In Part 1, we looked at how to THINK before you start searching. Remember that the goal is to find what you seek in ONE search.
Here are some other ways you can “make Google Dance” as you search the web. MOST of these tips will also work for DuckDuckGo.com, and possibly the other search engines as well.
Note that much of this material is drawn from an article from macsales.com
Site-Specific searching.
If you’d like to search a specific website [macon, com, for example], then add “site:domain_mane” to the end of your search.
should find every mention of the school at the macon.com website.
Getting rid of some results
Let’s say you are researching “fording a river”, but you keep getting results for Ford vehicles. You can use the minus sign to remove articles about the cars, which would make it easier to find what you seek;
Sometime the search engine gives you results that DON’T contain your search terms, or the results contain SOME of them. You can force the results to contain the terms by using the plus sign.
Use the asterisk to represent ANYTHING. That is useful if you aren’t quite sure of what you are looking for, or if you’d like to know what info is available about something general.
If you are looking for info relating to a particular computer, or car, for a specific year, the “after:” and “before:” options will save you some time.
So if you are loking for info about teh Ford Mustand, but only the models from teh late 1960’s, you would search this:
No, these aren’t words that will get you into trouble. They refer to ways to require ALL of your search terms or ANY of them in your search results, by using the words “AND” and “OR”. They can be used with ANY of the above options.
So if I want to search for a Ryobi one+ air compressor, but limited to Homedepot, Lowes, and Ace Hardware:
If you are having trouble finding, and have learned to THINK about your search, then dive into advanced search. At the top-right corner, click Settings, then Advanced Search. There are a lot of options here, but most are easy to figure out.
FINAL ADVICE:
DO NOT GIVE UP. There are a gazillion ways to find what you seek on the Web.
THINK about what you are looking for. Be as specific as possible.
Contact Tech, or visit the ARC, to get more advice [but ONLY after you have tried these tips and are just absolutely out of ideas.]
The goal of your web search should be to find the info you seek in one search. Yes, ONE. Is that possible? YES!
Step one: THINK
A) Figure out EXACTLY what you are looking for. Don’t be general [“I want to know about rivers nearby”], be as specific as you can [“I want to know the average depth of the rivers near Macon, Georgia.]
B) Phrase that in the form of a question, THEN underline the important words. The underlined words become your search terms
For example “I want to know the average depth of the rivers near Macon, Georgia” would become “average depth rivers near Macon Georgia” . THAT is what you type in.
Step two: SEARCH and LOOK AT THE RESULTS
A) Check the results. DO NOT just stick with the first page – often the results you seek are on page two or three of the results.
B) LOOK AT THE RESULT – do not just click on the first link. The results will have the web address listed – take a look at the first bit of the address. Is it actually a legit source you can trust? ALSO look at the text after the address – that will give clues on how useful the info ill be.
You can probably trust SOME of these sources, but not all!
www.federalpay.org will probably not be much help!
The National Weather service indeed keeps up with river levels, so that might be a good link.
go-georgia.com – looking at the description, that is going to give me a list of river tours companies. Also not much help.
Wikipedia? Sometimes helpful, sometimes not. Sometime accurate, sometimes not. In this case it would probably be faster to look elsewhere.
epd.georgia.gov – the “.gov” tells you it is an official site with the state of Georgia. The description tells us that the link is to a PDF file will all sorts of stream and river data for Georgia. That might be useful.
Step Three: I can’t find what I am looking for!
Here are some additional things to try:
Make certain you have followed the tips above. DO NOT use complete sentences, unless you really like wasting time.
Think of synonyms for your search terms. For example “stream” instead of “river”.
Think of related terms – for example, I could look for “river statistics “instead of just “depth”, since the depth figures are likely to be included with all sorts of river stats.
Guess what words might be on the page that would contain the info you seek. For example, a page with information on the depth of rivers near Macon might also have statistics, boating, watersports, middle Georgia [instead of JUST Macon], etc.
Use a different search engine – Google does NOT cover the entire web.
That is going to be the next article in this series. Watch for it – or go ahead and add your email to the list [it’s the Subscribe or “Email me!” box on either side up top.]
The below was taken from https://beingpaperless.com/notability-2/. See the bottom of this post for additional articles from this site that cover additional Notability features.
