By Jim Boyce

Applies to
Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003

If you're like most people, at this moment, you have at least one note that's stuck to your computer monitor, lying on your desk, tucked in a drawer, or sitting in your pocket or purse. You're keeping some critical piece of information safe until you need it again — safe, that is, until you lose the note. In fact, I bet you have lots of notes like that, cluttering your desk, your pockets, and your life.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 can help you keep those notes safe and, even more important, help you do a better job of managing the to-do lists, grocery lists, and other tasks and objects that are the cause of all those little slips of paper.

Working with Outlook notes

The Notes folder in Outlook helps you create and manage notes. But just what is a note in Outlook?

Outlook notes are really very simple — when you open a note, Outlook displays the note's text in a small window.

As you type in the note window, the text wraps and the window scrolls up automatically.

At first glance, Outlook notes might seem like little more than electronic versions of the sticky notes that pepper your monitor and desk. But, in reality, these notes offer many of the same benefits as other Outlook items in helping you manage information. For example, you can assign categories and contacts to notes, and you can create custom views to help you manage and view the information in your Notes folder.

Of course, Outlook notes aren't the solution for every situation. Although you can use notes in Outlook to keep track of just about any kind of information, a note is not always the best approach. Be sure you're not using a note in place of a more effective Outlook feature.

For example, if you need to remind yourself to make a casual phone call at some time during the day, a note might suffice. However, if you need to set up an important conference call, it's better to create a task and have Outlook provide a reminder at the appropriate time.

Likewise, the Contacts folder is the best place to keep track of contact information, rather than recording it on scattered notes. Notes are good when you need speed and convenience, but when another Outlook feature is more suitable, you should view a note as a stopgap. For example, you might use a note to create a quick to-do list, and then you might add each item as a task in your Tasks folder when you have the time.

Creating and using notes

To create a notes

1. In Outlook, on the File menu, point to New, and click Notes.
2. To open a new note window, double-click any blank area in the Notes list. (Or, click New on the Standard toolbar.)
3. Type your note. The first line of text that you type becomes the note's title. To start a new line for the body of the note, press ENTER.
4. When you finish the note, click the Close button, which is in the upper-right corner of the note window.

Note  Outlook notes have limited formatting and special character options. For example, they have no bullet formatting, but you can type * at the beginning of each line to create a pseudo-bulleted list. Likewise, notes have no automatically numbered lists, but you can type the numbers yourself.

To modify a note

1. To open a specific note, double-click the note.
2. Make changes as needed, and then click the Close button.

To delete a note

• Click the note, and then click Delete on the Standard toolbar.

Changing the way notes look

Outlook assigns a default color to each note, but you can easily change the color of the note and the note's corresponding window.

To change the color of a note

• Right-click the note, point to Color, and click a color.

You can also make changes that apply to all notes. You can do the following:

• Change the default color.
• Apply special formatting, such as making text bold or italic.
• Change the font of the text.
• Change the size of the text.

To change the default settings for notes

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click Notes Options on the Preferences tab.
2. To change the default color, click a color in the Color list.
3. To set the size of the note window, click a size in the Size list.
4. To change the default font, font style, font size, or other characteristics of the note text, click Font, and then make the changes you want.

   

Adding categories and contacts to notes

One of the great advantages of using Outlook is that you can assign categories and contacts to items and later use those properties to locate and sort information. You can assign categories and contacts to Outlook notes for that purpose. For example, you might create a shopping-list category to assign to notes that you use for shopping lists. Or, you might create a to-do category to track your to-do lists.

To assign categories to notes

1. Right-click the note, and then click Categories.
2. Click each category that you want to assign to the note, and then click OK.

   Note  To create custom categories, click Master Category List, type a new category, click Add, and then click OK.

To add a contact to a note

1. Double-click the note that you want to open.
2. Click the note icon, which is in the upper-left corner of the note window, and then click Contacts.
3. Click Contacts, click the contacts that you want, and then click OK.

Managing and organizing your notes

As with other Outlook folders and items, filtering, sorting, and custom views are the keys to finding and managing notes. For example, in the Notes folder you might use specific colors for certain types of notes — green for shopping lists, pink for to-do lists, yellow for meeting notes, and so on.

To group notes by color

• In the Notes pane, click By Color.

Category and contact associations can also be extremely helpful for organizing your notes. Assuming that you've assigned a category to each note, you can use the By Category view to easily organize the notes and to locate specific ones.

To organize your view by category

• In Notes pane, click By Category.

You can also filter and sort notes in any view. For example, maybe you keep to-do lists in your Notes folder, some of them personal and some related to work. If you've assigned Personal or Work categories to each list as appropriate, you can filter the view to show only one type of category.

To filter and sort views

1. In the Notes list, right-click any blank area and click Filter.
2. Click the More Choices tab.
3. Click Categories, select the check boxes in the Available Categories list that you want to see in the folder, and then click OK.
4. To clear the filter and show all items again, click Clear All on the Preferences tab, and then click OK.

Using Outlook notes in other ways

As you begin using Outlook notes more often, you might want to use them in other ways. For example, you might want to create a task and send it in e-mail from a note. Or, you might just want to forward a note as an attachment in a message.

To send the contents of a note as the body of an e-mail message

1. Drag the note to the Mail icon in lower-right corner of the Notes pane.
2. When you release the note, Outlook opens a new e-mail message that has the first line of the note in its subject line. The contents of the note are added to the message body along with the time that the note was modified.

To forward a note

• Right-click the note, and then click Forward. A new message opens with the note attached to it.

To create a task from a note

1. Drag the note to the Tasks icon in the lower-right corner of the Notes pane.
2. When you release the the note, Outlook creates a new task that has the first line of the note in its subject line. The contents of the note appear in the body of the task form.

   Note  By creating a task from a note, you can create a reminder for a to-do list or a shopping list that's in your Notes folder. Then set a reminder in the task form before you save the task so that Outlook will remind you of the task based on the note.

To copy the contents of a note into any Microsoft Windows-based program

1. Double-click the note, select its contents, right-click and then click Copy.
2. Place the insertion point in the program where you want the text to appear, right-click, and then click Paste.

Make Outlook notes work for you

You can really improve the usefulness of your notes by using categories, contacts, and color. And when you combine these three features with custom views, you'll find that Outlook notes can be an important tool for organizing information and making the most of your time.

About the author   Jim Boyce has authored more than 50 books about computers and technology, many of them about the Microsoft Office System. He regularly contributes to several online sites and publications. His latest book is Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Inside Out, which is available from Microsoft Learning.