Adding notes to Google Keep
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Are you brand new to Google Keep, or perhaps you're just looking for a refresher? Well, in this video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know to get started with getting the most out of your notes right here within Google Keep.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And today I'm starting with a brand new account.
I don't even have a single note listed here within Google Keep, but let's change that and show you all the different ways in which you can add notes, edit notes, and then manage all of that information here, right within Google Keep.
Now, by default, when you first log in or open up Keep, you will be presented with the notes section. Now, a little later on, we'll look at the other options that we see here on the left-hand side.
But to get started, let's start putting in some notes. Well, it's very, very easy at the top of our screen we will always have this take a note section.
And if we place our cursor in here, we are opened up with a brand new note. So we can start adding any piece of text, we can copy and paste links and other pieces of information directly into this note.
You'll notice that the cursor will always put us into the body of the note and not the title up above. A title is not necessary here within Google Keep.
So if I select close, you can see there is my full note at this case in point. If I start a new note, maybe I want to say this is new note number two but I do want to give it a title.
So this is the title section up here. If I hit close, you can see it doesn't make that significant of a difference. This really comes down to personal preference, and you may not need a title for each and every one of your notes.
But let's take a look at some of the other things that we can do here within our notes as well. Whether you're taking a new note, or perhaps you're coming in here to edit an existing note,
Using time and location reminders
You will see some other options here on the left-hand side. Let's start off with our reminders.
This can be really helpful if you wanna make sure not to forget a particular piece of information, or especially if you're using Google Keep as a to-do list.
So if we click on our reminders here, we're going to be presented with a few different default times, including later today, tomorrow, or next week. Now, if these fit my needs, I can select one of these right away.
Otherwise, I can come down here and select pick a date and time and be very specific as to when I would like to be reminded. So I'm gonna hit save in this case, and you can see I now have a little icon here, a little badge you could say that it's telling me when I will be reminded today at 2:30.
If I click on this, I can always come back in here and change that and say, you know what? On second thought, remind me tomorrow.
So now, I will be notified if I have Google Keep on my mobile devices, if I have my browser notifications turned on, I will be notified at that time about this particular note.
But you may have noticed that there was another option here under reminders. Maybe I don't want a particular date and time. Maybe I want a particular place.
And this is especially helpful if you are using the Google Keep mobile app on your phone. If I select place, all I need to do is start typing in the name of maybe a store, for example.
Let's see if I can pick something a little bit closer to home here. You can just start typing things in like you would in a regular Google Maps or Google Search.
And now when I've found, in this case, my local Staples store, I can hit save. And you can see that that is now added to this note.
Now it's not going to remind me at a particular date or time. What it's going to do, is that if I have Google Keep on my mobile device, when I am near this store, when I am driving by, or walking by it, when I'm within vicinity of this store, then I will be reminded.
So this can be especially helpful if you're managing a grocery list, or in this case if I need to buy some office supplies, when I'm close to that location, I will be reminded on my mobile device.
Collaborating notes with others
All right, a few other options here, the next one over has to do with collaboration. So you can always add someone to your particular note.
In this case, I am the owner here but all I need to do is type in someone else's email address. Let's type in this test account here, and I can hit save.
And now I can see that that individual has been added to this note. In fact, on the front of the note, from my main screen I can see that as well.
So now they can have access to this note and we can collaborate together. They can actually add content and we can see each other's changes as well.
Adding colors to notes
The third option here has to do with changing a color, and this can be very helpful to organizing all of your notes. Maybe I wanna make this note yellow.
And maybe for me, that represents something that I need to do today, for example. So I can manage my notes and base it on color coding.
You don't have to apply a color, but again another way in which we can organize our notes.
Adding and removing images to notes
The next one over has to do with adding an image. So you can add an additional image to any of your notes.
In this case, maybe I'm gonna grab this image here. I'm gonna select open. And now I've got this image embedded or a part of this given note as well.
There's a lot of other things that we can do with our images here within Google Keep. At this stage, I'm just going to show you how to remove it.
If you hover over the image, we can remove it, we can remove it here as well. And now it is removed, it's gone from that particular note.
The next one over has to do with archiving this note. And remember, archiving is different than deleting a note. Deleting is permanent, it's gone for good.
If I choose to archive this note, it will end up over here in this archive folder, so I can retrieve it later. Last but not least, we have this more section where we have a number of further advanced options as well.
This is where we can delete a note permanently. Here we can add a label, which I'm gonna show you in just a moment.
Adding drawings to notes
We can also add things like a drawing. So if you want to add something that you're drawing to, this is especially useful if you're using the mobile version of Google Keep, you can do so as well.
Now you can see I've added this drawing directly to this particular note. Be aware that it's actually going to add a full square, regardless of how small your drawing may be.
