Did you know that Outlook has it's own Electronic Post-it application? Yup! It's called Notes and it's been a part of Outlook since...well, since many versions. (Yeah, I'm too lazy to look up the stats!<grin>)
Personally, I love notes and use them all the time for storing all those bits of information that I will need again one day. However, if I stick them on real post-its, I end up knocking them off my monitor when I clean it. If I put it in a notebook, I sometimes forget which notebook I put it in. Same with emailing myself the info. If I don't toss it into my Notes, I'll never find it again...that's just a fact!
So I take advantage of Outlook's Notes and people call me organized because they can ask me for info and I can find it again in a few seconds. Thank goodness for Outlook Notes!
In this article, I'll show you how easy, versatile and handy using Notes can be. (Note that this article will focus on Outlook 2003, your mileage may vary.)
As you can see in the image below, Notes can save a lot of important info.
And because they're just tiny little notes, I can toss one in a folder, very quickly, whenever I need to save some ID or other important piece of info. Granted, you won't want to do this if you don't have your PC properly protected with a firewall and antivirus program to ensure your information is safe! And also, make sure you keep a safe backup, incase you should have problems with your PC. Using Notes keeps the info handy, but also can make it available to prying eyes or loss if you don't take proper steps to cover those bases!
You can easily access Notes by just clicking Go > Notes or using the Ctrl + F5 shortcut key. But there is also a shortcut icon or group listing available to get quick click access, depending on your version of Outlook.
The default view for Notes is by large icons, as shown below. But there are a pile of ways to change that view.
If you right click in a blank area within Notes, you'll get a shortcut menu that will provide quick access to customization.
And within Outlook 2003, there's a quick list to click options to resort by various, popular views. If you use colors to code the categories, you can quickly sort by color with just a click.
To apply a color, just right click a note and choose Color. You can choose between Blue, Green, Pink, Yellow and White (which provides a little gray shadowing so it clearly shows up against the white background, as shown below).
And if you've setup categories in Outlook, you can tag your Notes with categories by which you can sort.
Creating a new note is as easy as grabbing a piece of paper. Just double click in any blank area of your Notes background and you'll get a default note. Start typing. And notice in the image below that the bottom/right corner has a few diagonal lines. This means the page can be expanded. So you can actually add tons of info into these little notes. Just drag them out to view all the info, as needed. In fact, I've stuffed full emails into these little notes!
You'll start out with one default folder called Notes, which cannot be renamed. But you can then add custom folders, too. Right click on the main Notes folder and choose New Folder.
A dialog box will appear where you can add the name of the new folder. Just make sure that the Folder contains... drop down is set to Notes. It should default to that item, but if it gets changed, you might end up creating a new calendar or tasklist and you may go nuts trying to figure out what you did!
In the above image I created a new folder named DianPersonal. Now in the image below, you can see that I have a new folder with that name...ready to receive whatever personal notes I can to jot down and save within this folder.
Give 'em a try...people might even start calling you organized!
(Pssst...trust me, click here!)
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