How to search inside your notes

Notes have a habit of being titled Untitled, Meeting, or Thoughts 14/3. You wrote down the name of the contractor a friend recommended, the reasoning behind a pricing decision, the book someone mentioned on a call, and now you can picture the note but not where it is. It could be in Apple Notes, a Notion page, a voice memo, or a notebook on the desk.

This guide covers how to search inside your notes with Fabric: getting typed, spoken and handwritten notes into one place, finding exact words with quotes, narrowing by folder or type, and asking the AI assistant to pull answers out of months of notes.

How people usually search their notes

Every note app has search, and within one app it usually works well. Apple Notes, Google Keep, Notion, Evernote and OneNote all search the text of their own notes. The friction comes from having notes in more than one of them, which is common: quick thoughts on the phone, longer pages in Notion, meeting notes in a shared doc.

Voice memos are harder. The Voice Memos app and similar recorders save the audio, and finding a line in a recording means playing it back. Handwritten pages are harder again, since paper has no search box at all.

A common workaround is choosing one app and copying everything into it. That helps going forward, but moving years of old notes by hand rarely gets finished, and new notes keep turning up in the old places out of habit.

Step 1: Get your notes into one place

Write new notes straight in Fabric’s notes and docs editor, or paste text into Fabric and it becomes a note. For notes in Notion, a connection lets search and the assistant reach them; connections need a paid plan. Fabric also has import functions for Evernote and Notion if you’d like to move notes across.

Spoken notes need transcription, which is on paid plans. Start a voice note in any Fabric app, or record a meeting through the desktop app with no bot joining the call, and the transcript becomes searchable text alongside a write-up. Meeting and voice notes explains the recording side.

Paper notes go through the handwriting scanner, which is free: photograph a page in the mobile app and it becomes a structured note, with the original photo kept alongside.

Step 2: Search for the words you used

Click Search or press Cmd+F (Mac) / Ctrl+F (Windows). If you remember a word you wrote, put it in quotes for strict matching. “Hartley” finds the note naming that contractor, and “price floor” finds the note where you worked out the pricing rule. Fabric search returns only items containing the exact string.

Without quotes, search matches by meaning as well as keywords. That helps when you remember the idea but not the wording, for example why we dropped the annual plan discount. A note that talks about removing the yearly discount still comes up.

For voice and meeting notes, search reads the transcript, and results jump to the timestamp where the words were spoken. You don’t have to play back a 40-minute recording to find the part you need. Transcripts can be edited, so if a name was misheard you can fix it once and find it reliably afterwards.

Step 3: Filter by folder, tag or type of note

Filters keep a search focused. Filter by kind of item to keep results to notes, by location to look in one project folder, or by tag. Fabric suggests tags from each note’s content, which you can accept as you go.

Structure is optional. If you like a method such as the Zettelkasten you can build it with folders, tags and links between notes. If you’d rather not organize at all, search works on unsorted notes just as well.

Step 4: Find related notes

Once you’ve found one relevant note, select it and run a similarity search. Fabric finds items like it, which brings up earlier notes on the same topic, a meeting where the subject came up, or an article you saved about it.

This is useful for ideas that develop over time. A note from last week about onboarding emails might sit next to a voice note from January and a scanned page from a workshop, all on the same thread of thinking. Seeing them side by side often shows how a decision formed, which is hard to reconstruct from any one note on its own.

Step 5: Ask the AI assistant across your notes

For questions that need several notes to answer, open the folder and ask the AI assistant. It’s limited to that folder automatically and cites the notes it used, with timestamps when the source is a voice or meeting note.

Try questions like what have I decided about hiring a designer, or which books have people recommended to me this year. To include notes in different folders, right-click each folder and add it to the assistant’s context. Save answers as notes if you’ll want them again. How to find something you saved months ago has more ways to track down older material.

Frequently asked questions

How do I search all my notes at once?

Bring them into Fabric, then open search with Cmd+F (Mac) or Ctrl+F (Windows). One search covers typed notes, transcribed voice notes and scanned handwriting together.

Can I search inside voice notes?

Yes. Voice and meeting notes are transcribed, and search results jump to the timestamp. Transcription needs a paid plan. How to find something someone said in a meeting covers this in more depth.

Can I search my Notion notes from Fabric?

Yes. Connect Notion from the Fabric marketplace and search and the assistant can read it. Connections need a paid plan.

Can I import my notes from Evernote?

Fabric has import functions for Evernote and Notion, so existing notes can be brought across and searched with everything else.

How do I find a note when I can’t remember what I called it?

Describe what it was about. Search matches by meaning, so a description of the idea finds the note even when the title is Untitled.

Can I search for an exact word in my notes?

Yes. Put the word or phrase in quotes and search returns only notes containing it.

Are handwritten notes searchable too?

Yes, once scanned with the handwriting scanner, which is free. Each page becomes a text note you can search.

Do I have to organize my notes for search to work?

No. Folders, tags and spaces are optional, and search works without them. See pricing for which features are on which plan.