 In this video, we're going to be looking at how you can use the Shortcuts app on the Mac to work with the Notes app. And this is part of a series of videos I'm doing all about the Shortcuts app. So if you haven't seen those other ones, then be sure to head down to the description and check those out down there. But without further ado, let's get straight on into it, shall we? Now, I thought that a good place to start would be to actually have a look at some of the built-in Shortcuts that you can get from the Shortcuts Gallery within the Shortcuts app. Because this is a great place to start if you're relatively new to Shortcuts because it allows you, well, first of all, it gives you a starting point, obviously, of something ready-made. But it also allows you to go in and sort of reverse engineer and figure out how they've put theirs together in terms of all of the structure of the actions and so on. It also means that you can then go back and sort of edit these slightly and maybe adjust them to your needs. So that's what we're going to do first. And then we'll go on to just sort of build some out from scratch that can do perhaps something slightly more complicated and perhaps slightly more useful than those that are built in. But let's get over to the gallery, first of all. So this is the gallery within the Shortcuts app. And we're going to want to have a look, first of all, for all of those that are related to notes. Now, you can obviously just sort of scroll through here and have a look. But it is much easier just to search given that we know we want something related to notes. So I'm just going to type in note and we get all of these different options that have been shown to us. Now, these aren't necessarily all related to the Mac OS Notes app. The ones that are in teal are related to Evernotes. You've got one here for Ulysses, one here for Bear Notes. So it's the ones that are in yellow that are related to the Mac Notes app. And that's what we're going to be focusing on today. I'm not focusing on those other third-party notes applications. So we can obviously go in and have a look at any of these. And we've seen this before. You can just come and click on any one of them. It will give you a bit of a description. You can click on these three dots just up at the top here. And that will show you the full structure of the Shortcuts. So that's one way that you can just go and have a quick look to sort of analyze them. But what we're going to do is just pick out one of these. And I'll just take this first one here, which is New Note with Date. And what that's going to do, surprisingly enough, is it's going to create as a New Note with today's date as the title. And then it's going to ask us for some input where we can actually add the content of that note. So to install this, you just click on it and then click Add Shortcut. It will then add it into your Shortcuts library. And then you can open it up to edit it, which is what I have done. And there it is right in front of you now. So here you can see the content of it. And the actual structure of it is quite straightforward. It's going to create a New Note with the current date. And then it's going to add that into a folder. And I'll come on to this in a moment. Now, one thing to have a look at here is it's got this block called Comment. I can't stress enough how useful it is for your future self if you are creating complex sets of actions in Shortcuts to actually add these sorts of comments in. To just really, I mean, this is as a cue to you to tell you how they've constructed it. But it's also good for you when you are the one that's going to be looking at it further on down the line. I can't tell you the number of times when I've written some bit of code or something in whatever language it's happened to have been in over the years. I've gone back to have a look at it later to maybe make some changes. And I can't figure out what on earth I was thinking at the time. So having adequate comments in there to explain your thought process and what all the different components do is a great habit to get into. And they've obviously done this just to explain what all these different sections are for and help you with the editing and just to understand it really. So great for this reverse engineering thing because they are actually explaining all of these steps. So basically what it's doing is it's creating a new note with the current date in and it says folder. So we can actually choose the folder that we want this note to go into. So what I've done is in my notes I've got some different folders and I've got one TOT take one tech and I've got a notes folder. So this is where I'm going to be adding these things into for the purposes of this demonstration. So if I come back to the shortcut and I want to just click on this where it says folder we can actually select the folder that we want it to go into and it's this one here take one tech notes click on that. And so this comment is basically just explaining this the above create note action has the current date prefilled and the tap to show more to see compose sheet is turned off. That means the note will be created in the background. So it's basically not going to bring it up to the front and we edited in there. You'll see what's going to happen in a moment. It's asking for text input with the prompt. What do you want it to say? So if you remember this from a example that we did in the previous video or one of the previous videos where we have a little pop up comes on screen and the user can actually enter some information and they're going to be presented with this question. This will all make sense when I actually run it in a moment and it's going to take whatever the user puts into that box and then it's going to append that. That means add it on to the new note that we've just created. So that's what this comment is explaining. It's basically going to create a note then it's going to ask for some input and then it's going to take that input and add it into that note. This append feature by the way is very powerful and it's one that I use a lot in other automations that I have with that with other applications as well. So creating running lists and all this sort of stuff. But we'll use that