Keep your most important notes easily accessible by embracing Keep's pin function: Just tap the pushpin icon in the upper-right corner while editing a note or after selecting it in your main note list. From the main list view, you can also select any note (or combination of notes) and then tap the palette icon in the upper-right area of that screen. To change a note's color, tap the three-dot menu icon in the lower-right corner of the editing screen and then touch whatever color you want to apply. You can come up with any number of systems to make the colors useful either on their own or in conjunction with the regular text labels. Maybe all of your work-related notes are green and your personal notes are blue - or maybe urgent notes are red while all others are gray. In addition to labels, Keep lets you organize notes by color. The Keep app will suggest labels as soon as you type a hashtag - and once you've selected a label, you'll see it beneath your text. Keep will even pop up suggestions for existing labels as soon as you start typing, and once you've selected the label you want, you can either leave your hashtag text in the note or erase it. (You can select multiple notes at once, too: Just touch and hold any note until it becomes outlined, then tap any other notes to add them into the mix.)įaster yet, you can actually type a label directly into a note by prefacing it with a hashtag - '#Personal,' '#Web Projects,' or '#Business Ideas,' for example. You can add a label to a note by tapping the three-dot menu icon in the lower-right corner of the app's editing screen and selecting 'Labels' - or by touching and holding a note in the main list view and then tapping the label icon in the upper-right corner of that screen. Just like Gmail, Keep relies on labels rather than folders or notebooks to make your memos manageable. A few menu choices are slightly different, but it should be easy enough to figure things out if you or anyone you know prefers that style of device.) Part I: Organization 1. (A quick side note, by the way: My editor, who uses an iPhone (gasp!), says all these tips work pretty much the same in the Keep app for iOS.

I hope it goes without saying, but feel free to jot down notes along the way. If you, too, rely on Google Keep to supplement your gray matter, check out these practical tips to make sure you're tapping into all the ways its Android app can act as your memory extension.

Keep notes desktop