Creating Digital Notes
Pen Tool
Zoom Tool
Highlighter
Erase
Lasso Tool
Favourites Toolbar
Text Tool
Text Boxes
Shapes Tool
Adding Items to your Notes
Audio Recording:
Recording
Playback
Playback Timeline
Editing your recordings
Photos and Gifs
Scanning Documents
Web Clips
Sticky Notes
Scribble
Multitasking
`Mouse Support
Three-dots menu
Page Navigation and editing
Presentation Mode
The Homepage
Organization
Editing your notebooks
Exporting options
Universal Search
Importing Documents
Recycle Bin
Settings
Auto Backup
Syncing
Themes
Document Defaults
Typing Defaults
Handwriting
Passwords
Creating Digital Notes
Creating a notebook in Notability is a one-step process (tap the icon on the far right corner) on the app’s homepage. Your new notebook’s page template is one you’ve set in the app’s Document settings. This makes it very easy to start taking notes in the app. You can change the Paper template once you’ve created your notebook. Your paper template can either be plain, ruled, squared and dotted. It has 15 colours and 4 line-spacing options. That is all the page customisation you get in Notability. We are still waiting for different page sizes.
Pen Tool
The app has four pen tools: ballpoint, fountain, dashed and dotted pens. Each has 12 fixed sizes and 32 default colours. You can add custom colours to the palette using a Hex code or colour picker. You can have up to 64 colours, which is more than enough. You can Edit or Delete your custom colours. It would be better if we could change the default colours, perhaps then, we wouldn’t need to add custom colours. But, they have solved that problem with the Favourites toolbar.
Zoom Tool
The zoom tool adds tiny handwritten notes to your pages. Most users like it because it makes your handwriting look better. The zoom window has navigationarrows for moving the zoom tool on the page and writing tools on the left. To auto-advance, write on the blue section. You can make the section big or small, depending on your preferences. Manually moving the zoom window also works.
Highlighter
The highlighter has similar options to your pen tool. It has the same types, sizes, and colours. It goes behind your ink/text, which doesn’t dim it. This is the best way to highlight your digital notes.
Eraser
The eraser erases both per stroke (Whole) or per pixel (Partial). It has 12 fixed sizes. The Whole eraser can rub out the highlighter only. When your notes are highlighted, the app first erases the highlighter and then your notes.
Lasso Tool
The lasso tool can be freehand and rigid (rectangular) for moving items on the page. It only picks up handwritten sections of your notes (not photos or text), which makes it difficult to rearrange the notes on your page. We should be able to select all the items on our pages.
You can move your selection around the page, even across different pages. Style changes the type of ink (but the fountain pen option is missing), its colour, and pen thickness. You can Duplicate, Cut, Copy, Group, Save or Delete your selection. Grouping would be more useful if we could group our handwritten notes with images and text boxes.
You can rotate and resize your notes simultaneously using the two-finger gesture when using the freehand lasso tool. The rigid lasso tool, however, can let you do one of the two (at a time).
Favourites Toolbar
You can save your favourite pens, highlighters, erasers and lasso tools for easier access. The favourites toolbar is mobile and can be on any side of your screen. You can tuck it away when you don’t need it and bring it back up just as easily. Even after you’ve saved them, you can still adjust your favourites’ preferences. To Remove a tool from your favourites toolbar, tap on it twice to bring up the option.
The handwriting experience in Notability is excellent. Palm rejection is perfect and there is no lag with the Apple Pencil. Notability can replicate how your handwriting looks on paper. The app has no resistance when writing.
You can disable the inking of your Apple Pencil to scroll through your pages in the app. In case you don’t want any fingerprints on your iPad screen.
Add Interactive lists: when you check things off your list, Notability ticks it off, strikes it out and dims it. It makes it easier to differentiate your completed tasks from incomplete ones.
Indent your text
Customise your font:
Font type: the app has now organised your fonts for faster navigation. You can now search the font you’re looking for. It saves a lot of time. Notability also supports custom fonts, in case the app doesn’t have the fonts you like. Learn how to add custom fonts to your iPad.
Font size
Colour
Make it bold, italic or underline
Save three favourite text formats, long press to customise them.
Align your text if its in a text box. Alignment doesn’t work when your notes are typed directly on the page. Let’s hope we will be seeing this feature outside of text boxes. It would be lovely if we could Justify our text to straighten out both sides of our paragraphs.
Adjust your line spacing from three options: 1.0, 1.5 or 2.0
Create Lists (numbered & unnumbered): both support three type of bullets/numberings.