It's actually gonna take up an awful lot of room here when you add a drawing to that particular note. But let's look at some of the other options we can do here as well.
We can make a copy of this note. Maybe most of the note is the same thing that we want somewhere else, but we can make a copy and make some changes.
We can also show checkboxes, which I'll show you in a moment, and also copy it to Google Docs so that you can access this information within Google Drive.
But let's get back to adding more notes, because we can do so much more than just adding text-based notes here within Google Keep.
Lists and checklists within a note
One of the more popular ways of adding notes here within Google Keep is to create a list or a specifically a checklist.
So rather than placing my cursor here within take a note, I can come over here and select a new list. And what you can see is that it's going to give me a list-based form.
So if I start to write in, maybe a grocery list here, for example, I now have some checkboxes that I can tick off as I go along the way.
So this is especially helpful if you're creating a shopping list as you see here, or anything else, such as a to-do list where you want to tick things off.
If I close this off, I can see, and I can actually even access this checklist from the front of the note. I don't have to necessarily open it up.
I can actually start to tick these things off and you can see that it's going to cross them through and put them to the bottom of my list as well.
The other nice thing about the list format here within Google Keep is that you can drag and embed them or make them as a sublist down below.
So here I now have milk under oranges which probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but maybe what would make more sense is if I had a category named dairy, for example.
And maybe I added some things like cheese for example. And maybe dairy is gonna be my main header, and I'm gonna bring milk down below.
And I'm gonna bring cheese down below that as well. So I can have all of those areas underneath that subcategory down below.
Now, if I want to hide my completed events I can do so as well by clicking this down arrow here. But the other thing that we can do is always convert this back to a regular list.
So if I come down to my three dots here, I can say either uncheck all items, delete the checked items, or I can say hide checkboxes.
Now, in this case, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, keep, I wanna keep my deleted checkboxes. And now it's just gonna bring it back to a standard text or note-based form.
If I want to, I can always come back down here and say, show checkboxes. And it's gonna bring it back into that checkbox form.
But please note, it's not going to keep any of your previous formatting and here you can see milk and cheese are now in the same order as dairy in this particular example.
The other two options that we have here, is to create a new note with a drawing right out of the get-go. So we get our drawing screen here.
I'm gonna close this one, and the last one here is a new note with an image. So we already showed you how to add that image with an existing note.
Here, we can start with an image and we don't necessarily have to add any additional text down below if we don't want to, we can just add that image here as well.
Well, now that we have several notes created, and although many of them are very, very simple. What are some of the best ways for us to organize these notes?
How to organize Google Keep notes
Well, within Google Keep almost everything is drag and drop. So if you want to take something and move it somewhere else, you can take your cursor and just drag it around into a different location that you wish to.
Now up above, we actually have two different views. This is what's called the grid view, where you'll probably have roughly three or four across the top depending on the size of your screen.
But we can also have what's called a list view, by clicking this option, we get a vertical list. So now everything is gonna be stacked on top of one another, regardless of what is inside or how much content is within those notes.
I think for most people this grid view is a bit easier to work with just because you see so much more information on the screen at a given time.
But let's take a look at two other ways in which we can organize our notes.
How to pin notes to the top
You can see, as I hover over each of these notes, I have an option here to pin the note.
And so if I select this option here for this new note number two, if I select pin, you can now see that it's created two different sections here within my home screen.
I've got a pin section up top, which includes this one that I want to pin. And then I've got everything else listed as others down below.
Maybe I also want to pin this image one as well. So I'm gonna select that pin and I can reorganize these ones as well.
If I want to reorganize them in different sections, for example, I can do so. But if you have something very, very important and you'd like to pin it to the very top, this is a great way to do so.
Now the other thing that you might notice here is that as I hover over these different notes is that there's a little checkbox on the top left-hand corner.
What this allows me to do is actually select that note and then I can do other actions to it. Now this is really only most applicable when you want to multi-select and apply something to multiple notes.
So with this one selected, maybe I wanna select the other pinned note, and I'm also gonna select this yellow note. So here you can see in the top left-hand corner, I have three notes selected, and now I can pin all of them.
I can add the same reminder time to all of them. Maybe I wanna come over here and say, you know what? I wanna make them all yellow in this case, because this one is an image you can't really see that it's labeled as yellow.
But if I was to come in here, if I come in here and de-select them, you can see it has this yellow hover over it if we added some text, it would still look yellow as well.
So remember, that's the checkbox here if you want to multi-select and apply an action to more than one note. Now, the third way in which we can group our notes together
Using labels in Google Keep
And really start to declutter this home screen a bit, is by adding labels. And on the left-hand side we actually don't have any labels created at all.