as an example when we build out our own one in a moment. And then what it's going to do is it's going to actually show the note at the end. So those are the steps involved. Now I'm going to run this and there's one thing to note the first time you run these sorts of things. There's a little privacy and security question that pops up for the creator which says allow new note with data or new note with data I should say which is the name of this note to create a note. So we've got to actually grant shortcuts and this shortcut in particular we've got to grant it permission to be able to go in and edit our notes and create the note. So we do just need to allow that. This will only happen the first time that you run it. And once you've done that it's then going to go on to complete the action. And so here it says what do you want it to say? We'll say hello this is a note. So there we go. And now if I click on done if I come back over to my notes folder you can see that it is now created this new note and it's got the text that I just added in. Now obviously I've just run that from the shortcuts app but you could also just as easily have created a stream deck button for this if you have a look at my previous video I explain how to do that or maybe a keyboard shortcut or something like that. So those are all controlled from here if you come up into the settings you could have a little menu bar action again I've covered all of this in previous videos uses a quick action assign a shortcut or whatever we want to do. So if you did just want something to pop up on the screen when you hit a hot key or button on your stream deck to add a new note then that is the way that you could do it. Incidentally for this note because we have granted access to notes if you come over to this privacy section just up here you'll notice that we have now got notes in there so that's where we granted it permission. So if you had a particular shortcut that you downloaded or something like that or one that you created this is where you would find all of those permissions and if you needed to revoke those permissions you could either just delete the shortcut or you could change them in here as well. So that is a relatively straightforward example of how you could use this built-in one to just create a note. Now if I were to run this again let's have a little look at what happens. So here what I want to say this is another note and then if I click on done and then if I come back over to this view you'll see that now we've got that other note there as well. So we are just creating a list of notes within that folder with the date as the title. What if we wanted to do something a little bit more clever though? What if we actually wanted to have like a list of things? So I have a number of different running lists be it for things that I need to get for the studio be it for gifts for different people be it for things that I need to research whatever the case may be there are lots of uses that I have for basically a running list where I just want to be able to add things onto this list as we go along or as I go along. So I thought I'd do an example where we look at how we could do this and we'll start with just something just simple so taking some text and actually adding it to a specific note but then we'll get a little bit more complicated and try and give people choices about exactly where they want to append this information and that sort of thing. So I've got a new shortcut here that is completely blank. So let's just say that we have got a specific note. We don't now want to just post into this list of notes here. I've got a note here called video ideas. So this might be one for content creators out there where you want to have a way to just capture these video ideas easily and quickly so that they can just go into your list and then you can come back later and review your list of video ideas. So we want to now actually just add something specifically into this note. So how would we do about that? How would we do that? How would we do about that? If I speak English for a moment then what we're going to do is we're going to come back to this and what we want to do is first of all we want to actually find the specific note that we're going to add this to. We're still going to use the append command because we're going to add this to that list but we want to actually add it to a specific note. So the way that we can do that is we can search for note again in here and here you can see some different note commands. So what we want to do is we want to find a specific note. So I'm going to click on that one and we want to search for it's going to find all notes and we want to add some criteria here and we actually just want the one note really because we just want to add it to this video ideas note. So I'm going to add a filter in here and I'm going to add we've got some different options so we can look for something related to the body as in the body of the text. We could look for something related to the folder that the note is in the creation date last modified or the note name. So I want to find this by the fact that it is in this one particular folder. So if I click on folder then I can come down here and it's actually in my notes folder on to take one text. So if I click in that one so now it's going to look for notes that are in that particular folder and now if I click on add another filter we want to look for that specific note now. So there I want to search for one with the title or the name and it contains anything it doesn't have to contain anything it needs to contain video ideas like that. So now that is going to find the video ideas note within the notes folder of take one tech. Okay, so if you remember when we talked about variables the importance of using variables rather than just relying on notes magic variables what I'm going to do here is I'm going to actually call this give this a variable name. So this is the note name basically and it's the video ideas note name. So what I'm going to do in here is I'm going to create very if you haven't seen the variables video by the way go ahead and check that out in the description below. I think it was video three this is video six so I did cover that in there