Notebooks

In Jot, everything is organized into notebooks. A notebook is a topic you want to keep a log of — meals, mood, your observations, experiments and trials, notes from a course, ideas from your latest book. Each notebook defines what you are going to keep in it and how: its fields, color categories and export format. Create as many as you need.

The notebook editor

From the notebook editor you adjust everything that defines it:

• Its name: to tell it apart from your other notebooks.
• Its fields: what you are going to write in each entry.
• Its color categories: to classify entries at a glance.
• Its export format: grid or linear, depending on what you are going to log.

You also choose the time precision: hour only (09h) or hour and minutes (09:32), depending on how fine-grained you want your log to be. Fields, categories and the export format are explained in more detail in the next sections.

Fields, your way

Each notebook organizes what you jot down into as many text fields as you need. A mood diary might have fields for the state and its cause; a chess one, for the opponent, the opening played, the result and your analysis; a dream one may do just fine with a single field.

Color categories

You create each notebook's categories: as many as you like, with the name and color you prefer — from a palette or fully custom. When you add an entry, you pick the category it belongs to, and you will see it reflected both in your entry list and in the exported Excel. In a meals notebook, for example: breakfast, lunch, dinner.

Adding an entry

Logging something is that direct: open the notebook, create a new entry and fill in its fields — as many as you want; the rest can stay blank. Each entry stores its own date and time, plus a category if you give it one. No hunting for today's row in a never-ending document, no looking for the right cell in a spreadsheet, no checking the clock — just the note you have in your head right then.

Your entries, day by day

A notebook's entry list shows your notes day by day, colored by their category. You can review the week at a glance or find one specific day. Tap any entry to see its full detail or edit it.

Notebook templates

A notebook can also be shared as a template: a small .jotnb file with its entire configuration — name, fields, categories, export format and time precision — and no entries at all. It is sent however you like through Android's standard share menu.

The recipient just opens the file: Jot recognizes it, shows them the configuration for review and creates an identical notebook, empty and ready to use. If you already have the file saved without having opened it that way, you can also import it from inside the app itself. Handy for setting up a notebook and passing it to someone else ready to go, without them having to build it from scratch.