We can create them in one of two ways. We can come over here to edit labels. And I'm just gonna call this one a work label, for example.
Okay, I've got one work label, and maybe this one I'm gonna say is a family label so I can do so as well. Now I've got two different labels.
You can see them here on the left-hand side of the screen. And now when I come over to one of my notes, if I select more, I can say add a label and say, yeah, this is work-related.
So I can add that label to it. You will notice, you can add more than one label. You don't have to keep it from a one-to-one relationship.
You can add this to work and family, if I want to. And those will also appear on the front of the card.
The power here is that if I only want to look at my work-related notes, I come over here to the menu side, select work. And now all I see are my work-related notes.
If ever I want to go back and see everything, I come up to the top and say notes. Maybe I'm gonna come over here and say that this one is a family related item.
I'm gonna say that this is a personal one. I'm gonna say that this is also a family related item, and I'm going to hit close. So if I click on the family option here, I'm gonna see those two included as well.
Another helpful tip, a very quick and easy way to add these labels. Let's start with a new sample note here, is if I add a hashtag. So in this case, I'm gonna add the hashtag.
I can either type it in, or it's gonna bring up my options here as well. So I'm gonna select family in this case, I'm gonna say close, and here you can see the hashtag still exists but I also have that family label included here as well.
Now, instead of coming over here to edit our labels, if I take another new note, or maybe I can just apply it to an existing note here, if I want to, if I say add, change labels or add a label, I can start to enter in a new label right from this menu.
I don't have to go into the edit labels area. I've now both added this new label to this note but I've also created this label here on the left-hand side.
Note, Google Keep does not give us the option to rearrange these labels or reorder them. So they will always be listed in alphabetical order.
Sticking with the menu side here on the left-hand side, you will remember that we added a reminder over here. If you ever want to see just the notes
Archiving and deleting notes
That have a reminder applied, you can always select reminders. And here we can see this location-based reminder, whether it's location or a due date that you've added.
You can see all of those reminders here within that reminders tab. Lastly, we've got two other options down below. And that is our archive and our trash.
Now, Google Keep makes it very easy for us to archive because as you hover over any of your notes, you can see the last little icon here is our archive icon.
So if I select that here, and I'm gonna come over and maybe select that on this note as well, both of those notes have now been removed from my home screen.
But if I ever need to go back and take a look at where they are, I can click on the archive option and see all of my archived notes. The other helpful thing here is that you can see this one is listed as a family note.
If I come back up to family, it will actually show me the archived notes here as well. So it will create that separation from either your active or the notes that do display on the homepage, and things that are listed here as archived.
Last but not least, you still have access to some of the notes that you have deleted or put in the trash. By default, notes in the trash are deleted after seven days, or you can go ahead and manually delete these notes as well.
This is where you will find them in the trash option.
Searching for notes
Next up, we wanna take a look at the search capabilities here within Google Keep, because rather quickly, you build up a lot of information and a lot of things that you may be searching for.
So here at the very top of the screen we have our search bar. By clicking in our cursor, we actually get a variety of other options available to us even before we apply any text.
So for example, maybe I just want to look at images here, I can click on this images option, and it's gonna bring back any of my notes that have that image.
If I select X here, I'm gonna come back to this menu, I can also search by my different labels. I've got things titled, things, which is sort of a smart way of Google Keep to try and classify all of your different notes.
I can see who I've collaborated with, or the things that are a particular color. So in this example, I just wanna pull up the things that have yellow with them.
Now that we're familiar with the search capabilities here within Keep, let's take a look at our setting. And there's some particular things that you're gonna want to make note of.
Google Keep settings
The very first option here under the gear icon is settings. And let's take a look at each of these one-by-one. So the first section is notes and lists, and you have the choice to either add new items to the bottom.
And if we uncheck this, uncheck this, new items will be added to the top. The second option, move checked items to the bottom. Now this has to do with creating a list or a checklist like you saw before.
Next up is displaying rich link previews. What this has to do is that when you are copying and pasting, for example, a website URL, do you wanna be able to see a preview of that website, maybe a little image or a font that is particular to that website, or do you only want to see the link itself?
Lastly, here in this section, we can enable a dark theme. So if you don't like the white background you can have a dark theme as well.
Down below, under reminder defaults, this is where we will select those default reminders. So if there are particular times of the day in which you would like to be reminded, just to make it that much easier when you're applying these reminders, this is where you set it.
And here's a pro tip, changing these reminder times will actually change the default snooze times in your Gmail account. So if you'd like what's going on in Gmail with those default reminder times, be careful with what you select here.
But if you need to change them, this is the place to go. Last but not least, is the ability to enable or disable sharing if you don't want to allow sharing of notes with other members.
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