I have a friend who uses sticky notes on his Mac system that sync across computers. Very cool. Can I do the same with synchronized stickies across my Win10 computers?
I have to admit I’m a bit confused about your question because while MacOS X “Stickies” offers a simple and darn useful app, it doesn’t actually sync across computers. The Mac “Notes” program does, through iCloud, and there are also third party apps like Evernote that offer multi-platform synchronized notes, but Stickies? That can’t be what he’s using if it is working across computers.
This is actually one place where Microsoft Windows wins out versus the Mac system because in Win10, Sticky Notes does indeed sync through OneDrive, and it’s easy and seamless!
To start, make sure you’re running the correct program by doing a Win10 Cortana search for “sticky” (or, in my case, “stickie” which worked just as well). Here’s what you’ll see:
Make sure that you choose the one listed as “Trusted Microsoft Store app”. It’s already installed on your computer so you can simply choose “Open” to launch the program.
The first time you run it, you’ll be prompted to log in to your Outlook.com account as shown:
Since my computer is already logged in to my account, it shows that same account here. If you’re on a more pristine PC computer then you’ll have to enter both your email address and password. Once you’ve entered your account credentials (which is required for you to be able to sync notes across multiple computers), you’ll be able to create notes as desired:
See the “+” on the top left of the white (main) window? That’s how you create new notes. The yellow note is your demo sticky note, so you can type into it directly. Notice the formatting options along the bottom of the window.
Enter any data at all and it’ll show up in the master Sticky Notes window:
You can close individual notes by clicking on the “X” on the top right of the note. They’re all stored in the main window and can be brought back as their own mini-windows by simply clicking on them. More importantly, you can have oodles of notes, which is where this gets interesting.
Click on the “•••” on the top right of a note and you can change its color too:
This is also where you can actually delete a note (remember, clicking the “X” just closes the note, it doesn’t actually delete it from the Sticky Notes database). One smart idea is to color code your notes so that yellow are to-do, purple are phone numbers, blue are funny quotes, etc. They then show up in the main window in whatever colors you specified too:
Where this is really cool, however, is when you log in to the same Outlook / Microsoft account on another computer. Launch the Sticky Notes program and…
You have to admit, that’s pretty darn cool and useful both. And now you know how to set it up and use Sticky Notes, one of the most useful and underappreciated programs included in Windows 10.
Pro Tip: We have oodles of Windows 10 content on the site. Please take some time to check it all out!
for simple notes (no formatting at all) that are accessible from and sync’d across all devices you install it on (win [use the win 7/8 version; otherwise it’ll install it as a windows app], macos, android, ios, linux) as well as the web, you might want to chk out the freeware Simplenote ( https://simplenote.com/ ). notes are stored on their server (unencrypted?), but you can export a zip file of text files.
Hi Dave,
Do you know of any non-cloud Sticky software which works across a LAN, which will deliver stickies when a user logs on?
I have one which requires the receiving PC to be on, and there are plenty of cloud solutions—but I can’t find one which fits the criteria in my question.
Thanks,
Lugh.