Aha! Notebooks | 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! Notebooks 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.
If you are on the Aha! Notebooks Essentials plan, all notes are personal and only visible to you by default. You can then choose to share any note with a colleague for easy collaboration. An unlimited number of people can view and edit the note simultaneously while all your other notes remain private.
If you are on the Aha! Notebooks Advanced plan, workspace notes are visible to all users in your account that have permission to access that workspace. Your personal notes are private — unless you choose to share them with a colleague.
Create a note
You can create new notes from anywhere in Aha! Notebooks. To create a new note, click Add in the upper left corner of your screen 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: If you are on the Aha! Notebooks Advanced plan, use the dropdown in the upper left of your screen to select the intended location of your new note before adding it.
New notes are pre-populated with today's date by default. You can change a note's title or date field. Changing a note's date field will ensure that it is associated with the right date on your My work page.
To create a copy of a note, right click the note from your My documents section at the left of your screen and select Copy note. A copy of the note will open and will appear 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 Add 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.
Create a new note template (Advanced plan)
Your team has its own processes, workflows, terminology, and preferences. You can personalize your note templates to reflect how your team likes to work by creating your own custom note templates.
Note: Users with contributor permissions can create document templates.
To create a new note template, navigate to Settings ⚙️ Workspace Document templates. Then click Add document template and select Note.
To create a template from a note you are currently editing, select the More options menu in the upper right corner of the note and select Save as template. Then enter a name for the template and click Create template.
Note: You can only create templates from workspace documents.
Once saved, you will find your new note template in the Custom section of the Aha! template library.
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! Notebooks 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.
Folders
Folders are a simple way to keep your notes organized.
To add a folder, click Add and select Folder from your documents. Name your new folder, then drag and drop it into the desired place in your document hierarchy.
Note: If you want to include a description, try using parent and child notes in your document hierarchy.
To add a document to your folder, select your folder and then choose the type of document you want to add. Drag and drop existing notes to move them into a folder.
Parent and child notes
Parent and child notes are organized just like systems of folders. The only difference is that instead of having a folder as a container for a group of notes, one note serves as a parent note with child notes nested below it, setting up a nested hierarchy. This is useful when you want to include specific directions or details to a group of notes for context.
To nest one note under another, click it and drag it on top of another document.
To remove a note from a parent-child relationship, click it and drag it to a new location.
Reorder notes
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 under it 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.
When you drag a note or whiteboard to a new location, the blue bars in your Aha! Roadmaps account 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 is just the first step. As you build out notes in your Aha! account, your notes hierarchy can become quite complex.
Instead of scrolling through a hierarchy expanding every parent note, click on a parent note or folder to see a preview of all its child notes.
Note collections — child notes with sub-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 sub-notes of their own — are listed at the bottom.
You can control what notes appear in these views by clicking on a parent note, then clicking More options Hide nested notes.
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 anyone — just send them a shareable link. Anyone in your account can share a personal note that they have created. Owners or contributors (Advanced plan) can also share workspace notes — but viewers and reviewers for a workspace cannot share workspace notes.
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 anyone.
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.
If the person you want to collaborate with is not a user in your Aha! account, they can still collaborate on your note:
If they do not have an Aha! account or trial in progress, they will be prompted to create a free guest account. After they do, they will be able to access the document you shared with them.
If someone accesses your shared document while they are in a trial period and then their trial expires, they will not lose access — their trial account will become a free guest account so they can continue to access and collaborate on shared documents.
Users with guest access to any document in your account will not have access the document's Share menu.
Viewing and editing permissions
After you have generated a shareable link, you can configure viewing and editing permission for any individual note. Select the Share menu. You will see two different permission sections:
Guest access: Anyone who has accessed your note from a guest or trial account will be listed here. Click anyone's initials to change their permission to Edit or View only. Hover over a guest's initials or avatar and click the trash icon to revoke their access.
Reviewer access (Advanced plan): The default reviewer permissions for your document will be inherited from your workspace settings, but you can change them on a per-document basis. Select View or Edit to update all reviewer's permissions for your note.
If a reviewer has permission to view, but not edit a document, they can click Request edit access to send an email to the workspace owners and the person that created the document. A workspace owner can then choose to update the edit permissions for all reviewers.
Accept a note
Your colleague will provide you with a link when they want to share a note with you. Click the link to open the invitation to view the document. You can then select an option to View the document or Ignore the document.
You will be prompted to log in or sign up if you choose to View the document.
If you do not have an Aha! account, you can create a free guest account to view the document.
If you do have an Aha! account, log in to the view the document. After you have accessed it, the document will appear in the Shared with me section of your My work page. If it is located in a workspace that you have access to in your account, it will open within that workspace.
To see who has access to a shared document and will potentially see any edits you make, click the Shared icon at the top of the document next to its title.
Export a note
You can export a note as a PNG or PDF — so you can print it out or use it outside of Aha! Notebooks. Click the More options menu at the top right of your note. Then select Export as PNG or Export as PDF. When you do, the file will be generated in a new window. Click Download to save the file to your computer.
Move a note (Advanced plan)
Workspace notes are a great place to collaborate and share documentation with your team — but some people prefer to experiment with different approaches in initial drafts to refine a note's content before sharing it with colleagues. You can use personal notes to experiment with various writing styles, structures, and formats — then move the note to a shared workspace when you are ready to share access with the rest of your team.
To move a personal note to a workspace, click its More options menu and select Move note. Then select the workspace to which you would like to move your note and click Move to workspace.