Notes on your iPhone are no longer just a place for a quick shopping list or a few sentences you don't want to forget. You can easily use them to take notes from meetings, store work or study materials, and create fairly extensive documents. However, the longer the note, the more difficult it is to find a specific piece of information later. This is where colored text highlighting comes in handy.
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Apple added this option already in iOS 18 and the principle is similar to a classic highlighter on paper. You add a colored background to the selected text, so that an important sentence or keyword immediately stands out from the rest of the writing.
Colors don't have to be just for decoration.
Highlighting makes the most sense when you create a simple system for colors. One color can be for tasks, another for important information, and another for things you need to come back to later.
This means you don't have to go through every paragraph on a long meeting note the second time you read it. It's just as useful for study materials, article outlines, lists of ideas, or research notes. There's no need to highlight half the text—a few well-chosen spots are usually better than a note in every color.
How to highlight text in Notes
The process is a matter of a few clicks:
- Open the Notes app on your iPhone and select the note you want.
- Hold your finger on the text and use the handles to select the part you want to highlight.
- Click the Aa button above the keyboard.
- Select the color highlight tool.
- Choose the desired color.
The change will take effect immediately and the highlighting will remain part of the note's formatting. You can mark other parts of the text in the same way, combining multiple colors to suit your system.
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Color highlighting is a small detail that may not seem like a big deal at first glance. But it can significantly speed up navigation in longer notes. Together with headings, lists, tables, attachments, and other formatting options, it shows how far Notes has come from a simple digital notebook to a fairly capable tool for everyday work.
