Sometimes it feels like the most cursed tech combination you can have these days is a Windows PC and an iPhone.

Apple is known for their great ecosystem, but they keep it as closed as possible. I don’t blame them, but it makes a lot of things harder for someone like me.

An issue I came across recently was when I wanted to export all my notes from the Apple Notes app into my Obsidian vault.

I could not find a single tool or service that could help me achieve this. The only way was seemingly to buy a Mac where the option to export notes was available.

I couldn’t accept this, I had to find a way.

And now … good news!

I have found a way to reliably export all notes from your Apple Notes app to any Windows machine of your choosing … no Mac needed!

Requirements

You will need:

1. Access to the Apple Shortcuts app
2. A Dropbox account (a free account is more than enough, use my referral link and gain an extra 500MB of space if you want!)

Note: All of my notes in the Apple Notes app were text based, I haven’t tested how it would work with attachments, or if it would work at all.

The Process

Install Dropbox on your Windows PC and set up a local folder where your synchronised files will be placed.

Then head to your iOS/iPadOS device and open the Apple Shortcuts app.

You will need to make a shortcut as below:

specific details below

In summary, this shortcut works by:

1. Finding every note in your Apple Notes app (you can add optional filters here if you like)
2. For each note it finds, the shortcut will:
   • Get the created date of the note
   • Format the created date in a succinct, nice-looking way (yyyy-MM-dd @ HH.mm.ss)
   • Save the note to a Dropbox folder of your choosing with the filename being the date of creation of each note. In the above example screenshot the full Destination Path is Backups/Apple Notes/[FORMATTED-DATE-VARIABLE].txt
     • Where [FORMATTED-DATE-VARIABLE] is the variable from the previous step and you yourself type .txt at the end

If you set it up in this way, you will be able to export all your desired notes with a single button click!

They will look like this:

https://preview.redd.it/dx7gu5ej2c2h1.png?width=328&format=png&auto=webp&s=d7a71d7ea49734d6ed575020c65e2947154f43d8

I was able to export almost 900 text-based notes in this way without any issue whatsoever. It takes some time for a large amount of notes and you have to make sure your phone stays on the shortcuts screen, but it works.

Note: Double check the number of notes in your Dropbox upon completion and make sure its the same as the number of notes you wanted to export.

There you have it, a relatively clean and easy way to export all your text-based notes from Apple Notes to your Windows PC/Laptop.

https://preview.redd.it/b5cjf6zr6d2h1.jpg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6fb70a3f1ad90425e219f3b1e9361bf6a1c4015c

Thanks in advance!

Hi, does anyone have the same problem;

I track my gym progress with my notes and have a subheading for each exercise; which contains a chart, when im done with an exercise for the day, i close the heading, but when im done with the next machine, and open the app, all headings are open again; how do i make it stop?

on my iPhone, if I'm in the notes list (i.e. haven't opened the note itself)

The only ways I can allocate a note to a tag is by pressing the 'select' button, pressing the radio button next to the note, then pressing the 'tags' button, then selecting a tag from the pick list.

Didn't there used to be an option to long press on a note and then press a 'tags' button?

I was on my notes called anime I watch I was updating it like I always do whenever I finish an anime I put it in notes

While when I was putting them there I must of hit something on accident because when I went to exit it, it says it locked and needs a fucking password? There is no option for me to use Face ID either I had to have hit something random and the hint it gives me is “rainbow” tf you mean rainbow? Is there anyway to figure out how to use Face ID or by pass it

Hoping someone might have a solution:

I include tables in many of my Apple Notes and am looking for a feature to be able to resize the cell column width that is created.

Both on the original creation of the base table, and when inserting additional columns or rows, the size of each cell is coming out FIXED.

Sorry if this has been asked before.

I keep trying to stick with Apple Notes, but 3 of the biggest annoyances luring me to consider other note/PKM apps...

1. Can't expand the left folder list column enough (to be able to see the full folder names)

2. No versioning (to recover from accidents or reverts)

3. ONLY 5 FOLDER LEVELS ALLOWED!

#3 is very limiting and nearing deal-breaker levels for me. I frequently need more than 5 folder levels. Here's a stripped down example folder structure I want; it's 7 levels deep...

1. Business

2. Customers

3. Customer A

4. Projects

5. Project A

6. Scripts

7. Production

How are others handling this limitation?

So my gf recently synced her notes on ipad with icloud and somehow all her notes that were stored on her iPad vanished. Apple store told us bad luck and there’s nothing we can do, but i‘m certain there must be some kind of trash where you can restore them or something? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Has anyone credited an estate planning template and perhaps a home hub template to make it easier for a survivor to take over everything and have a single location of where to find all the important information?

Things like insurance policies, wills, powers of attorney, name and contact info for lawyer, accountant, executor or trustee etc?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

For the past few months, various Apple Notes that I delete, tend to return automatically. Apple Support has no idea why this is happening, or how to fix it.

To add, I feel I am missing data from certain Notes. I notice this when I go to search for a particular item, knowing full well I saved it in Apple Notes.

I've been researching OneNote, and at this stage, having lost a little faith in Apple Notes, it may be time for me to fully move to OneNote.

All of this is a shame really, as I love the simplicity of Apple Notes. UGH!

/rant /vent

I can select multiple tags on the Mac, but when I try to do the same in the iOS app, I can only select one tag at a time.

The obvious workaround is to set up the Smart folder for the Smart folder for just two tags seems a bit of an overkill. I use smart folders for more complex searches.

Is there any work around? Am I missing something obvious?

I have not yet forced a re-sync of everything by toggling notes off iCloud, I just wanted to see if it's possible to fix without doing that yet. I updated my iOS a few weeks ago for the first time in...years, probably. I was on some version of iOS 16. I don't think the new iOS should be related to Notes, but the problem didn't exist before that. I have one long note that I use for meal planning. It has no special formatting (tables, checkmarks, fonts), it's just a long list of each day. Since my last iOS update, when I make a change on my computer, it only partially updates on my phone. So for example if I write:

Monday
B: meal A
L: meal B
D: meal C

and then decide to delete and rewrite dinner on Monday to meal D on my computer, on my phone it will now say:

Monday
B: meal A
L: meal B
D: meal Dmeal C

This is not happening with ANY other notes. I have copy/pasted the text into a new note multiple times, deleting the original, but it keeps happening. I also started a brand-new note recently, and it happens there too. These meal plan notes are often at least 6 weeks or 2 months long, so it could be related to the note length (even though this problem never happened in the past), but it's not a lot of actual text, certainly not 10,000 words. If I make the change on my phone, it syncs normally on my computer, just not in reverse.

Has anyone seen this odd behavior before? It's very obvious when this error happens since I have it written out like this example, but what I really worry about is that I also make long work-related notes when I am on research trips, which are more rambly and unformatted and I might not spot weird errors when I make edits partway through.