Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 13. Using Notes to Capture Your Ideas

As you're probably well aware, the invention of Post-it or "sticky" notes by 3M's Art Fry (and absolutely not the zany characters, Romy and Michele in the 1997 hit comedy movie, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion) forever changed the way people take and use short, individual notes. This is because Post-it notes not only enable you to quickly capture random thoughts and to-do items, but you then get to stick the notes in obvious places where you can't easily ignore them. (All around the computer monitor is one of my favorite places.)

As you soon discover, Outlook Notes are definitely modeled off of Post-it notes. Their icons resemble a pad of notes with the lower-left corner of the first note turned up, and they're even a canary yellow color (although you can change them to blue, green, pink, or white). Moreover, you can drag Outlook notes out of the Notes module and stick them anywhere you want on your Windows desktop. And with some skillful window placement, this makes it possible to have certain Outlook notes up while you're working on documents in other applications, such as a report in Word or financial statement in Excel. It also makes it possible to declutter the periphery of your computer screen.

This chapter shows you how to use Outlook notes to quickly capture your bright ideas (and find them again) as well as how to use them as visual reminders that stay in your face when you're using your computer but not working in Outlook. ...