10 Minute Guide to Outlook 97 - 17 - Creating Notes In this lesson, you learn to create, sort, and view notes. Creating Notes If you've ever used a paper sticky note to remind yourself of tasks, ideas, or other brief annotations, Outlook's Notes are for you. Notes are very similar to paper sticky notes. You can use Notes to write down reminders, names, phone numbers, directions, or anything else you need to remember. In Outlook, all notes are kept in the Notes folder. You'll have to remember to look at the folder so you can view your notes. To create a note, follow these steps: 1. In the Notes folder, choose Note, New Note or click the New Note button on the Standard toolbar. A note appears, ready for you to type your text (see Figure 17.1). 2. Enter the text for your note. Timesaver Tip: The Long and Short of It Notes don't have to be brief. You can enter pages and pages of text if you want. As you type, the page scrolls for you; use the arrow keys and the Page Up/Page Down keys to move through the note text. 3. When you finish, click the Close (X) button to close the note. You can reopen a note and enter as much text or edit text as you need to. Figure 17.1 A note automatically includes the date and time it was created. If you press Enter after entering text in the note, you create both a line break and a title of sorts at the same time. Only the text before the hard return is displayed when the note is closed. If you do not add a hard return, but instead enter the note text so it automatically wraps from line to line, the entire note text appears below the note in Icons view. Setting Note Options You can change the default color and size of your notes. You also can change the default font used for your notes. To set note options, follow these steps: 1. In the Notes folder, choose Tools, Options. The Options dialog box appears with the Tasks/Notes tab displayed (see Figure 17.2.) Figure 17.2 Customize your notes. 2. In the Note Defaults area of the dialog box, click the Color drop-down arrow and select a new default color for your notes. You can change the color to yellow, blue, green, pink, or white. The default is yellow. 3. Open the Size drop-down list and choose Small, Medium, or Large for the size of the notes. The default is Medium. 4. If you would prefer not to show the time and date on your notes, deselect the Show Time and Date check box. 5. To change the font, click the Font button. The Font dialog box appears. Change the font, font style, size, color, and other options, and then click OK. Managing Individual Notes To open a note, double-click it in the Notes folder. You can edit the text in an open note as you would edit any text. To move a note, drag its title bar. You also can delete, forward, or print notes; you can change the color of individual notes; and you can specify categories for your notes. Click an open note's Control-menu button to display a menu with the following commands: New Note Creates a new note but leaves the first note open. Save As Enables you to save the note and its contents. Delete Deletes a note and its contents. (You also can delete a note by selecting it in the Notes list and pressing the Delete key.) Forward Enables you to send the note as an attachment in an e-mail message. Cut, Copy, Paste Enables you to select text from the note and cut or copy it to the Clipboard. The Paste command enables you to paste items on the Clipboard at the insertion point in the note. Color Choose another color for the individual note. Categories Enter or choose a category. Print Print the contents of the note. Close Closes the note. (You also can click the Close (X) button in the note's title bar.) A closed note appears in the Notes folder. Viewing Notes The Notes folder provides various views for organizing and viewing your notes. You can also sort notes in any entry list view by right-clicking the heading bar--Subject, Created, Categories, and so on--and selecting the sort method. The default view is Icons, but you can change the view using the Current View drop-down list in the Standard toolbar. Figure 17.3 shows the Notes folder in the default view. Figure 17.3 This view displays the notes in Icons view. You can choose to display your Notes folder in any of the following views: Icons Displays the notes as note icons with the message (or a portion of the message) displayed below the icon. Notes List Displays the notes in a list, showing the title and note contents in the Subject column, the creation date and time, and the categories. Last Seven Days Displays all notes written in the last seven days, by subject, creation date, and categories. By Category Displays the categories; double-click a category to show its contents. By Color Displays notes by their color. Double-click a color to display the notes. In this lesson, you learned to create, sort, and view notes. In the next lesson, you will learn to print in Outlook.

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