Ever wish you could collaborate on a document with a few friends or family members, but don’t want to hassle with Google Docs or any of the other formal collaboration tools? Turns out the Apple ecosystem has a delightful solution: Notes.
Imagine that you’re planning a surprise birthday party for a friend and want to have a few people involved, but really don’t want to text message endlessly or bounce a document around. Instead, wouldn’t it be nice – and modern! – to collaborate on a document that contained all the details for the party? There are plenty of collaboration tools available nowadays, of course, but they tend to be clumsy and involved, not lightweight and user friendly. I mean, who wants to use Google Docs for party planning?
If everyone’s on Apple devices – or is willing to sign in once via a Web browser – turns out that one of the most unsung hero apps of the iPhone and Mac is just what you want: Notes. The Notes program has quite a few capabilities beyond what you’ve likely used, including the ability to embed multimedia and change typeface, font size, and even colors. Even fewer people realize that it also has some pretty impressive collaboration features. Perfect for our party! Let’s have a closer look…
INVITE SOMEONE TO COLLABORATE
To start out, my initial birthday planning note is pretty bare bones:
As you can see along the bottom, there are a surprising number of formatting options, even freeform doodles and scribbles (circle your favorite cake?). Notice that this Note is in the group “All iCloud”, which is critical for collaboration to work.
A tap on the box with the arrow icon (Share) and lots of options appear:
First off, note the “Collaborate” option. That’s a menu with two options: “Collaborate” or “Send Copy”. Since I want to have my friends involved in the creation of this note, Collaborate is the correct choice.
Now I can send a link via text to the shared Note or, if desired, share it via one of the many apps on my phone. I can even Copy the link, send it to a printer, search with Google Lens (!!), find the product on Amazon (!!) or even analyze with Bing Chat [which is an AI interface now known as Microsoft Copilot]. Lots of really interesting choices.
This time I just want to invite Ashley into the collaboration.
While I wait for her to tap on the link, I’ll also invite our pal Mario to the collaboration. He’s a Windows and Android guy, not an Apple person (don’t worry, we still like him!) so his experience is a bit different. When he taps on the shared link, instead of having it open in his version of Notes, he sees this:
A bit more of a hassle, but doable and it’s not too onerous for him to set up an Apple ID for this task. Now that these invitations are in process, let’s check out the settings and preferences.
SETTINGS FOR A SHARED NOTE
Back in the Notes for iPhone app, a new icon is shown along the top: The tiny profile pic of the person (or persons) with whom you’ve shared the doc. Tap on it and settings appear:
Being able to see who did what is helpful, so I enable Participant Cursors, Show All Activity, and Show Highlights. Tap on “Manage Shared Note” and…
You can see that Ashley’s invited, but hasn’t yet accepted, and I haven’t actually invited Mario yet! Here’s where you can enable that Highlight All Changes feature and, if you don’t want notifications when others edit the doc, Hide Alert too. But there are more settings! Tap on “Share Options“.
Interestingly, these same settings are far easier to navigate in the MacOS version of Notes (which also has full collaboration features):
But, back to the iPhone version of Notes. Finally, Ashley’s joined and has added a few lines…
WORKING WITH A SHARED NOTE
A notification alerted me to her accepting the invitation, then here’s what I saw in the Note itself:
The light salmon background denotes content that I entered, with the new Cards Against Humanity-inspired content, was something Ashley added. The tiny triangle shows the new insertion point in the Note. Settings are also a bit different now too, as you can see:
I’ve gotten her input, now I want to stop sharing the Note. More typically, of course, you’d keep collaborating. To stop collaborating and have your own local version of a Note that only you can see and edit, tap on “Stop Sharing” at the very bottom of the basic settings screen, above.
Notice that the shared note is deleted from everyone else’s devices. Good to know if you change your mind or the project is over. This doesn’t stop them from saving a copy prior or using screen capture to save copies of the info. Unshared? Here’s the Note back to being just for me, but with input from someone else:
Now to get back to that party planning…
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing tutorials for the Apple iPhone since it was first released. Please check out my extensive iPhone help area for lots and lots of useful content.