but I'm just going to search for variable and we want to set variable. So this is basically video ideas note. So that is now the variable video ideas note and it's going to take whatever note it finds in here and there will just be the one we can actually fit filter this so we can give it a limit of just one but it's a little bit irrelevant because there is only going to be one video with that. Sorry, there isn't going to be only going to be one note with that name. Right. So now we want to ask for some input. So let's ask for some input. We'll use this as command ask for input and we're going to ask with prompt what's your great idea? So that is the text that we're going to get and then what we want to do is we want to set that to be a variable. So I'm going to give that a name set variable and this one is video idea and that is going to take that input and give it the variable name video idea. Now what we want to do is we want to actually append that to the note. So what we're going to do is if I go to one second, go to append and we want to append to note. So I want to append video idea to note and the note we want if I come to this drop down is this video ideas note. Okay. So if I just pop over to my video ideas for a minute you can see how it's just completely empty. It just says video ideas at the top. That's the title. And then if I come back to here and then I try and run this. So I'm going to run this one. What's the great idea? A video about notes. And then if I click on done like that and then I come back to my list you can see that now it is just added in a video about notes. Wait a minute. I think I've got another great idea. Let me just type this one on as well. So this one is if I run it again it's going to ask me again. So a video about shortcuts and I click done and that has now added that to the list as well. So with this action we have now already the shortcut I should say we've now got a little pop up that is coming up to basically capture all of our notes as they come up and once again we could assign this to a little stream deck button or something like that. So that every time we have that stroke of genius that little light bulb moment we could click on our little light bulb button and it would pop up and we can type our little thing that we want to remember in and then it would add it into our running list. But wait typing is hard. What if you don't have your hands free you're busy multitasking doing something else and the ideas come to you and you just want to speak it. Well we can actually do that as well because there is a dictate function. So let's come and just modify this slightly and we will add that in instead. So if I come back over here what I'm going to do is if I just clear this little window away rather than asking for text let's just come back and just delete this shall we? Just delete all of these and what I'm going to do in here instead is I'm going to use the dictate function. So dictate text and here what we want to do is we want to then append. So if I go append whoops again and I'm redoing this just to show you how it looks when you're starting this from scratch. You'll see that it does take that dictated text straight away and then we can add it in again to the video ideas note. We could assign a variable to that but I will skip that just for the moment. We'll get onto that in a moment because we're going to go one step further with this in a moment as well. So that's going to take the dictated text and it's going to just add that into the video ideas note once again. So just to refresh our memory here is what we've got in there so far. Just these two ideas. Now if I come back and I just run this one and it's going to prompt me to actually speak I've got another great idea for a video. So now it's captured that and if I come back here over here you can see that that has just dropped straight in and in fact if I just do it live again now you'll be able to see how that goes in. So this is an even better idea the best yet and you can see that it's just populating that note. So this is a great way to just add things into your running notes. But wait, what if you want to get a little bit more complicated? What if you want to use it for say capturing URLs or something like that? Maybe your browsing website you're doing some research or whatever it is and you want to capture these really useful websites but more than that you want to be able to add a little bit of narration around what they are so that you just don't end up with a list of links and things like that. Let's do that first and then I'll take it one step further again after that. So let's think how we might want to do that if I come back to this over here and we'll just use exactly the same note and we'll just edit this again. So I'm going to come back out of here and I'm just going to delete this little output window. I'm going to delete that as well and what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to assign this to be a variable. In fact, let's not. Let me just do it the quick and easy way. I'll do that on the next section, next section. So what I'm going to do here is I am going to do text. I'm going to add in a little text box that we're going to add a load of things to. So this is where we're going to create the body of our note basically or the body of note that we want to add in. And what I'm going to do here is I'm going to say, let's say we want to have the date that we recorded it in case we want to go back and look at the URL in our history or something like that or look at what else we're doing there. Who knows? We can simply do this by right-clicking insert variable and you can search for current date. It's just off the bottom of the screen. Let me just move that up so you can at least see it. Insert variable current date and it's asking whether you want the date and then the date format. So let's just have the regular format and the time. Let's say none because we don't actually need the time. We just want the date itself. So that's going to get us the current date. Then let's say we're going to use this and we're going to trigger it when we want to copy a URL and say out of the browser and then we want to add our little notes to it. So I'm going to come here