Be productive with Calendar, Notes, Reminders, and Shortcuts

Add multiple accounts. With Calendar, you can add multiple accounts—iCloud, Google, Microsoft Exchange, and more—and manage all your events from one place. Open the Calendar app, choose Calendar > Add Account, then follow the onscreen instructions.

Add calendars. You can create separate calendars to keep track of different schedules. For example, keep all of your work meetings in one calendar and your children’s school events in another. Choose File > New Calendar. If you have multiple accounts, choose the account for the new calendar. The new calendar appears in the sidebar. To change the name or color of the calendar, Control-click it, then choose Get Info.

Create events and reminders. To create a new event or reminder, click  or double-click a day and time in the calendar window, then choose Event or Reminder. You can also include additional information, like location, a URL, or notes. After creating an event or reminder, you can edit it by double-clicking it. Reminders created in Calendar also sync back to the Reminders app.

Share a calendar with others. iCloud makes it easy to share calendars. Control-click a calendar under your iCloud account in the sidebar, then choose Share Calendar. Enter the email of the person you want to share with.

Learn more. See the Calendar User Guide.

Create or edit a note. Click in the Notes toolbar to create a new note. To change an existing note, click anywhere in the note and begin making changes.

Format and add content to notes. You can add checklists, tables, images, audio recordings, and more to your notes. Click to format text—for example, add a list, make a collapsible subheading or heading, or highlight text. To add an attachment to your note, click , then click Choose Photo or Video, Record Audio, or Attach File.

Collaborate on a note. You can send an invitation to collaborate on a list in Messages or Mail, or share the link. Click in the toolbar, choose Collaborate or Send Copy from the pop-up menu, then choose how you want to share. After you’ve invited others to join, you can track activity and manage collaboration by clicking .

Solve math problems. Crunch numbers, evaluate expressions, and assign variables—right from Notes. To define a variable, enter a word or a letter, followed by the equal sign and the variable’s value. To use a variable, the variable has to precede any expression it’s used in. To solve an expression, enter the expression followed by the equal sign.

Learn more. See the Notes User Guide.

Create a reminder list. You can create a list for each of your projects to help keep your to-dos organized. With iCloud reminders, you can also create automatically categorized Grocery Lists or custom Smart Lists based on rules and filters you identify. To create a list, choose File > New List.

Add or edit a reminder. Click the space below the last item on a list or click in the top right to add a new reminder. You can add notes, tags, a date, or a location to your reminder by clicking .

Collaborate on a list. Share the load by sending an invitation to collaborate on a list. Click , then choose how you want to share. If you share in Messages, everyone in the conversation is automatically added to the list. After you’ve invited others to join, you can track activity, manage collaboration, and even assign reminders.

See what’s coming up. Keep on top of upcoming reminders and make sure you never miss a beat. Scheduled reminders show up in the Calendar app, and in the Today and Scheduled lists in Reminders. To add a date to a reminder, click the reminder, click Add Date, then select the date you want to be reminded.

Learn more. See the Reminders User Guide.

Browse the Gallery to find shortcuts. Starter shortcuts for a range of common tasks are grouped in collections. The shortcuts you create, and ready-made shortcuts you choose or edit, are shown in All Shortcuts in the sidebar.

Create a shortcut from the gallery. Choose a shortcut from the Gallery to add it to your shortcuts. For example, in the Quick Shortcuts collection, click on the Play Playlist shortcut. Choose the playlist you want that shortcut to play, then click Add Shortcut.

Create a custom shortcut. You can also create your own shortcuts. While viewing All Shortcuts, click in the toolbar, then search for and drag actions from the list on the right to the shortcut editor on the left to produce the results you want. Actions are building blocks of a shortcut, like steps in a task. For ideas, see Ideas for custom shortcuts.

Shortcuts to your shortcuts. You can run shortcuts with a click by making them available in Spotlight, Siri, or the menu bar, or set shortcuts to run automatically—for example, at specific times, or when you take actions like saving a file to a folder. To choose how to run a shortcut, double-click it, click at the top right, then select options under Use as Quick Action. To use currently selected files and webpages as input when you run a shortcut from Spotlight, select Receive Input from Spotlight.

Learn more. See the Shortcuts User Guide.