How to view edits in Notes

The Notes app is a handy way to share material with other people. My family—particularly my spouse and I—has about 15 to 20 shared notes that let us collaboratively update various household, financial, college-related, and other details. We even use it with meal planning.

However, once you start adding a shared note, you get alerts about modifications. Notes let you see the editing history and highlight changes. But the stapled-on interface for this makes it harder to figure out what to choose and what you’re seeing than, say, the version history in Google Docs.

All the options to see what’s changed over time can be reached via the Shared Note menu, by clicking or tapping the profile icon with either a generic head and shoulders with a checkmark in it or a tiny profile pic from your contacts for the shared person:

Show All Activity: This displays a pane revealing the editing history, as well as when people accepted the invitation.

Show Highlights: You can get a clearer idea of what changes were made when and by whom.

Show Updates: If you haven’t clicked or tapped the Shared Note menu, you may see a button that reveals changes since your last visit. This status doesn’t appear synced: although I had already viewed a note on my Mac months ago, when I opened it on my iPhone, it still displayed “Show Updates.”

Use the Shared Notes menu to reveal highlights and activity (left). The Activity pane details edits from newest to oldest.

You can use activity and highlights in a couple of different ways.

First, you can use the Activity pane (Profile Pic: Show All Activity) to find previous revisions, listed from the top, oldest to newest, with a profile pic and name next to each. Click or tap the revision, and the note shows additions and changes; deletions don’t appear to be marked, and I don’t see any way to roll back to earlier versions. (If you need version history for shared documents, you can turn to Google Docs or Pages, among many apps.)

Second, when you choose Show Highlights, you see changes in the margin reflecting all edits across the history of the document tagged with the editor’s name and the date. If there are too many edits to fit, you will see +1 next to the name—click or tap it to reveal all names and dates associated with the dit, and that highlight is isolated from the rest of the document.

Third, you can combine Activity and Show Highlights: with a revision selected, choose Show Highlights, and you see just the edits in the margin associated with that set of changes.

Select a revision in the Activity pane with Show Highlights active, and the editor and date is called out in the left margin.

For further reading

Take a gander at my revision of Take Control of Notes, which tells everything you need to know about Apple’s Notes app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the web, from basic features like formatting text and creating lists to advanced features like scanning documents, protecting notes with passwords, making sketches, and managing attachments.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]