and I'm going to copy the clipboard or insert variable which is the clipboard contents. And then I'm going to add another new line and then here I'm going to add in that dictated text just like we did before. So there we go dictated text. So that is a block of text and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use that append command and I'm going to append to note. Append text which is taking this text and append that to that note. Again, I've been a bit naughty because I should have really called each of these explicit variables but for the time being I'll take this approach so that you can see what we're actually trying to do here. Now if I go over to a website I'm going to go over to my Buy Me a Coffee page and I'm just going to copy the URL. So I've pressed command C to copy it. Now I'm going to run this little command and let's see what happens. This is a great site to visit. So that's now popped up. Now if I come over to my notes again what you'll see is it has added this in to my note. So over here again, we are now got the date 23rd of February and it's got my Buy Me a Coffee page, BuyMeACoffee.com slash Take One Tech. Of course I should definitely mention that if you are enjoying this video that's the best way to go and support the channel on a one-off or ongoing basis. And it's got the little note that I dictated this is a great site to visit. This is a great way to actually populate these sorts of things where you want to add sort of spoken notes to things as well as the thing that you're copying to give them context and add in dates and things like that. Let's have a look at another example, shall we? What happens if I've got multiple different lists? Like for example, I'll use an example, shall I? If I come over to my little lists folder I've got my wife and kids down here, Emily, Jasmine, May and Dale. And then I've also got a tech wish list. This is really daddy's list, isn't it? Let's be fair. But I'll call it tech wish list. So what happens if we have got this as our sort of little shopping list, for example, our gift shopping list and we want to be able to add things, you know, as we come across them in our day-to-day I often see things that I think all that would be nice for Emily, for Dale, for Jasmine, for May or whoever or for daddy. So let's just say that we want to actually have these as a collection of lists where we can add URLs to these products or whatever it happens to be, maybe Amazon links or who knows what it is. But we don't want to create a custom action for each of these. We just want to prompt ourselves or the user ourselves with a list of these notes so we can actually choose where we want to append this thing. I thought this would be a good example to show how you can use basically multiple choice for users when they are creating these things or when they are actually triggering these things rather. So let's go through and have a look at how we might want to do that. So first of all, I'm going to come back over here. In fact, let's actually create a completely new shortcut, shall we, so that we are working with a sort of blank canvas again. This is going to be somewhat similar. But the first thing we want to do is because the previous one, it was actually creating... This was Append to Note, Append to Video Ideas Note. But this one here, we want to basically give people a choice of notes. So Append to Choice of Notes. Okay. The first thing we need to do, if I move that back down in the screen where you can see it, you might have wondered what I was typing. I was typing in the name. So here we go, Append to Choice of Notes. So the first thing that we want to do is we want to actually get a list of all of those potential notes. So I want to give people the choice. I say people, it's me, let's face it. I want to give the user myself the choice of which of these notes to append to. The reason why it's good to do it like this as well is because you can just go in and add in as many notes as you want. And then I will be presented with all of those different ones that I can choose from later. So this will all make sense as we go through. But here for the start, it's going to have the names of all of these lovely people. So let's go back to here for a moment. So what we want to do is we want to actually extract that name of... those names of those notes in order to present it as a choice when we are deciding where we want those... to append our note. I hope this is making sense. So let's first of all use that exact same function that we used before, which was to basically find those notes. So I'm going to use the find note function. Find notes. And what we want to do now is we want to find all notes. And we want to find all notes in that specific folder. And the folder I created was called lists. So I'm going to look for a... in a specific folder. And I'm going to search for that one. Oh, it's pulled it up already. Look, it is that one, lists. But that's the only thing we want to do because we're wanting to just basically extract those names from there. So what I'm going to do now is we have found all of those notes. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the choose from command here because we want to give people a choice. So choose from list. And the list is actually because I've put that underneath there, it's just going to take out that list of file names. So it's going to choose from that. Now if I was to just run this now, you can see what's happening. Can you see how that has just given us this little pop-up? And it's pulled out all of those little lists there as well. So if I was to just cancel that and let's say that I go and add a new list there. What's the daisy? I've just closed that. I didn't mean to do that. If I open that up, I'm going to add a new list in here. There we go, that would help. So I'm just going to type in two more. What's the daisy? No, it's quit unexpectedly. It certainly did. Naughty boy. So I'm going to just put in another couple of lists in there now so you can see how this is going to update. And now if I rerun this, you can see that now it's actually added in. We've also got mom and dad in there as well because we can't forget them, can we? So now you can see that the point of this is how we can