Your meeting notes become clean minutes

What is it for?

Minutes are not there to retell the meeting, they are there so nobody has to hold it again. Two weeks later nobody rereads the discussion: people look for what was decided, who does what, and by when. The rest is context.

Writing the minutes was never the problem, formatting them afterwards is. You walk out with a block of notes, and tidying it up gets pushed back until it no longer helps anyone. This tool removes that step: paste the raw notes, fix two or three lines, send.

How to use it

1. Fill in the meeting subject, and the date and attendees if you want them.
2. Paste your block of notes into a Text box. Each line becomes a block, and the tool works out what it is.
3. Fix anything it got wrong in the Kind column. It will get things wrong, that is expected: the column exists for exactly that.
4. Fill in the owner and due date of your actions. Those two fields only appear on lines that are actions.
5. Pick the font, the text colour and the colour scheme, then download as PNG, JPG, SVG or PDF.

What the tool picks up on its own

Your notes are not shapeless: they carry marks everybody uses without thinking about it. Those are what the guessing runs on.

• A line starting with Decision, Agreed or Approved becomes a decision.
• A line starting with Action, TODO or Next steps becomes an action.
• Inside an action, @name becomes the owner, and by 12/09, before Friday or due end of month becomes the due date.
• A line starting with Open, Pending or Blocked, or ending in a question mark, becomes an open point.
• A dash or a bullet at the start makes it a bullet, and so does a number followed by a full stop.
• A short line with no closing punctuation, or one written in capitals, becomes a heading.

None of these rules are worth memorising: type the way you always do, look at the result, fix what bothers you. You will never be asked to mark up your notes before being shown something.

The structure that works

If you are starting from a blank page rather than notes, here is the skeleton that works, and nothing more:

1. The header: subject, date, attendees. Three lines, no more.
2. The context, in two sentences: why the meeting happened. People skip it on a reread, but it saves whoever joins six months later.
3. The decisions, one per line, stated positively. "Scope is cut to three countries", not "we discussed scope".
4. The actions: what, who, when. An action with no owner is not an action, it is a wish.
5. The open points: whatever was not settled, and will come back if nobody writes it down.

What does not belong: a transcript of the discussion, named disagreements, and anything you would not say out loud in front of the people quoted.

FAQ

It got several lines wrong, is that normal?
Yes, and it is expected. Guessing what a line is from its shape is an approximation, not a science. The Kind column is there for exactly that, and fixing three lines is still faster than formatting everything by hand.

Do my notes go anywhere?
No. Everything is read, guessed and drawn in your browser. That is what lets you paste internal meeting notes without thinking twice.

Why an image rather than a Word file?
Because minutes are mostly read inside a chat thread, and an image drops in there without being opened. PDF is still available for whatever gets archived or attached to an email.

How many lines?
Up to 40 blocks. Beyond that it stops being minutes and becomes a transcript, and it is better split by topic.

Can I come back to my minutes later?
Yes. What you type is kept in your browser, and the Save button lets you keep several. Ctrl+Z undoes the last action.

Is it really free?
Yes, no sign-up and no limit on how many you make. The free version adds a small site credit at the bottom of the image and lets you keep up to 3 saved items.

All the frequently asked questions, across the seven tools.