How to Use a Printable Planner in GoodNotes (Step by Step)
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One of the most common questions about printable planners is whether they work on an iPad. They do — a printable PDF and a "digital planner" are, in almost every case, the same file used two different ways.
Here is how to set one up properly.
What you need
- A tablet — iPad, or Android.
- An annotation app: GoodNotes or Notability on iPad, Xodo or Noteshelf on Android. Any app that lets you write on a PDF will do.
- A stylus. An Apple Pencil is ideal, but any capacitive stylus works.
Importing the file
- Download the PDF on your tablet — from your email or your account on the shop.
- Tap Share, then Open in GoodNotes (or your app of choice). In GoodNotes you can also use + → Import.
- Choose Import as a new document rather than adding it to an existing notebook. It keeps things tidy.
If you were given both US Letter and A4, either works on screen — paper size only matters when printing. Pick one and keep it.
Use the hyperlinked contents
If your planner has a hyperlinked contents page, tapping any line jumps straight to that page. This is the single feature that makes a long PDF usable on a tablet — a 54-page planner is unpleasant to scroll and fine to tap through.
One thing that catches people out: links only work in reading mode, not while the pen tool is active. If tapping does nothing, switch out of writing mode and try again. Nothing is broken.
Duplicating daily pages — the important bit
This is the question we get most. If a planner has one daily page and you want thirty, or thirty and you want ninety, you do not need to buy anything again.
In GoodNotes: open the page thumbnails view, tap and hold the page you want, choose Copy, then Paste — or use Duplicate. You can repeat as many times as you like.
In Notability: open the page manager, tap the page, and choose Duplicate.
A quick tip: duplicate the blank page before you write on it. Duplicating after means copying your handwriting too.
Add your own sections
Most apps let you insert blank pages between existing ones — useful for a brain dump, a shopping list, or a longer entry that ran over. You can also merge two PDFs into one notebook if you want a planner and a journal side by side.
Handwriting search
GoodNotes and Notability both search handwriting. It works better than people expect, even on untidy writing.
This is genuinely the biggest advantage over paper: you can find the entry where you mentioned a name or a place months later, in seconds, without leafing through anything.
Back it up
Please do this once, now. Turn on iCloud or Google Drive backup in your app's settings.
People lose a year of journalling to a broken tablet, and unlike a paper notebook there is no drawer to find it in. Two minutes in settings.
If you would rather print
The same file prints. Two things worth knowing:
- Turn on "Background graphics" in your print settings. It is off by default in most browsers and printers, and it strips out every colour and panel in the design. This is the single most common printing problem and that one checkbox fixes it.
- Print only what you will use. Print the daily pages as many times as you need — a hole punch and a ring binder is the cheapest binding there is.
You can do both
Plenty of people keep trackers digitally — easy to duplicate and search — and print the reflective pages, because writing longhand on paper feels different when the entry matters.
The file is the same. Use it whichever way you will actually keep using.
Every planner in our shop includes US Letter and A4, with a hyperlinked contents that works in GoodNotes, Notability and Xodo. All undated, so nothing needs re-buying next year. Browse them all.