Google Keep: What do you need to know?

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If you’ve looked into Google’s productivity suite, then you may have seen Google Keep listed. It’s their note taking program. What does it do? How does it compare to similar programs? Let’s take a look

Disclaimer: I’m going to be completely honest here and say that I’ve looked into Google Keep before, and it doesn’t suit me personally (I’m a MS OneNote girl). But that doesn’t mean that it might not be perfect for you.

What is Google Keep?

Let’s start with at the beginning.

“Google Keep is a note-taking service included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google.”

You know all those thoughts, ideas, lists that you need to keep a record of somewhere?

It can all be added into Google Keep.

Where can it be accessed?

Like the rest of Google’s suite (or Workspace), Keep is available via a

There used to be a desktop program, but that stopped in early 2021, leaving the web-browser option as the main access point (https://keep.google.com/). And you can install an app on a mobile device (phone or tablet), through the relevant App Store.

OK – so what it store?

That’s a very good question 😁

Well, save/store notes is the simple answer.

Let’s expand that to explain a bit more.

Google Keep - main screen in a web browser
Google Keep Web Browser

Your thoughts and ideas are saved in a ‘note’ format. Personally I think of them more as sticky or “post-it” notes because they appear in blocks on the screen (web-page).

A note can contain:

  • Characters (text, numbers & symbols) – as you’d expect
  • Images
  • Create a check-able list
  • Drawing (not shown)

A single note can contain a mix of these options.

Within those options, there’s a lot of choice.

Text Notes

As with any note-taking app, you can type in or paste information in.

While the ‘note’ may look small, it will expand as you continue to add more information. In fact each note has a maximum of 20,000 characters, which roughly equals just under 6 document pages.

In terms of the numbers of individual notes, it’s unlimited how many you can create and save. I will add that each note is saved into your Google Drive space, but they don’t take a lot of storage so it will take a lot of notes to use up the included free space.

If you do you use all the included storage, you can of course purchase (for a monthly fee) additional space.

Checklist

One of the things we most use notes for is a checklist. Google hasn’t forgotten this, it’s built-in when you want to create a note.

Google Keep Notes - Take a note at the top of the web page
Take a note…

At the top of the web page you’ll see Take a note…, I’m sure that you can guess it’s how you create a new note. However, you can see the standard tick box icon ☑️ on the right. Click there to make it into a list, with checkboxes (in green) automatically added to each line.

Psst… you can also take an existing note and show the checkboxes to make it into a list.

Note or List

One thing to be aware of, is you can’t have both in a single note.

It’s either a note with text and images, or it’s a list with checkboxes.

Yes you can ‘switch’ between them, but showing or hiding the checkboxes.

Images and Drawing

Images can be added to a note (text or list).

You can select saved images, or paste straight into the note. It doesn’t have to be just one image either – you can select multiple images.

All of the images appear at the top of the note, and can’t be mixed in/added within the text.

Drawing is an interesting feature which creates a blank board that you draw on. Where you want to draw out a process, or an idea that you’ve got, it will be added to the current item.

I’ve grouped it with images, as drawings also appear at the top of each entry – on the right-hand side.

Importing into Keep

This is a quick note to mention that if you’ve been using another notes program, you CANNOT import those notes into Keep.

Now when I say that, I’m taking about a ‘wholesale’ type of import that does all of the hard work for you.

If you’re happy to manually enter the notes in, then yes you can move them over. Remember, it’s copy and pasting all of your notes by hand. Not realistic if you’ve got a lot of notes. 😥

Google Keep vs OneNote

As I mentioned at the beginning, I prefer Microsoft OneNote, and it’s not fair just ignore this, so let’s discuss it.

Being the two note-taking programs in their respective productivity suites, it seems obvious to compare them. However, as you take a closer look, I don’t think that’s actually fair.

At the end of the day, it’s all about what information you want to store and what you need to do with it.

The main comparison options are that they both store information, have a search facility built-in and work with other programs within their respective Office Suites.

But as you start to look a bit closer at them, the differences become more obvious, and show that they have been designed with different purposes in mind.

Google Keep Notes appear to be designed around sticky notes, rather than pages which is what MS OneNote uses.

The organisation structure that they both offer can’t be compared – Keep doesn’t have a built-in structure, a new item appears at the top of the list. While OneNote uses a three level structure (for more information take a look at OneNote: What do you need to know to start?).

Keep offers the use of labels and colour (background) coding to sort the entries. OneNote has tags. OneNote colours each page to match the section that it’s in, but not individual pages.

While both work with other programs, there are differences between what they do and how they interact with the other programs.

So I’m finding it difficult to objectively compare these programs to each other.

Making a decision

At the end of the day it’s about what information you want to store, what specifically it includes (images, text etc) and how to plan to use it.

I urge you to look at your needs and requirements, not the company associated with the product, to make the final choice.

In case you’re wondering about the cost – yes Google Keep is free, but with a free Microsoft account you can use Microsoft OneNote Online.

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Google Keep, Google Keep Notes, Google Keep vs OneNote

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