Improving Your Outlook

Jessie's job duties include software support and keeping up with current trends in technology. As a result, she keeps a lot of snippets of information, including Notes and URLs for reference later.

She needs an effortless way to create her Notes and a simple filing system that enables her to quickly find the information when she needs it.

Jessie discovered she could drag text from Web pages and emails to the Notes folder. Jessie uses colors to identify content and assigns categories to each Note. When she comes across information that applies to a specific client or user, she associates their contact record with it. Because URLs in Notes are clickable and she can color code and categorize Notes, Jessie prefers to use Notes instead of Internet Explorer's bookmarks for URLs she needs for reference but won't use often.

When she needs to find the information, she can scan the folder for Notes by color, use the Activities tab on a contact, or sort by category. If she has trouble finding the Note she needs, she uses Advanced Find.

If she needs to email the information in a Note to someone, Jessie drags the Note to her Inbox. This creates a new message in which the first line of the Note is the subject and the contents of the Note are used for the message body. The Note's last modified date is included in the message. She can even use this method to send the text from multiple Notes to people.

Jessie discovered a bonus to using Notes over some of the other solutions she tried: Her business uses Exchange Server and Outlook Web Access and she can review her Notes at any time, using a Web browser.