Aha! Create | Notes
What do you need to write down? In short, everything. An agenda for tomorrow's product meeting. Insights learned from a customer call. An idea for a new feature, paired with a diagram of a prospective user flow. You take notes during every stage of the product development lifecycle — but they are often scattered across digital tools and physical notebooks. It is hard to find what you need when it is time to share your plans and collaborate with your team.
Notes in Aha! Create make it easy to record, share, and collaborate seamlessly, all while staying effortlessly organized. Create new notes and format them with headings, tables, and lists. Embed images and whiteboards to add visual context to your thoughts. Drag and drop notes into an organized hierarchy so they are always there when you need them, and add dates to visualize your notes on a calendar. Then collaborate with your team in real time on shared notes and whiteboards — so everyone can contribute to the same vision.
Click any of the following links to skip ahead:
Use notes
Some of the notes you take are just for your personal use. Maybe you have a great idea for a new strategic opportunity and want to jot down some unfiltered thoughts. Perhaps you are working on an outline for an upcoming presentation you will be giving your colleagues. Although most of your notes are just for your use, you also may have plenty of notes that are intended to be shared, like meeting agendas, project plans, and even frequently asked questions.
Notes in Aha! Create are only visible to you by default. You can then choose to share any note with your teammates for easy collaboration. An unlimited number of people can view and edit the note simultaneously while all your other notes remain private.
There are two different ways to view your notes — the List view and the Calendar view. Use the toggle to navigate between views.
List view
The List view shows you all your personal notes and whiteboards, organized into a hierarchy that you customize. From this view, you can drag and drop any note into its desired place in your document hierarchy to stay organized. Add a Date to a note if you want it to appear in the Calendar view as well.
Calendar view
You can quickly find and create notes by date from the Calendar view. You will see a dot indicator on any date that has a note associated. Click the date to see the notes for that day. Only notes with Dates added will appear in this view.
Create a note
You can create new notes from the List view or the Calendar view of Aha! Create. To create a new note, click + Create and select Note. The new note will appear. Use the text editor to edit and format your note with headings, lists, tables, inline images, and embedded whiteboards.
Note: When you add a note from the Calendar view, it will be pre-populated with the date you have selected on the calendar when you create the note.
To create a copy of a note, right click the note from the List view and select Copy note. A copy of the note will open and will appear in the List view below the the original note.
Use templates
Get a head start on your note — use a purpose-built note template from the template library. Use the whiteboard and note templates in your template library to brainstorm ideas, draft product roadmaps, build business models, prepare for customer interviews, create meeting agendas, and more.
Click + to add a new document. Then click Use a template to open the template library. Templates will be listed in alphabetically order, but you can use search if you are looking for something specific. Use the Categories listed on the left side of your template library to find templates to support a specific purpose.
Click a template to see more details. From here, you can click Use template to add it instantly or Learn more to view detailed guidance and best practices on using it.
Draft and improve text with AI
You can use the artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistant in the Aha! text editor to help you create clear, polished text in the right tone — so that you can communicate effectively without spending extra time and effort. Use AI to draft emails to customers, refine what you have already written, summarize long passages, and more.
Click the wand icon on your toolbar to prompt AI to generate a first draft of your note. Highlight existing text and click the wand to prompt AI to apply changes in tone, summarize passages, make formatting changes, and more.
Organize your notes
Saying that staying organized is challenging is almost cliche at this point — but only because it is true. The hierarchical structure in Aha! Create makes it simple, with nested hierarchies that allow you to group and reorder your notes and whiteboards however it makes the most sense for you. The following features can help you stay organized:
Daily notes folder
All notes added from the Calendar view will be located in the Daily notes folder that appears in your List view. You can leave your notes in this folder or drag and drop the daily note anywhere in your nested notes hierarchy. Any note you move out of your Daily notes folder will retain its date and will still be visible on the Calendar view.
Add a date to any note beneath its title to add it to your calendar view. Removing the date will remove it from your calendar view.
Nested hierarchies
Once you have created a few notes, it makes sense to organize them. Bringing structure to these documents is as easy as clicking and dragging them in the left-side panel of the notes page.
To reorder a note, click on it and drag it to your preferred order. If you drag a parent note, all nested child notes and whiteboards will come with it.
Note: You can drag parent notes to new locations whether they are expanded or collapsed, but it might be easier visually to do this while they are collapsed.To nest one note under another, click on it and drag it on top of another document.
To unnest a note, click on it and drag it to a new location.
When you drag a note or whiteboard to a new location, blue bars will show you where it will land in order.
A thin blue bar means your note will exist above or below another document in the order.
A thick blue bar means that your note will be nested under another document in the order.
Note collections and standalone notes
Organizing your notes into nested hierarchies is just the first step. As you continue to add new notes and whiteboards in your account, your notes hierarchy can become quite complex.
Instead of scrolling through a hierarchy expanding every parent note, click on a parent note to see a preview of all its child notes.
Note collections — child notes with nested notes of their own — display here as tiles. Each collection includes the first three lines of the note's description, the top three child notes, and a total note count.
Standalone notes — child notes without nested notes of their own — are listed at the bottom.
Customized title icons
Every note you create has a title icon. By default, this is a page icon for standalone notes and a folder icon for parent notes. You can change these title icons to emojis to help your notes and note collections stand out.
To do this, open a note and click its title icon. Click or search for any replacement emoji you prefer and the title icon will update.
Embed a whiteboard
You can embed a whiteboard directly into your note to add diagrams, sketches, and other visuals alongside text in your note. While editing a note, just click + on the text editor toolbar and select Whiteboard or type "/whiteboard". A new whiteboard will be added below your cursor. Click the pencil icon to edit the whiteboard. When you are finished editing the whiteboard, click the X to exit and return to your note. To remove an embedded whiteboard from a note, click the trash icon and click to confirm that you would like to delete it.
Add images
Add an image to your note to add visual context to the subject matter of your note. Drag and drop an image from your desktop into the note's body. Drag the image's corners to stretch or shrink it to the desired size.
Share a note
You can share a note with a simple link — so anyone who needs to can join the conversation. Once your recipients click the link, they will see your note in their own Aha! Create account, where they can view your work or collaborate with you in real time. If they do not have an Aha! Create account, they will be prompted to make a free account.
To share a note:
Open your note and click the Share button in the upper right corner.
Click Get shareable link.
Select whether anyone with the link can View only or Edit the note.
Click Copy link.
Share the link with your teammates.
The shareable link will expire six days after it is first generated. If you want to share your note with someone else after the link is expired, you will need to generate a new link. You can disable the link whenever you choose. If you disable the link, anyone who has the link but has not yet accepted access to the note will not be able to access it.
You can change a viewer's permissions to Edit or View only access by clicking next to their initials in the People who have access section of the Share menu. You can remove access to your note for any viewer by hovering over their initials and clicking the trash icon that appears.