Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Learn tips to make the most of your notes, which are handy as a place to store info.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
2016, 2019/365.
Quick reference
Using Notes
An area to store notes that don’t need to be filed into email folders.
When to use
Notes are a very handy, but often overlooked area of Outlook. You can store information tidbits that don’t need to be filed into email folders or lost in the inbox.
Instructions
Create a note
OR 
- In the Notes view, right-click Notes and choose New Folder. This allows you to keep sets of notes.
- Create a new note.​​​​​​
- Enter the information and be aware of these attributes:
- The right corner is to re-size the note.
- The bottom is the Created date and time stamp.
- The top right corner is the Close button (there is NO Save button.)
- The first line of the note is also the title of the note.
If no first line, then no title appears.
- The right corner is to re-size the note.
Create a note from an email with drag and drop
- Click and drag any email to the Note icon at the bottom of the Folder pane.
- A copy of the email is made into a note; the original email is intact and can be deleted.
Change the view layout of your notes
- In the Notes view, in Current View make a selection:
- Color-code your notes with Categorize.
Move a note to the desktop
- Click, hold and drag a note onto your desktop for quick reference.
- 00:05 Okay, let's talk about notes.
- 00:06 Again, it's on the task pane at the very bottom of your navigation pane.
- 00:11 When I click the dot, dot, dot, I do have notes.
- 00:13 Now if you'd rather see them out there, you need to widen your navigation pane.
- 00:18 But that shrinks everything else, so keep that in mind.
- 00:21 I'll go ahead and click notes, and now of course I was already in my notes section.
- 00:25 And this follows along the rule of everything else.
- 00:27 You can have new notes.
- 00:28 You can put items in notes.
- 00:30 You can rearrange and view the notes differently.
- 00:33 I can make folders of notes.
- 00:34 So I can make a new folder and call this office notes or
- 00:39 personal notes, whatever you want, then we have folders of notes.
- 00:43 So let's go ahead and create a brand new note.
- 00:46 When I click the new note button, up comes this huge screen,
- 00:49 they're usually not that huge.
- 00:50 And I'll go ahead and paste in some information.
- 00:53 Of course I am going to shrink that down so it's not as huge.
- 00:57 All right now keep in mind, whatever you type it's a top line.
- 01:00 Very tippy top line will be the title of that note.
- 01:03 There's also not a save button here.
- 01:05 There is no save button.
- 01:06 The moment I close this, it will save and you'll see the note in the background.
- 01:10 Notice the date and timestamp in the bottom.
- 01:12 And of course I can resize with the corner right over here.
- 01:15 All right, I'm going to go ahead and close this, click, there we have it closed.
- 01:19 Well now I'm going to make another new note.
- 01:21 New note, good, it showed up at the small size.
- 01:24 And I'm going to hit enter, so there is no top line.
- 01:27 This is a new note,
- 01:29 and I want to close this to save it, please look up the title of this one.
- 01:33 Close, there is no title on this one.
- 01:37 I'm not kidding.
- 01:38 The importance is make sure there is not a blank line at the top,
- 01:41 if you want a title on these things.
- 01:43 All right I'm going to create a note another way.
- 01:45 Every once in a while I receive an email that, I'd like to keep it, but I really
- 01:51 don't have a folder and I don't want to flag it, and I don't want to store it.
- 01:54 It's just information.
- 01:55 I just want to keep this information somewhere, so I'm going to go ahead and
- 01:58 click into my emails.
- 01:59 And I think I have one off at the ready.
- 02:01 I'm going to go ahead and click and drag this email,
- 02:03 and I'm going to drag it down on top of my note.
- 02:07 When I let go, there you have it I just created a brand new note and
- 02:11 I'm just going to go ahead and whittle off some of this information,
- 02:14 make sure I have a title, I'm going to go ahead and close this.
- 02:18 Let's check out my notes and there we have a brand new note made from an email.
- 02:23 When I double click this note, here's all the information that was in that email,
- 02:27 I didn't have to type anything.
- 02:30 The drag and drop from an email onto your notes is great.
- 02:34 Okay, well, of course these are all about different topics and
- 02:37 they're sorting themselves, which is fine.
- 02:39 So I can click through this gallery and I can change whatever I want.
- 02:42 But I do like the icon view, because I can color code it.
- 02:45 I do like to color code.
- 02:47 So that also means categorize.
- 02:49 So I can click on any of these and change the color or I can right-click and
- 02:53 I can categorize it from the right-click and it's just kind of fun, I don't know.
- 02:58 I like coloring things, okay.
- 03:01 One last little feature about the notes.
- 03:03 Let's slide my Outlook over a little bit so
- 03:06 you can see my desktop in the background.
- 03:08 You guessed it.
- 03:09 I can take one of these notes, click and drag and drop it onto my desktop so
- 03:13 the note resides right out here.
- 03:16 But notice it didn't move it.
- 03:17 It's still inside my notes, but every once in a while there's a note I just want to
- 03:20 keep handy on my desktop and that's how you do that.
- 03:23 All right, that's the magic of the notes.
- 03:25 Have fun with that.
- 03:26 I really like them.
- 03:27 My real computer is full of notes.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.