Scan Documents
While Notes is obviously a great place to store all of your digital information, Apple also clearly wants to make it the home for all of your paper records as well. Using your iPad or iPhone camera, you can scan in receipts, bills, bank statements, or even your child’s artwork in order to keep a permanent digital record.
Scans are inserted into notes like any other attachment, so you can easily add a title and more text around them, such as descriptions for expense receipts, or payment confirmations for bills. They can also be annotated marked up using the built-in markup tools, and you can even add a signature with your Apple Pencil and then send the document back out as a PDF via Mail or Messages.
While the ability to scan documents is a great feature to have built into Notes, there are some limitations worth keeping in mind. Chief among these is the lack of OCR — this is something we’re really hoping to see Apple add in a future iOS update, but for now if you want your scanned documents to be converted to searchable and copyable text, you’ll need to turn to a special-purpose scanning app like Scanner Pro or Scanbot, although this doesn’t mean you’ll have to abandon using Apple Notes to store your scans — many of these apps will still let you send scanned documents from them right back into Apple Notes.