It’s important to know how to use text in Notability. Technically, there is a right and wrong way to use text in Notability, depending on what you’re trying to achieve (of course). Selecting your text lets you Cut, Copy, Highlight, Speak, Define, Learn or Replace the text. Highlighting uses a default yellow colour, which you can change. Learn only appears on the text the app can’t recognise. You can add it to the app’s dictionary for the app to learn the new word.
The features above your keyboard are customisable, meaning you can choose what you prefer showing. You can remove or add some features. The app limits you to about 16 features, after which trying to add more displays a warning that you can’t add more features.
Text Boxes
When mixing your handwriting with text, it’s best to put them in a text box. Make sure you tick the Draw option so you can quickly create text boxes with your Apple Pencil. Avoid your handwriting overlapping on to textboxes because it sticks. When moving the textboxes, the handwriting moves too. It is annoying because Notability’s lasso tool doesn’t move all your items together.
Your text box has a transparent background. You can change the paper template or add colours instead. Once you make these changes, you can’t go back to the transparent background. Let’s hope our developers can give us that option in the future. Your colours can be any of the colours on the colour palette. We would love to see some borders for text boxes in Notability. It’s not really a box if it does not have a border, is it? You can then:
Style to edit your the text in your text box.
Turn on Round Corners
Disable Text Wrap
Cut
Copy
Delete
Customise Paper
Shapes Tool
Notability supports any kind of shape (regular and irregular). It has a very simple way to add shapes, which doesn’t involve selecting and deselecting a shapes tool. Just draw your shape and long-press to transform it. Notability also supports curved lines and arrows, though your arrowheads are always closed. We look forward to having open arrowheads in the app, or even options for different types of arrowheads and tails.
Styling the shape lets you change the stroke thickness, colour and Fill. We are still waiting for opacity options for our shapes and their fill. For now, we are still relying on the highlighter tool for translucent shapes. You can Duplicate, Cut, Copy, Save and Delete the shapes. You can resize and even rotate them. In Notability, you can change a shape after you’ve drawn it.
The pink snapping guidelines make working with shapes in Notability pleasant. It helps when you want to align items on the page. Ignoring it is quite simple, so you won’t need the option to disable them.
Adding Items To Your Notes
Audio Recording
Recording
You can add audio recordings, synced to your notes. This is Notability’s most impressive feature, one no other app has been able to replicate. To start recording, tap on the microphone icon. The app no longer limits the length of your recordings and it continues recording even when you exit the app. When your iPad is sleeping, Notability will continue recording if you don’t stop it.
When you’re on a call/meeting, you can’t record audio in Notability. It seems conferencing apps use the same resources Notability uses for audio recording and they take preference. That problem you don’t have on the macOS version, though.
Playback
Audio playback animates your notes when you have Note Replay turned on. Turn it off and the animation stops, which is obviously boring. Turning on Animation Preview displays a dimmed preview of your notes. This shows you notes that have audio recordings synced to them. The preview helps when skipping to specific parts in your notes. You can turn the preview off, which is handy when you’re trying to learn something new.
Playback Timeline
Your audio timeline shows the different audio recordings in your notes. You can speed up playback up to 2X or slow it down to 0.7X and rewind back 10 seconds or fast forward 10 seconds. The timeline can also help you skip through the playback.
Fine Tuning Playback
Tuning improves your audio playback to decrease the tapping noise of your Apple Pencil. Playing around with the frequencies under Equalizer can dramatically improve your playback. The best way to do that is to listen to the audio while playing around with the settings. Voice Boost also helps focus on different voices that were in the room. Earphones or AirPods help reduce surrounding noises during your recordings.
Editing Your Recordings
You can rename your audio recordings for better organisation (tap the audio wave icon). We requested, they delivered. You can rearrange them or select multiple audios to Merge or Delete them. Edit to split the audio and cut out sections you don’t want. You can playback the audio in this window to see the sections you want to be excluded. You then get split one and split two to exclude sections you don’t want either at the beginning or end of the audio. The audio recordings in Notability are very small, they won’t use up much of your iPad storage.
Photos & GIFs
You can add photos (from Photo Library or Camera) to your notes. Select all the photos you want and Add. The app bunches them together and you then have to rearrange them. Notability also supports drag & drop, it’s a faster way to insert images into the app. The app supports PNG images. You can:
Add captions and format them by choosing the font, size and colour you want. In Notability, you can now make your captions bold, italic or underline. That is a lot of text styling for your captions.
