Taking Notes with Google Keep

It's Saturday, and late afternoon is time for a little writing, and taking notes.

When I am on the Mac, I use their default program- Notes.  It works across all of my Apple devices.  Take notes on the iPhone, and they show up on the MacBook and the iPad.  It has been pretty seamless. They added the ability to add pictures and drawings with one of their updates, but for the most part the app is plain, and just works.

Google has its own app for similar functions- Keep. I tried it first on my Chromebook and then downloaded the app on my iPhone and then on the iPad.  It syncs notes quickly and on demand on all devices.  Sometimes with the Apple devices, notes have a lag time, and sometime trying to manually sync the notes doesn't get results. It was a welcome surprise to see notes on one device appearing on the others almost instantaneously in Keep, and without fail.

What does Google Keep do?  Most everything you would hope a note taking app to do.

On the Chromebook desktop, it does not have the same capabilities as it does on an iPhone or Android, but it has these basics:

• You can take typed notes as easily as you can create a document, but it does not have any formatting options that I can tell. (Using keyboard combinations, I can add bold, italics and underlines on the MacBook)
• You can give any note a title, or leave it without a title.
• You can give the note a color using one of the seven pastel colors available.  You can filter notes by color in a search.  This can be a very useful feature if you organize and color code as a habit.
• You can give the note a label and you can filter your notes by a label.
• You can add an image to the note.
• You can add a reminder to the note and you will get a notification on all of your devices at the scheduled time.  I like this feature, because on the iPhone, the Notes app and the Reminders app are separate functions.
• You can also add a checklist to a note that you can use for keeping track of finished tasks, or a shopping list. I can see this as a cool feature if a team is sharing a note with a checklist. (see below)
• Also, you can share a note directly with another person in the Google system (it may work outside the system, but I have not been able to confirm yet).  It will show up in their email and in their own Keep app.  Seems very useful if you have a team sharing notes and checklists.
• You can also copy a note to Google Docs and can begin a new document from that note.  It will also copy over images from the note.

It has a few more features on iOS and Android devices.

• On a phone you have the ability to use voice to dictate notes (and you can share that audio file between phones, but the audio file does not get shared on the laptop).  The dictation feature is very accurate and I think it will be useful in the future.  I can imagine dictating notes in Keep and adding them easily to an article or blog.
• On a phone you can take a photo and add it to a note which is immediately available on other devices using Keep.
• On an Android, you can share a drawing on the phone with other devices.  It is not an option with the iPhone/iPad at this time.

So, this app is a keeper.