Attach files

Put any file in a note — a Word document, a spreadsheet, a PDF, a picture, a film, a zip — and keep it with what you wrote about it.

Attach a file

1. Click or tap in the note where the file should go.
2. On the Mac, click ＋ in the toolbar and choose File or Picture…; on the iPhone and iPad, tap the paperclip in the note's bar and choose File…. Or type /file and press Return.
3. Pick the file.

You can also drag a file into a note from anywhere you can drag one, and drop text the same way.

The file lands on a line of its own, with one empty line above it and one below, so there is always a line to click into to write beside it. If you drop it on an empty line, that line counts. Whatever you type just before or after an attachment is in the note's ordinary body text.

A few things you can count on:

• A file you drop lands once, even though it arrives by more than one route at the same moment. Attach the same file twice on purpose and you get two.
• The same file attached twice is two attachments, each with its own name, its own marks and its own width.
• A second file with the same name as one already in the note is numbered the way the Finder numbers a copy — Report.pdf and Report 2.pdf. Each keeps its own contents.
• A file with an extremely long name is shortened to a name the disk will take, keeping its extension.
• When a file is too big to sync well, NotaBene warns you and names the file.

ⓘ ▸ Attachments lists everything you attached to the note — and only that.

Show it as a card, a preview or its name

Every attachment is drawn as a card with a badge that shows the file's extension in a color of its own: a blue DOCX, a green XLSX, an orange PPTX, a red PDF, a gray ZIP; pictures have theirs too — a violet PNG, a magenta JPG, a teal HEIC, an amber GIF.

• A Word or Excel file shows what it says — the first lines of the document, the rows of the spreadsheet.
• A film shows its name and size along the top, the frame it opens on below, and a play mark over it.
• A PDF shows its title, its first page or all of its pages.

A card that shows what is inside a file is as wide as a PDF page, so a note with several kinds of attachment lines up. Pictures keep the size you gave them.

To change how an attachment is shown, choose Display As from its menu or from ⋯ on the bar over it:

• Title turns it into a one-line card — badge, name and size.
• Preview brings back the picture, the excerpt, the sheet or the film's frame.
• A PDF has three choices instead: Title, One Page and All Pages.

A zip has nothing inside that can be drawn, so it is offered nothing. The current choice has a tick beside it.

Every attachment shown as its name is the same card, whatever kind of file it is: the same height, the same badge, against the left margin. The choice is remembered under the file's name, it stays when you rename the file, and your other devices show the attachment the same way.

The attachment's menu

The menu holds what makes sense for that kind of file:

• Open and Download — on every attachment.
• Rename… — renames the file in place.
• Display As — on anything with two ways of being shown.
• Show image, Edit and Annotate, Size in Note and Set as Note Preview — on a picture.
• Open and annotate PDF — on a PDF.
• Delete File — at the foot, in red; it asks first.

When you select an attachment, a bar appears over it with the same choices. The bar and the menu do exactly the same thing.

To send an attachment to someone or to another app, use the share sheet from the attachment's menu.

Move an attachment within the note

Any attachment can be dragged to another place in the note — a picture, a PDF, a Word file, a zip.

While you drag, a blue line shows where it will land:

• The line is drawn exactly where the file will go — on the top edge of a block when it goes before it, on the bottom edge when it goes after.
• The upper half of a paragraph means before it and the lower half means after, so you don't have to aim precisely. Above the first block is the top of the note; below the last is the end.
• You can drop a file between any two paragraphs, above a callout or under one. A callout and a block of code each count as one block — a file never goes inside them.
• The line appears only where dropping would actually change something. A drop that would leave everything where it was does nothing, and leaves nothing to undo.

A moved attachment is moved, not copied: one attachment before, one after. It lands on a line of its own and never ends up side by side with its neighbor, and it doesn't leave an extra empty line behind.

Open and edit in another app

Click or tap an attachment in the note, or in ⓘ ▸ Attachments, to open it. A picture or a PDF opens in NotaBene's own viewer, where you can mark it up. A film opens in a window of its own with the system's player — play, scrub, full screen, picture in picture.

When a file is missing or can't be read

• A file that hasn't reached this device yet shows a card with its name that says the file isn't here yet.
• A file that can't be read — for example a document in iCloud Drive or OneDrive that hasn't been downloaded to this device — NotaBene says so and names the file, rather than attaching an empty card. Open it once in Files or the Finder so it is downloaded, then attach it again.
• An attachment whose file has gone missing stays in the note rather than being quietly dropped when the note is saved.

See Also: Pictures and sketches · PDFs: read, annotate, summarise · Move and select blocks · Your library and sync