Does this scenario sound familiar? Maria is an executive who is responsible for managing numerous projects. When she's not in meetings, she's busy working with team members to collect information and solve problems. Between project information, meeting notes, and e-mail messages, Maria could easily be drowning in information.

Luckily, Maria does most of her work in OneNote and Outlook. She uses OneNote to take notes during meetings and to collect all the information she needs for each of her projects. She uses Outlook to send and receive all her e-mail messages, to keep track of her clients' contact information, and to schedule meetings and appointments. All of this results in a lot of information, which Maria need to share with her team and clients, and keep organized so that what she needs is easy to find.

Because Maria uses OneNote to take meeting notes and Outlook to schedule her meetings, she can copy a list of attendees, the meeting time and place, and the agenda for each meeting directly into her meeting notes in OneNote. In addition, she can capture contact information for new clients, as well as tasks and appointments in OneNote, and then import all of that information into Outlook with ease.

Maria loves taking notes during meetings using OneNote. Before she even leaves the meeting room, she can quickly organize the notes and send them to her team in an Outlook e-mail message, just by clicking a button on the OneNote toolbar. Her notes appear in the body of a new e-mail message, and the notes file itself is automatically attached to the e-mail message so that Maria's team members can add the page to their own OneNote notebook.

At the end of the day, Maria finally gets a chance to sort through her Outlook Inbox and read the e-mail messages she received during the day. She inevitably finds many pieces of information that she needs to keep, organize, and use again.

Maria has a lot of tricks for keeping this information at hand. In Outlook she has set up Search Folders — virtual folders that contain views of all e-mail items matching a specific search criteria — for messages from specific people or about specific projects. Maria has also set up rules in her Inbox so that e-mail messages sent directly to her are displayed in one color, while e-mail messages where she appears on the Cc: line are displayed in a different color. This helps her prioritize which messages she needs to respond to first. Finally, Maria flags any e-mail messages that she knows she needs to follow up on so that they are easy to find later.

Maria also has tricks for organizing the notes that she takes in OneNote. To begin with, she has created a folder in her notebook for each of the projects she works on. Within each folder she uses sections to further organize each project. When Maria takes notes, she flags any action items that she needs to remember by using the To Do note flag. Later, she can use the Note Flags Summary task pane to review all her flagged notes. She can even create a summary page that lists all of her To Do items in one place.

With OneNote, Maria can also easily find any information she needs. For example, if she wants to find information about a particular client, she can search for notes that contain that client's name. If she knows that the notes are in a particular folder or section, she can narrow her search, or she can choose to search her entire notebook.

Maria may have a lot of information to deal with each day, but with the help of OneNote and Outlook, she's able to keep up with the flow of information.

To find out more about using OneNote and Outlook together

• About sharing notes with other Microsoft Office programs
• Send notes in an e-mail message
• Create an Outlook task in OneNote
• Create an Outlook contact in OneNote

To find out more about finding information in OneNote and Outlook

• 7 Tips for searching notes
• Review flagged notes
• Find all messages received yesterday and today
• Manage your e-mail, don't let your e-mail manage you