Introduction
Good note-taking apps emulate the feeling of having an organized notebook. The free Google Keep app most resembles a refrigerator covered in randomly written sticky notes. Everything about the design of Keep suggests that it is made to host notes and lists that you jot down quickly, glance at for a few days, and then hide or delete. There is nothing wrong with sticky notes, and Keep offers more than a few interesting tricks, although it lacks some basic features like offline access and desktop apps. If you need a more robust note-taking app for lasting notes, try the award-winning OneNote or Joplin instead.
How much does Google Keep cost?
The Google Keep app is completely free – almost aggressively so. All you need is a Google account. Photos and audio files stored in Google Keep do not count towards your Google storage limit. Photos are limited to 10 MB each, and text notes are limited to 19,999 characters. Paying for extra storage in Google Drive does not lift these limits.
The Google Keep app is not the only free note-taking app, but most free apps have data storage limits. For example, OneNote and Apple Notes are free, with a limited storage of 5 GB that you get with their respective cloud storage services (OneDrive and iCloud), although this 5 GB is shared with other apps. Obsidian and Joplin are also completely free if you do not need online storage or are willing to bring your own storage. Google Keep differs; it is simply free, and you cannot pay for extra storage even if you wanted to.
Where can you use Google Keep?
Google Keep works in your browser. It officially supports Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. There are no desktop apps for Google Keep. There used to be a Chrome app for offline access, but Google has shut that down; there is no way to access Google Keep notes offline on a computer now.
For mobile, there is a Google Keep app for both Android and iPhone. Both mobile apps allow you to access your notes offline.
Getting started with Google Keep
All you need to do is go to keep.google.com in any browser or open the mobile app, and you can start using Keep. As long as you are logged into your Google account, you should see the main interface.
The main selling point of Keep is how quickly you can create notes with it. In the web app, the text box at the top of the notes says “Take a note…”. Click it, and you can immediately start writing a new note. You can optionally attach an image or turn the note into a checklist. Each note can also have a reminder added for the date and time you specify or the location you set if you are using the mobile Google Keep app with location services enabled.
You can also choose the background color of the note, which complements the sticky notes metaphor. To add a label, you can either include a hashtag (#) before any word or use the label dialog. Labels give you a rough way to sort your notes, although you do not get the common organizational tools found in other note-taking apps, such as sections, notebooks, or notebook groups.
It syncs
almost all your notes immediately differ between the mobile and web versions. In the mobile app, creating a note means tapping the prominent + button in the bottom right corner and then writing. The mobile version of Keep offers some features that are not available in the web version, including voice notes and drawing.
According to the sticky note metaphor, your Google Keep notes are loosely tied together in columns. If the note contains a lot of content, it stretches to become a slim rectangle, but eventually, it ends, and the text of the note is cut off from view. You need to open the note to read more. Since there are no notebooks in Google Keep, all your notes are grouped together on one massive scrollable screen. Using the search bar or clicking on a label is the primary way to clean up the notes that exceed the display.
Lack of Formatting and Limited Attachments
Google Keep lacks some key functionalities. The first and most prominent is formatting. You cannot format your notes with bold or italics or add any other changes. Anything pasted from another app appears as plain text.
Secondly, you cannot attach anything to the note except images. Only GIF, JPEG, JPG, and PNG files are accepted. If you want to upload PDF files or any other type of documents, you will need to look for another note-taking app. OneNote is very good at managing attachments. You can upload a PDF file, extract each page into a note, highlight parts of the text, and also add your notes in the margins. Keep is not designed for that kind of work. Keep is built around quickly jotting down ideas to refer back to later and archiving them when done.
Limited Tools for Organizing Your Notes
Google does not seem to consider Keep a place to store long-term notes for long-term use. The way Keep is built and designed makes it just a place to quickly jot down a few ideas, much like you would with paper sticky notes. A wall with lots of sticky notes is not useful, but Keep doesn’t give you many tools to organize everything you put into it. You can drag notes in any order you like and pin notes so they always appear at the top. You can also archive notes that you don’t want to see on the homepage.
After that, the only way to organize and sort your notes is by using labels, as mentioned earlier. Labels in Keep work the same way as they do in Gmail. You can add as many labels as you want and then browse all notes with the same label by clicking on it in the sidebar.
Most other note-taking apps, including OneNote and Evernote, allow you to sort notes into notebooks at least – in addition to supporting tags, which are almost the same as labels.
Disappointing Web Clipper
Keep has a web clipper, as do OneNote, Joplin, Evernote, Zoho Notebook, Bear, and many other note-taking applications. But the Keep clipper is the worst. (Credit: Google / PCMag)
The web clipper is a browser extension that saves content from a webpage to your account with one click. For example, if you find a recipe online and want to save it to Google Keep. The idea is that the clipper captures the entire recipe, so you don’t need to cut and paste the content. This way, you can refer back to the recipe by looking at your notes without having to visit the webpage again. Another common use is clipping online articles for offline reading later.
But
Keep only saves the URL! It does not save any actual content. Evernote and OneNote have much more useful web clippers that allow you to save an entire page or a simplified article free from ads and excess content on the webpage, or just a screenshot of a designated area. Most other note-taking apps also support video clipping. Keep does not do that. Worse, it is only available to Chrome users – Firefox and Safari users are out of luck.
Integrations and Other Features
Google Keep can capture text from any image and add it to your note. I tried it, and it works perfectly on printed text and acceptably on handwritten text, depending on the quality of the handwriting. It’s useful for capturing short documents – but if you hope to scan and upload multiple-page documents, you should use a note-taking app that features deeper scanning capabilities, such as those offered by OneNote, Evernote, and Bear.
You can collaborate on notes in Google Keep, but again, with limited tools to help you. When inviting a collaborator by adding their email address, the person receives an email link to the note. If they’re logged into a Google account when they click the link, the note is automatically added to their Keep account, and they have full editing rights. There’s no way to restrict the note to view-only or comment-only as you can when sharing other Google documents.
You can configure Google Keep to appear in the right sidebar of Gmail and Google Docs. You can use this sidebar to browse your notes while writing emails or to create a note with an email attachment. You can also drag content from any note into a Google document.
Regarding Google Docs, you can send any note to a new Google document with just two clicks, which is great if you want to expand a note elsewhere with more formatting options or if you want to take your notes as a starting point and turn them into an actual document.
Not for Everyone
Google Keep is not suitable for taking and processing notes in the same place. Instead, it is built for jotting down a quick thought or two. If that’s all you want, Google Keep may be acceptable, especially since it’s free. However, most people who care about a note-taking app want more than that, which is why we recommend award-winning OneNote for its range of features, and Joplin for a slightly more stripped-down app with an option to store your data yourself.
Google Keep Specifications
Android App
– Voice notes
– Collaboration tools
– Free storage: 15 GB
– Location tagging
iOS App
– Maximum file size uploaded: 10 MB
– Maximum image size uploaded: 25 megapixels
– OCR
– Scanning
– Supported drawing
– Storage for the stated price: 15 GB
Web App
– Web clipper
All Specifications
– Table of Contents
– What is the price of Google Keep?
– Where can you use Google Keep?
– Getting started with Google Keep
– Lack of formatting and limited attachments
– Limited tools for organizing your notes
– Disappointing web clippers
– Integrations and other features
– Not suitable for everyone
Source: https://me.pcmag.com/en/productivity-products/21218/google-keep
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