Searching Saved Notes — A Guide to Digital Note-Taking with LDS.org Account Notes

How to Look Up Something I’ve Saved to Notes

Everything that you highlight, tag, bookmark, or type in a journal entry, gets saved to your account and can be pulled up from either the Gospel Library app, or LDS.org. Therefore, things you highlight on your phone (through the Gospel Library App) will sync with LDS.org and be visible to you from either your computer or your phone. So how do you go back and see everything you’ve annotated? It’s pretty simple.

• From the Gospel Library app, you can see (and edit) all your annotations by clicking on “Notes” from the main screen of the app. You can see “Notes” listed in the left column of the Gospel Library home screen.

Notes offers you multiple ways of finding things you’ve saved. The first thing you see when you enter Notes is a list of all your notebooks. If you click on one it will show you everything associated with it in chronological order (with the most recent annotation listed first.) For instance, in the third screenshot above you can see my most recent highlight from President Uchtdorf’s talk “Fourth Floor, Last Door”. It shows that I highlighted it pink and tagged it “Sharing the Gospel.”

Click “Tags,” above the search bar to see a list of all your tags, in alphabetical order. Click “Recent” and you will see everything you’ve annotated in chronological order. The notebooks and tags sections both have a search bar, but the search function in notebooks ONLY searches the titles of your notebooks, NOT the content within. Likewise, the search function on the top of the tags section only searches the tag names. Therefore, the best way to find something you’ve saved in your notes is to tag your annotations, or organize in notebooks you’ll remember, and pull them up by their tag or notebook.

It is important to note that the new version of Gospel Library does not display bookmarks anywhere in the notes section of the app. Instead, your saved bookmarks, open screens, and history can be accessed by clicking on the bookmark icon on the top-right hand side of the screen. This icon is visible on that top bar, everywhere in the app, including when you have the notes section open. That’s probably why they no longer list bookmarks among your other annotations in the notes section.

• From LDS.org you explore your saved items and entries by logging in to your account and selecting “Notes” from the drop-down menu in the top, right-hand corner of the screen.
• The Notes screen is organized differently from Notes in the Gospel Library app, but affords you additional tools to drill-down into your saved content. Everything is organized into Notebooks (if you haven’t assigned everything a notebook it will automatically be assigned to the Notebook “Unassigned Items.”)

When a Notebook is selected, then the types and tags listed in the left-hand menu below your notebook list will only display the types and tags used in the notebook you have selected. For example, if I’m looking for something I highlighted in my personal study, I can select my personal study notebook and then click on “Highlights” in the left-hand menu and browse through those highlights in the order I saved them. The screen below shows what that would look like. Notice in the “types” menu, the numbers next to the various listed types are smaller than in the image above. That’s because in the screenshot below the Personal Study notebook is selected. The above image is showing available types of annotations in “All Items” while the screenshot below is limited to showing only types of annotations in the Personal Study notebook.

This limiting functionality can be helpful when you’re looking for something you’ve saved. There is a drawback, however: If I don’t know which notebook I’ve saved something in, I must be certain to select “All Items” in the notebook list, or else my annotation may not appear.

The Notes section of LDS.org hasn’t change to reflect the changes in Gospel Library’s newest version. Bookmarks are still listed within notebooks, and you can only highlight selections within the scriptures and general conference talks. Look to us in the future for updates, and be sure to read next week’s post on Note-Taking Strategies!