The Notes Tab

The Notes tab may not be a feature in Outlook that everyone is familiar with, but it can be helpful in creating and organizing simple text notes. As we know, Outlook is organized into different tabs or sections, including: Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks. Notes is the 5th tab of Outlook. Users can move to the Notes tab by pressing Ctrl + 5.

Creating Notes

Notes are simple text documents. That means they only include characters, spaces, and line breaks. We can’t change the font, the font color, or the font style – that’s right, you can’t even make the font bold, italicized, or underlined! Further, you can’t do anything crazy like add pictures or video.

We can create new notes with CTRL + N. You don’t need to name notes or save them. When you are done with a note, simply press Escape to close it. The name of your note will be whatever you have written in the note up to the line break (or the character maximum which I believe will be 128). Notes are also given a time and date stamp when they are created.

Organizing Notes

Once you’ve created more than one note, you’ll be able to move through your notes in the Notes tab with the left and right arrow keys. You can open existing notes by pressing enter. You can delete notes by pressing delete on the note in the Notes tab.

Users can forward notes as email attachments by simply using the Ctrl + F command on an open note or in the Notes Tab. You can also move notes into folders in Outlook. Press Alt to move into the ribbon. In the Home tab, you’ll find the Move Submenu which will allow you to move notes to recent folders, any other folder, or you can copy a note to a folder (this will keep a copy of the notes in your Notes folder as well as adding a copy to the destination of your choosing). Typical Outlook folders only hold mail items, so Outlook will prompt you to add the note as an attachment to an email if you want to move a note to a folder of this type. You can also create special note folders using the Create New Folder dialog.