Managing Notes and Stacks

When you first opened Sticky Notes, you may have noticed a notation in the toolbar area that said 1/1. This indicates you have Note 1 of a total of one notes open. When you've created a few notes, you'll notice that the notation changes; for example, it might read 3/5 to indicate that the third of five notes is displayed. These notes are collectively called a stack. Only one stack of notes can be open at any one time.

 Tip  You can use the Previous Note and Next Note buttons to move among the stack of notes.

Often you don't want to keep notes around for long - after all, they are typically little on-the-run reminders that come and go and are soon out of date. However, it is possible to store and retrieve notes for the times when that's useful. You do this by exporting and importing them.

Exporting notes

To send a stack of notes to a file (which you can then save on your hard drive or a storage disk, or even send to another Tablet PC user), you export it. Export essentially involves saving the entire stack of notes to a file.

Follow these steps to export a stack of notes:

1. With Sticky Notes open, choose ToolsðExport.

   The Export dialog box (shown in Figure 8-5) appears.

   
   Figure 8-5: This is pretty much your average Save dialog box.

2. Use the Save In drop-down list to locate the folder in which you want to store the stack.

    Tip  You may want to use the My Notes folder in your My Documents folder for this purpose

3. Enter a name for the file.

   As a bonus, you get the .snt extension entered for the file type automatically.

4. Tap Save.

That's it. However, notice that your stack didn't disappear; it's still the stack displayed in the Sticky Notes window. If you want to clear out your notes and start a new stack, you have to delete the current stack note by note, one by one. (See 'Trash It! Deleting Notes,' later in this chapter, for details.)

Importing notes

So, you have saved a stack of notes to remind yourself of how to find that long lost gold mine and now you want to retrieve the notes again? Just import them. Import is pretty much the equivalent of opening a file in other applications.

Follow these steps to Import a stack of notes:

1. With Sticky Notes open, choose ToolsðImport.

   The Import dialog box (shown in Figure 8-6) appears.

   
   Figure 8-6: This should look similar to dialog boxes you've seen before.

2. Choose whether you want the imported stack to merge with any notes you currently have in Sticky Notes.

    Tip  If you don't want to merge with that stack, you can replace those notes altogether by tapping the appropriate choice under Action.

3. Locate the file you want to import using the Look In drop-down list and tap it.

4. Tap Open.

   Behold! The stack is either added to or replaces any current notes, based on your selection.