I can now move to with a single tap.
Finally, the outline view, while similar to favorites, allows you to create a table of contents as you work through your document. As you create new notes, you may have multiple pages on the same subject and want to mark where those events begin. From your notebook page, you can select ‘add this page to outline’ to include it in the outline view.
Import Pictures and Add Shapes
Good Notes allows you to take pictures or add pictures from your photo library into any note. Simply choose the picture icon or the camera icon at the top of the page. The pictures icon will then open a photo picker to select the photo you want to import into your document. The camera icon will open the camera function on your device and allow you to take a picture and insert it into your document.
Once your pictures are imported into the document, you can resize them, move them, and even draw on them.
Convert Handwriting to Text
A convenient feature that Good Notes also offers is the ability to convert your handwriting into text. The software is pretty good a converting handwriting. If you write fairly neatly, it picks up most words and translates smoothly. Your results may vary based on your handwriting. I have found it reliable when I use it, and it certainly is a time saver even with some minor edits to the final product.
The way Good Notes has implemented these features makes it very useful even for use outside of Good Notes. For example, if you have written notes within the application and want to convert those to text and then email them. It is an easy process to do. When you select the handwriting you want to convert, it opens a new window that allows you to copy that text and then use it within any other application through the iOS Share Sheet function.
Use Templates
Templates usually mean being confined to a few that the developer included in their software. Good Notes has taken that much further and allows you to import any PDF document that can then be used as a template. I have found this feature to be extremely useful and is the reason that I switched to Good Notes. (In fairness to Notability, this can be done in that application as well. I have just found it works better in Good Notes for various reasons.) This ability allows you to find countless options across the web to use within Good Notes or allows you to create your own.
I have used both methods, I have created my own templates in applications like PowerPoint, Keynote, Pages, or Word, then converted them to PDF documents and imported them into Good Notes for specific uses. I have templates for a weekly sales review meeting, my status meetings, as well as a daily planner.
Good Notes has become one of the most used applications on my iPad. Behind email, it is the one I am in most often. It is versatile enough to use for almost every note-taking situation I find myself in. Because it syncs seamlessly across the iPhone and iPad, I can easily take quick notes while in a store and have them on my iPad when I get back to incorporate into anything else I may need. This is especially handy with pictures and notes from multiple store visits.
While I didn’t show them explicitly, Good Notes offers multiple pens types to fit the style you prefer while writing. It has built-in highlighter tools, shape tools, and text box tools. It really does have everything you need in a fully-featured note-taking application. Good Notes is a paid app, but for the $7.99 (current) price, it is a huge time saver and has allowed me to stay better organized since I began using it.
How might Good Notes help you in your everyday environment?
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