Did you know...

Did you know you can assign Categories to Notes? Click on the Note icon of an open Note or right-click on a closed Note (or several closed Notes) to add Categories to Notes. When one Note is in a category, you use the group by category view and drag other Notes to that category.

Did you know you can assign Contacts to Notes and the Note will display on the Activities tab of the Contact? Click on the Note icon of an open Note to add a Contact.

Did you know you can change the color of Notes? The default Note color is yellow or you can change it in Tools | Options | Notes. Or change one Note at a time by right clicking on it. You can group by color and drag Notes to groups to change their color too.

Did you know you can drag a selection from an email message, Word document, Excel worksheet, a Web page displayed in Internet Explorer and other programs to the Notes folder to create a new Note? You are limited to text selections only--including images in the selection returns an error. This works for any Outlook item type, not just Notes.

Did you know you can send a note by email by dropping the Note on any mail folder? A new message is created that uses the Note's first line as the subject and the full note text is inserted in the message body. If you select and drop more than one note, the contents of all the notes combined is inserted in one message.

Even with these shortcuts, Outlook's Notes capability lacks features many users want, like the ability to leave Notes open in the desktop when Outlook is closed and have Outlook reopen the notes when Outlook is opened. Because Notes use a simple text editor, not unlike Notepad, it lacks rich-text support and you can't highlight words or phrases with fonts or colors. I'm not sure if we'll ever see these features added to Outlook's Notes, especially since Microsoft will be releasing a program called OneNote (at http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/) about the time Office 11 is released. I haven't seen the OneNote software yet, but it sounds like a really nice Notes program, similar to 3M's Post It Note software (at http://www.3m.com/market/office/postit/com_prod/psnotes/).

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's coauthor of Word 2002: The Complete Reference (Osborne, 2001) and Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development (for Wrox Press). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.