Add Round Corners
Wrap text
Crop, Cut, Copy or Delete
Resize or rotate your image. It would be better if the captions rotated too.
Add GIFs to make your notes fun.
Scanning Documents
You can scan documents directly into your notes; an addition that came with iPadOS 13. These scans tend to be big, which makes your notebooks big too. It is better to use a scanning app, but if you must, Notability lets you save your scans as a PDF to add them as pages to your notes. Or you can save them as Images in case you want to write around them. In that case, though, it’s better to take a photo instead of a scan. Scans taken in note-taking apps are unnecessarily huge.
Web Clips
You can drag & drop web clips into Notability. You can also copy & paste web links from Safari. Edit Clip lets you update the link if you want to change it. Your web clips have editing options similar to those for your images and that makes it difficult to interact with them as web clips. Opening them is simply too much work, it is better to use web links instead. Notability should find a way to open web links in a single tap.
Sticky Notes
You can add Stickies with different paper templates; blank, lined, grid or typing. What you write on your sticky notes, in Notability, actually sticks. For customisation, sticky notes work much like text boxes. Whichever paper template you choose, you can edit it after you have created your sticky note.
Scribble
Scribble is no longer limited to text boxes, you can write anywhere with Scribble now. To use it on the page, turn off the Draw option first. Scribble has dramatically improved since its introduction, especially in Notability. With Scribble this good, is handwriting conversion still useful? Perhaps only for searching through your handwriting. Certainly not for converting your handwriting to text. For that, Scribble is faster and becoming more pleasant. The one thing Scribble doesn’t cover yet is Math Conversion.
iPadOS Support
Multitasking
Notability now supports multiple instances, finally! It also still has its Note Switcher which works on both instances. It seems once our developers figured out how to open the same notebooks twice, they could introduce multiple instances.
With multiple instances, you can open the app twice. You can open Notability in multiple windows with different apps and even in slide over. The Note Switcher could now simply be a faster way to switch between notes, in Notability. It displays your ten most recently opened notes. You can also search your app for notes you need or even Create new note.
You can choose where you want the second notebook to open, View on Left/Right or Switch the notes. You can also resize your splits to any ratio within the 25-75% range. Your split windows can have different scrolling directions. That is, your left window could have horizontal scrolling and the right vertical
Mouse Support Improvements
The mouse pointer supports the different tools, which makes tutorials easier to follow. When we are talking about the eraser, you can see it. We are not sure this is useful for most end-users though.
Three-dots Icon
The three-dot icon has settings for the following:
Paper to change the paper template for your notebook.
View to change your scrolling direction. Seamless is for vertical and Single Page for horizontal scrolling.
Info gives you information about your notebook:
Modified Date
Created Date
Formatted For what device
Word Count for your text only.
Handwriting Language for your handwriting conversion.
Highlighter has the option to Revert to Old if you want your highlighter infront of your ink.
Apple Pencil: Disconnect if you want to use your fingers or passive stylus to write in Notability.
The last icon on your toolbar previews your document. It displays your pages as thumbnails. You can see all your pages & bookmarks, or search through your notebook. You can easily Add Page or Copy Background to copy page templates. When you Copy Background, the app doesn’t copy what’s written on the page, just the template only. You can, of course, paste it as much as you need. This is not the best way to add custom templates to the app, but it simplifies it for us… just a little.
Presentation Mode
Presentation mode automatically activates when you mirror your screen (Airplay) or connect your iPad to an HDMI cable. In Presentation mode, your audience doesn’t see your user interface (all the black areas) so they can focus on what’s important. You get four colours for your laser pointer. It can either be a tiny dot or trail. It’s like a temporary marker for your presentation, anything you write/draw disappears within a few seconds.
The Note Switcher can split view your screen in presentation mode, to give you a Presenting window (seen by your audience) and another one for your eyes only. If your presentation has notes you don’t want your audience to see, you will love this.
The Homepage
Organisation
Notability’s homepage divides into two columns. The left smaller column has folders and the right bigger one –notebooks. The app has a two-level organisation system (Dividers & Subjects). Dividers contain folders and subjects – notebooks. Your notebooks can now display as lists or thumbnails. You can then arrange them according to Name, ModifiedDate or CreatedDate.
