Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your NOTES file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert NOTES to another file type
To convert NOTES Notes to another format, you need Notability or other Data software.
Convert a file to NOTES
To convert other file formats to the "App Note Data File" file type, you need software like Notability or a similar tool.
About NOTES files
The .notes file extension is heavily fragmented and used by multiple unrelated note-taking applications to store digital notebooks, handwritten memos, and database backups. Most commonly, it is associated with Notability (where it acts as a renamed ZIP archive containing audio, text, and vector data), ColorNote (where it functions as an SQLite database backup), or Samsung Notes. These files are strictly proprietary and rarely cross-compatible. You cannot open a Notability .notes file in ColorNote or vice versa. These formats deliberately lock your data into a specific app ecosystem, often requiring an active subscription or restricted hardware (like an iPad or Samsung Galaxy) just to access your own writing. Converting a .notes file to open standards like PDF, TXT, or DOCX is absolutely critical for long-term archiving and cross-platform sharing. However, because each application relies on a totally different underlying architecture (ranging from XML trees to serialized Python pickle objects or raw binary streams), standard online converters almost always fail to process them. Our analyzer will inspect the file signature to determine its true origin. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format - like an unencrypted database or zipped directory - viewing the raw text or extracting the internal media may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your NOTES file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert NOTES file to PDF, TEXT, AUDIO, TXT, RTF, DOC, DOCX, ODT, PAGES, TEX, LATEX or MD, you can use Notability or similar software from the "Note Application Data Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert PDF, DOC, ASC, TODO, NFO, MEMO, README, DOCX, JPG, TXT, NOTE or RTF files to NOTES, try Notability or another comparable tool in the "Note Application Data Storage" category.
The NOTES Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our NOTES converter.