Google Keep is a popular note-taking app that lets you easily create, organize, and share notes and lists. However, one limitation of Google Keep is that it does not allow you to format text or change the font size.
Table of Contents
Current Options for Changing Font Size
Unfortunately, Google Keep does not yet have built-in options for changing the font size or style. Here are some current workarounds:
- Use a Chrome extension like Markdown for Google Keep – This extension lets you write notes in Markdown format and renders them nicely formatted within Keep. However, it does not allow editing notes in Markdown view.
- Copy-paste text into a web-based formatting tool like Boldtext.io – You can open Keep in one tab and Boldtext in another tab, copy text from Keep, paste it into Boldtext, format it, and copy it back into Keep. This is tedious but allows basic formatting.
- Manually emphasize text by making it bold or ALL-CAPS – Not ideal but you can manually emphasize important text.
None of these current options are very seamless or integrated with Google Keep.
Upcoming Features for Font Formatting
The good news is that Google Keep will likely add better text formatting options soon:
- Android app updates (rolling out late 2023) – The Google Keep Android app will soon support options to bold, italicize, underline, and adjust font size. The font size options act as header styles (small, medium, large).
- Potential desktop updates – It’s not clear yet if the Keep website and iOS apps will also get the text formatting upgrades. Hopefully they maintain feature parity across platforms.
- Markdown support – So far the updates don’t mention Markdown formatting, but Markdown support would be an excellent addition to provide more formatting flexibility.
Best Practices for Readability
Until more robust formatting features arrive, here are some tips to enhance readability in Google Keep:
- Use line breaks and spacing between paragraphs instead of writing long blocks of text.
- Organize notes into sections using dividers or nested bullet points.
- Use highlights sparingly to emphasize important keywords or phrases.
- Capitalize for makeshift headers when needed for scannability.
- Use list formatting for steps and procedures.
Recommended Uses for Google Keep
Google Keep works best for short notes. If you find yourself writing longer-form content, you may want to compose in Google Docs instead.
Good uses cases for Google Keep include:
- Brainstorming ideas
- Task lists
- Quick notes
- Web clippings
- Saving quotes
If you need more text formatting capabilities now, consider alternative notes apps like Evernote, OneNote, Notion, or Joplin. But the upcoming formatting features may make Google Keep more capable as a daily note-taking tool.
Wish List for Future Features
Here are some text formatting capabilities that would further improve Google Keep:
- Full Markdown support for advanced formatting options
- Typography settings – font family, font color, line height, letter spacing, etc.
- Note templates with reusable formats for consistency
- Quick style formatting toolbar like Google Docs – allowing no-click access to styles
- Keyboard shortcuts for applying formatting while typing
- Formatting sync across mobile and desktop
- HTML note import to retain formatting
Conclusion
Google Keep doesn’t support text formatting yet, but basic features are clearly in development. We can hopefully expect font size adjustment and style formatting like bold and italics soon. In the meantime, you can use workarounds to manually format text as needed. While more typography options would be ideal, Keep does offer helpful organizational features like color-coding, labeling, pinning, and search to optimize your notes.