Editing Your Notebooks
Edit lets you edit your documents in the application. You can select multiple notebooks to delete or duplicate them. You can rename your notebooks by tapping on their title. The settings icon on your dividers lets you rename them and for your subjects, you can:
Rename
Choose a colour
Lock Subject: there is no way to recover your password if you forget it. Make sure you remember it. Otherwise, you won’t be able to open or delete the subject.
DeleteThis Subject to delete all the notes it contains (naturally).
Move subjects to different folders.
Exporting Options
You can export multiple notes to other apps or share them with other people. In Notability, you can share via:
Email
Cloud services: Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box & WebDAV
iTunes
Print
Other Apps (there are plenty to choose from).
You can send it as a PDF, Note, Image or RTF. These are the same export options you get in the app’s workspace.
PDF
Read-only format View anywhere Good for sharing with Windows PC and non-Notability users. Password protect PDF Add margin around your notes Include recordings(in zip file)
Note
Notability’s native format Editable in Notability only Best for backup and sharing with other Notability users.
Image
Read-only formats: PNG/JPEG View anywhere Good to share to any platform, application or device that supports photos. Add margin around your notes
RFT (Rich Text Format)
Exports text, images and recordings Does not export handwriting or PDFs
Exporting Options In Notability
Universal Search
Universal search searches through all your notes in the app (handwritten, styled-text or scanned). Your search results are organised into:
Title Matches
Content Matches
Long-press on a result to do the following:
Share
Duplicate
Browse through the notebook’s iCloud Version History
Show in Note List to open the folder it’s in
Move to Trash
Importing Documents
You can import documents into Notability from:
Files
Dropbox
Google Drive
OneDrive
Box
WebDAV
Scan them
Recycle Bin
Notability permanently deletes notes after 30 days, unless recovered earlier. A recycle bin is a must-have for a note-taking app.
Settings
You can save some default preferences in your settings.
Auto Backup
Auto-Backup has options for Cloud service automatic backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, WebDAV or Turn Backup Off. You can then choose a Destination (folder) for your backup, Subjects to Back Up and the File Format you want (.note is the best format to backup your notes in Notability because they remain editable). Backing up your notes with recordings as PDF or RTF loses the sync they have with your notes. Learn more about syncing and backing up your digital notes.
You can sign in to your cloud service under Manage Accounts and the app lets you sign into multiple cloud services at once. This is also where you sign out of your Notability account.
Syncing
iCloud lets you turn on (or off) iCloud Syncing. It syncs your notes across all your devices (iPhone, iPad and Mac). You can also see the last time your app synced and the history versions of your updates in the app. In case you want to revert to older versions of your notes, this is a cool feature to have.
Themes
Themes are responsible for how your app looks. You get four free ones (light, dark, dark blue and jet black). The rest are in-app purchases in the Notability shop. You can turn on Match iOS Appearance so the app’s user interface changes when you switch between light and dark mode. Turning this off keeps your user interface when you switch back and forth. Colourful Subjects makes your subjects colourful, if you love colour, you might like this.
Document Defaults
Document sets default preferences for new notebooks. You can choose a default name, Include date and time to make every notebook unique. Pick a Default Note Paper: template and line spacing. You can also choose a default scrolling direction for new notebooks and turn on Rounded Corners for your media.
Typing Defaults
Typing sets default options for your typed notes in the app:
Font
Style (bold, italic or underline)
Line spacing
Size
Turn on Check spelling
Turn on Tap anywhere to start typing on that line. Turning it off is not changing anything.
Handwriting
Handwriting lets you choose your handwriting language for better handwriting recognition. You can also turn on the following:
Straight lines
Shapes Detection
Zoom Mode
Tap and hold Zoom Mode: turn it on if you use the zooming feature a lot.
Left-handed mode
Palm Detection
Passwords
Password lets you set a password for protecting your subjects (folders) in the application. You get one password for all your folders. You can turn on Touch- or FaceID and reset your password if necessary. The app keeps a record of when you created your password. It can help you remember the password if you forget it. You cannot recover your password if you lose it. Guard it well, lest you lose all your valuable notes.
Notability ignores the iPad’s sleep mode when iOS Sleep Timer is turned on. We recommend turning this off because it drains your battery if you forget to turn off your iPad screen. Text-to-Speech customises the speed your iPad reads out your text for you; from Slower to Faster.
