Notes is a small but useful feature in Microsoft Outlook that can help you to organize all of your electronic notes and clippings.
NOTES IN OUTLOOK AND MORE
You will often come across information that you want to save for a future reference but don’t have any logical place to save it to. This is the sort of information that you would jot down on an easy to lose post-it note, or cut out of a newspaper in the world before computers.
Notes is a small but useful feature in Microsoft Outlook that can help you to organize all of your electronic notes and clippings.
In this issue we’ll introduce you to Notes and explain its limitations. Then we’ll suggest an alternative that might suit you.
BASIC NOTES
The Notes button can be found in the Outlook Navigation Pane (the column on the left-hand side of the Outlook window that includes buttons for Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks). Normally the Notes button is the first of three small icons situated below the Tasks button.
Clicking on this Notes button will display all of your previously saved Outlook Notes. To create a new Note, click “New” on the toolbar menu or right-click the screen and select “New Note”. Either way, a blank note will appear in a small colored floating window, displaying the date and time the note was last modified at the bottom. You can also open up a blank Outlook note anytime you have Microsoft Outlook displayed by using the CTRL+SHIFT+N keyboard shortcut.
Making a note is easy. Simply type your information into the text area of the note (or paste in text from another program). You can even select text from a Microsoft Word document or a web page and copy that text directly into an Outlook Note.
Under Tools | Options | Preferences you’ll find a few configuration options for Notes – just the background color, window size and font.
A menu can be brought up by clicking the icon in the top-left hand corner of a note. Options include: saving the note to a text (.txt) or rich-text (.rtf) file on your computer, deleting the note, forwarding the note as an attachment in an email, changing the color of the note, setting the categories a note belongs to, and linking a note to one of your contacts.
A note can be left open on the screen, ready for more data input, or automatically saved to the Notes area by clicking the close box. The title of the note corresponds to the first line of text within the note. Any previously entered note can be opened by double-clicking on it.
Of course notes can be opened and edited at any time. Test can be copied to and from notes just like any other text field.
It is also possible to create different folders for different categories of notes. In the Navigation Pane, click Notes and then navigate to File | New | Folder. Type a name for the new folder, and then click OK. By default the new folder is created beneath the existing Notes folder that you are viewing. Then simply drag the notes between the folders.
If you have a Pocket PC you can synchronise your Outlook Notes from your computer to the PDA. Like the rest of ActiveSync, it only synchronizes plain text notes to the internal storage of Pocket PC (not an external memory card). Each note is stored as a separate file on the Pocket PC but you access them via the Notes program.
The big limitation of Notes is that there are no rich-text features available (such as bold, italics or hyperlinks), only plain text. There are also no file attachments. The more you use Notes the more this becomes noticeable.
That’s why you might want to consider a workaround to make a better notes within Outlook.
ALTERNATIVE TO OUTLOOK NOTES
Some Outlook users have a ‘Reference’ folder that has notes with login details for web sites, account numbers for banks, couriers etc, software registration codes and even login and setup info for Internet connections. Putting all this info in one folder makes it easier to find and it’s easier to read with proper formatting and links beyond the plain text of standard Outlook notes.
The rich-text alternative to notes is available within Microsoft Outlook.
Firstly, click on the large Mail button in the Outlook Navigation Pane. Create a “New Folder” by navigating in the menu to “File | New | Folder”. Name the folder whatever you wish (something like “Archived Notes”), leave the type as “Mail and Post Items” and select the desired location of the folder (such as in your Mailbox).
The folder can be ‘under’ an existing folder or on the same level as Inbox, Contacts etc – the choice is yours.
To create a new note, make sure you are within the newly created folder, and navigate in the menu to “File | New | Post in This Folder”. It looks like a blank email message except with a “Post To” field (specifying the folder you have selected) instead of a “To” address field.
On the toolbar in this “Discussion” window, you can do lots of things the plain notes can not, such as:
- Select the type of note (HTML, Rich Text or Plain Text)
- Insert or copy a table and retain the formatting
- Specify the importance of the note (high or low)
- Insert a file attachment
When you have created you note and formatted it to your satisfaction (i.e. placed in your bold, italics, justification and hyperlinks), simply click the “Post” button and it will be stored in the specified folder.
Tip: you can copy in a message that has account or login information. Unlike standard Notes the formatting is retained.
To edit one of these ‘notes’ open the item then choose Edit | Edit Message. You can use this to trim a copied message down to the essentials or highlight the important information by making it bold or larger font. That makes it easier to read later.
These rich-text notes cannot be synchronized directly with a Pocket PC yet. The ActiveSync tool to link a PC to a Pocket PC needs a lot of work.
