Google Keep is retroactively adding text formatting to your old notes

Google Keep hasn’t gotten many updates since it launched almost a decade ago. When the updates do roll in, they’re usually not seemingly that significant, yet they do impact the core user experience quite a bit. However, there is one feature note takers have been clamoring for, and it’s finally arrived – text formatting options.

Google Keep’s design philosophy

The ability to add emphasis to your thoughts in digital format should have been added way back in the beginning, but it was only introduced this year. In fact, pretty much all other notes apps have had this since their inception. It’s important to keep in mind though that Keep was always meant to be a minimalist experience. The more bare bones it remains, the more universally accepted and useful it is to the large middle of users.

At long last, text formatting has arrived

As previously stated, Keep recently rolled out an update that lets you add bold, italics, and underline text decoration to your musings, but at the time, this was only introduced for new notes you’d jot down post-update. Now, as reported by 9to5Google, these features will soon be retroactively fitted to any notes you’ve created before formatting was introduced.

Yes, you read that right—those stacks of notes you’ve accumulated over the years in Keep, the ones you might have long given up hope on for any fancy formatting, are getting a fresh lease on life. I’ve already got the “A” icon with an underline in my existing notes near the bottom left, and while it’s grayed out at first, modifying some text in the note lights it right up and gives me free reign to add H1, H2 headers, and more!

But patience is a virtue

The rollout of these new formatting features, while a cause for celebration – especially for journal fanatics like myself – may not happen in the blink of an eye. Google is known for the infamous, but understandable “staged rollout”, and this set of tools is supposed to become widely available over the next week or so.

It’s almost unbelievable to think that after nearly a decade since its inception, Google Keep is taking a big step forward in delivering what many users have been longing for. Why it took this long is a mystery, but I’m famous by now for saying that about pretty much everything Google releases. What features is Keep still missing that you feel it should have had already? Let me know in the comments!