Why is Notes so far behind any other similar app/program available?

Where do you wish to send them?

Where do you wish to see "download" and in what format do you want them to be in after downloading?

never now forever wrote:

I would love to hear why Notes doesn't have any type of feature like this, and after over an hour of searching I haven't found any reasons.

No one here can answer why Apple gave Notes the particular feature set it did. However, most of the built in programs on Apple devices are relatively basic. If you want more feature rich programs or apps, you download the one that better meets your needs.

Submit your feedback to Apple requesting additional features here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Best of luck.

Then why not simply email them?

With a note selected, tap the share icon, choose email and the contents of your note are pasted into an empty email. Send it where you wish and retrieve any one of a dozen ways.

OK... how about this then.

From the Notes app on your Mac. Nicely formatted, but only one a a time.

Not to come to Apple's defence, but their consumer apps are not always feature rich and ahead of the game. Once they set a bar, all the others go about raising it.

Within their own ecosystem, Notes travel back and forth with ease, but your needs are somewhat beyond that. It happens.

Lots of software companies "break" their products as they move forward, leaving popular and beloved features behind as they try to read the market .

Search for threads on Google about Hypercard or Bento!

never now forever wrote:

Thank you LACAllen, I didn't realize I could do that. Although it's faster typing the date then copy/pasting them from iCloud to the Notepad file than having to send them to my email then copy/paste them from there. Either way, though, this is extremely inconvenient. I have around 800 notes that I am having to do this for....

Ugh, sounds horrid!

I thought iCloud Notes was supposed to sync to Mac OS? Can you get the notes onto your Mac?

If so, this could work for you it creates plain text files (no formatting, no images) from the DB that Apple stores your notes in.

http://writeapp.net/notesexporter/

If you can handle plain text notes get Simplenote, create an online account…

http://simplenote.com

Install Notational Velocity on the Mac or NVAlt. Enter your Simplenote account - 2 way syncing to iOS/ Mac, Android, Dropbox, anything you like basically. It has simple search, tagging, plain text notes, the Mac apps are simple but surprisingly good.

http://notational.net/

http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

One point about Simplenote, it uses http which is not encrypted, so do not store your passwords in your notes, someone can read them in transit (when syncing). Or at least that was the case a few years ago.

Or move to Evernote or one of the many other services, some of them let you get your data easily 🙂

Drew Reece wrote:

Or move to Evernote or one of the many other services, some of them let you get your data easily 🙂

Or you could try the Write app, the company that make that notes explorer export tool, looks neat too.

Or get the OneNote app from Microsoft - pretty feature rich - and can be used on a Mac as well as a phone and syncs instantaneously and free to boot

I use Evernote. Works with just about any device I'm likely to have. Bit of a learning curve but, it works for me.

The fact that we've all recommended different things points up the fact that notes applications tend to be something that people have very specific wants and needs for. Fortunately, there are lots of them out there.