Tip 1017: Using Outlook and Onenote Together

A user was complaining about syncing Contacts between Outlook, Hotmail, and iPhone. She often adds long notes to contacts but Hotmail only supports 1024 characters.

My suggestion: OneNote, with the notebook stored in SkyDrive. You can easily link Outlook Contacts to a OneNote notebook, with one page for each contact you link to OneNote. You can copy a hyperlink to the page and paste it into the contact's note field for easy access to the OneNote page for the contact.

To link a contact to OneNote, click the OneNote button on the ribbon. The first time you do this, a dialog opens asking you to choose a section.

If you select the option at the bottom to always use this section, you won't see this dialog again. (You can change the section in OneNote's options).

A page is created for each Contact. The basic contact information is copied to OneNote, along with any attachments in the contact. Text notes are not copied to OneNote.

A link is added in OneNote that will open the contact; to open OneNote from a contact, click the OneNote button.

Right-click anywhere on the page and select Copy link to page to copy a hyperlink to the page. Two hyperlinks are put on the clipboard, one link is to the notebook page in Skydrive, so you can access the page in the a web browser from anywhere, using the OneNote web app; the other hyperlink opens the page in OneNote.

In additional to Outlook Contacts, you can link Email, Tasks, and Appointments or Meetings to OneNote. Meeting and Tasks can be added to the contact page or added as a separate page and made a subpage of a contact's page. You can keep your notes to yourself or share them with others.

While OneNote doesn't have all the features of Outlook's Journal, it can be a usable replacement for the Journal.

Published August 23, 2012. Last updated on August 23, 2012.

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