As a sales professional, you need to keep track of a lot of information. And sometimes it's hard
to remember where you wrote down key details. With Microsoft Office OneNote 2003, you have one convenient place to store all of your information. Plus, OneNote offers powerful features that help organize your notes the way you want.

OneNote offers several features that can help you organize your notes. In this article, you'll learn to:
Use stationery for your meetings
OneNote 2003 includes different kinds of stationery for a wide variety of note-taking needs. In OneNote, when you click a stationery name in the New task pane, OneNote adds the page to your notebook. By default, OneNote offers six basic kinds of stationery.
Basic OneNote Stationery types
- Tablet PC. Special stationery for OneNote that can be used on a Tablet PC.
- Decorative. Stationery with pictures and coordinated fonts and font colors.
- Planners. Stationery for your to-do lists and action items.
- Business. Various templates to help you organize your meeting and project notes.
- Blank. Standard paper sizes such as letter, A4, billfold, and index cards. Using blank paper sizes as your stationery helps to ensure that your notes will print correctly on the corresponding paper size.
- Academic. Stationery to help you organize your class notes.
Notes
- OneNote also includes choices of blank stationery that differ according to size only. The default stationery is a blank page that grows as necessary while you take notes. The other choices for blank stationery match a fixed paper size, as described by the title of the stationery.
- When you download more OneNote stationery types from the Internet, they become available in the Change stationery list in the New task pane.
Stationery pages give you a consistent look in all note-taking sessions, make typing recurrent text (such as the word "attendees" in every meeting note) unnecessary, and help you create visually pleasing notes without needing to format layout and font styles every time.
You can create your own customized stationery by formatting a page in your notebook, and then saving it as stationery in OneNote.
Create a new page based on stationery
- In OneNote, click the General tab or the Meetings tab.
- On the File menu, click New.
- In the New task
pane, under Stationery, click New from stationery.
- Under Add a page, click Business.
- Click Simple Meeting Notes 1.
The stationery opens in the page area, where you can type or write your notes.
Attach note flags for follow-up
OneNote enables you to attach note flags to items as you take notes. Later, when you want to review the notes you flagged, you use the Note Flags Summary task pane. If you use the check box symbol for note flags, you can follow up on your notes by checking them off.
Flag notes
- To display the flags so that you can find them quickly, on the View menu, point to Toolbars, and then click Note Flags.
- Place the insertion point in the paragraph you want to flag.
- Click a flag on the Note Flags toolbar. For example, to attach a check box for something you want to follow up on, click Note Flag (To Do)
. Notes
- You can apply note flags to paragraphs and to drawing canvases.
- You can apply more than one flag to a single item. For example, you could apply a To Do flag and an Important flag to the same paragraph.
Use the Note Flags Summary task pane
- On the Standard toolbar, click Note Flags Summary
.
- In the Note Flags Summary task pane, do any of the following:
- In the Group note flags by box, select the way you want to group the flagged notes.
- In the Search box, click the location of the flagged notes that you want OneNote to display in the task pane.
- In the list of flagged notes, click the group headings to collapse or expand a group.
- Click a flagged note to jump to it in the context of your notes.
- If you want to create a new page based on the flagged notes currently showing in the pane, click Create Summary Page.
Follow up on notes
Do one of the following:
- If you use the check box symbol for note flags
—
for example, the To Do note flag
—
you can indicate that you have followed up on the item by clicking the box to place a check mark in it, either in the Note Flags Summary task pane or on the page where the item is written. Notes
- If you want the Note Flags Summary task pane to display only those items that you have not yet followed up on, select the Show only unchecked items check box in the Note Flags Summary task pane.
- To remove the check mark, click the box again. To remove the note flag, right-click the check box, and then click Remove Note Flag.
- If you use a shape other than the check box symbol, or if you use text formatting for note flags, you cannot check them off, but you can remove them from your notes by placing the insertion point in a paragraph, right-clicking, and then clicking Remove Note Flags from Selection.
Create a Microsoft Office Outlook task
Have you ever forgotten an important task that you wrote down in a notebook? With OneNote, you can create an Outlook task directly in the note
as you write and set a reminder for the task.
Create an Outlook task in OneNote
- In OneNote, click the item for which you want to create a task. For the example in the following
illustration, you would click Francoise will write first draft of presentation.
- Click Format, point to Note Flags, and then click Create Outlook Task.
- Switch to Outlook — and the new task is already open for you. You can now set the parameters for the task and then click Save and Close.

Send your notes in e-mail
By clicking the envelope icon on the toolbar, users with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 can quickly send an e-mail message with any note taken in OneNote. OneNote automatically converts the notes to HTML and puts them into the message body so that even recipients who don't have OneNote installed on their computer can read them. Handwriting and drawings in the notes are converted into picture files.
In addition, the program creates an attachment of the notes as a .one file so that recipients who have OneNote installed on their computer can easily add that page to their own notebooks by
double-clicking the attachment.
Send a OneNote e-mail message
- On the File menu, click Send To, and then click Mail Recipient.
- Type the names of the recipients in the Outlook To line, and then click Send a Copy.

Search your digital notebook
Have you ever had to search through a paper notebook for a note that you wrote last week but now can't find? With OneNote, you can search your digital notebook for typed notes
—
and if you have a Tablet PC, you can search for handwritten notes, too!