add more and more lists to our list list. And then we will get to choose from them when we are coming to assign these things or append these things to our list. Once again, this will all make sense when it's all finished. So the next things we want to do are basically what we've already done, actually, which is we want to add that little dictate function in. So I'm going to add in dictate. We're just going to do exactly the same as we did before, dictate text. And I'm going to add this up here. And then what we want to do is we want to add some text. So I'm going to add a little text box. And I'm going to add this up here because we want to actually get all of this stuff up front. So this is going to basically have insert variable. It's going to have our, let's say we have the date again. And we're going to do the same as before. The short form, no time. And then we're going to enter, and then we're going to add in here the insert variable, which is the clipboard. And then we're going to add in another note here, which is the dictated text. So this is the same format as we did before. I'm just showing you how you can use this as the multiple choice to append two different notes. So now what we're going to do is we're going to assign a variable to that as well. So I'm going to insert, set variable, bit of a mouthful today. There we go, set variable. And I'm just going to call that one note content. And so that's going to take that text and assign it to note content. And so this is choosing from notes. And so we could select here, we could set another variable. We could call this the note name. And so that's going to basically pop up this multi-choice. Ask us to choose the note, and that becomes the note name. And then we're just going to use our good old friend, the append command. And we're going to use append to note. And you can see, by the way, just quickly, you can see that this append is a very common thing that you have with notes. You can append to Dropbox text files. I actually use pretty much exclusively a text file system. And so I do a lot of my appending and my running notes, and all of my notes are actually just .txt files. So I tend to use this one for appending to text files in Dropbox, but I'll stick with this notes because I know that this is a common application for the time being. But just to let you know that all of the steps that we're doing, you could equally be appending a side note, a bear note, or whatever app you happen to be using. But here, what we're going to do is we're going to append a note name. Well, actually, no, we don't. We want to append the variable that we want is, if I just come into here, we want to actually append a note content, which is just down there. And we want to append that to note name. Okay, so hopefully this has made a little bit of sense. But basically, first of all, what we're doing is we're going to use the same command as we did before. We're going to copy some text from the screen. Then it's going to ask us to dictate some little note about that text. And then it's going to compile this little bit of text here, which has got the current date, the link, or whatever we copied from the clipboard. Then it's going to add in the dictated text. It's setting that as the variable called note content. Then it's going to give us a pop-up that says, where do you actually want to append this? And it's going to pull up a list of all of those list notes that we've got in our lists folder. And we can choose what we want for those. And then it will go and do that appending as we had before. So just to come over here for one second, you can see how we've got all of these different people. And these are all just empty at the moment. So let me say I've just spotted a great idea for a gift for my dad. So I'm going to come over here and then I'm going to run this. And once again, obviously I'm running it from within shortcuts, but you can equally just go in here and actually set a keyboard shortcut. You can assign a stream deck shortcut. However, you want to trigger it in the menu bar or what have you. But this is just to demonstrate the process. So now when I run this, let me just actually copy a link. In fact I'm going to just copy something random. It just happens to be my website, takeonetech.io but it's just going to prove the point. Let's just say that this was actually a link from the Aston Martin dealership or something like that. So then I'm going to run like this. This would be a great car for my dad. And then you see it's actually popped up with this extra pop up here. And it's asking me which note I want to post it to. So let me just click on dad and then click done. And then here this is this privacy thing again. It's actually asking for permission to write to these different notes. So once again, this is only going to happen the first time you run it. So click on always allow. And then if I come over to my notes, you'll see that it has now added that to my running list of gifts for my dad. So what about if I had another one? I'll just show you how this runs without that little privacy pop up. So if I just click on run again. And again assume that I've copied something. Jasmine really loves slime. She does as well, by the way. So click on Jasmine who is my little nine year old. Parents not so keen on slime. Children love it. The furniture also not so keen. But now if I come over to my notes again, you can see that now we've got that one that I added in for my dad. And then also this little gift idea for Jasmine as well. Now all of that is just to show the sorts of things that you can do related to notes with the shortcuts app. There is of course a lot more that you can do but certainly by just digging into these sorts of things you'll get a much better idea of the scope of things that you can do. And hopefully those examples will prove useful and it will give you an idea of maybe all of the other possibilities that are opened up to you. I will be doing some more advanced shortcuts videos in due course related to notes and all sorts of other applications as well. But don't go anywhere because the next video that is coming right up now is related to images and how you can work with images with the shortcuts app. So I'll see you there.