Bill Detwiler: Just like their paper cousins, Windows 7's Sticky Notes applet is a handy way to remind yourself about important tasks or upcoming events.
I'm Bill Detwiler, and during this episode of TR Dojo, I'll show you three handy tips that will help you get the most from Sticky Notes.
The idea behind Sticky Notes in Windows 7 is pretty simple. Instead of writing the not on a piece of paper and sticking it to the side of your monitor, you can create a digital sticky note and stick in on your Windows desktop.
And unlike the old-fashioned paper notes, Windows Sticky Notes will increase in size as you type. You can change their color. And, the notes are automatically saved. You can even hide all your notes by clicking on applet's task bar button.
Now that you have the basics down, let's look about our first tip -- creating a shortcut that makes it easy to find a specific note.
If you're a heavy Sticky Notes user and you create a lot of notes, you may find that it hard to sort through them all -- as they tend to overlap each other on the desktop.
Luckily, using the search-ms protocol you can create a handy shortcut that will display all your notes in a Search Results window. Allowing you to quickly scan through your notes and find the one you're looking for.
To create the shortcut, right-click on the desktop and select New | Shortcut.
When you see the Create Shortcut window, type rather long command into the text box:
search-ms:displayname=Search%20Results%20in%20Sticky%20Notes%20(Windows%20Sticky%20Notes)&crumb=&crumb=location:C%3A%5CUsers%5CUSER%20NAME%5CSearches%5CSticky%20Notes%20(Windows%20Sticky%20Notes).searchconnector-ms
When you enter this string, you'll need to replace the USER%20NAME characters with your account name. For example, if my user name were Bill (space) Detwiler, I would use Bill%20Detwiler. And if my user name were just Bill, I would use just Bill with no %20.
Now don't worry, I'll include the text of this command in the video's blog notes so you can just copy and paste the text into your shortcut, and then edit the user name.
Once you've entered the text, click Next, give the shortcut a name, something like Show Notes will work, and then click Finish.
When you run the shortcut, you'll see an Internet Explorer security warning. Just click Allow. You can now browse all your sticky notes from in an easy-to-read Search Results window.
One thing to remember about sticky notes is that when you delete one, it's really gone -- it doesn't just go to the Recycle Bin.
So, to prevent you from accidentally deleting a note you really wanted to keep, Sticky Notes gives you a standard "are you sure you really want to do this" warning message each time you try to delete a note.
As these warnings can be kind of annoying, many people turn them off -- including me. But if you find yourself accidentally deleting notes on a regular basis and you might want to re-enable the warning message.
And you can with a simple registry edit, just remember to make a back up of the registry before make the change.
After opening the Registry Editor, navigate to the following folder:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\StickyNotes
Then, double-click the PROMPT_ON_DELETE value and set it to 1.
The last tip I'll show you today helps you protect your notes from both accidental deletions and system crashes.
You can make a backup copy of the Sticky Notes data file, or included it in your regular backup routine, by backing up the StickyNotes.snt file, which is located in the:
C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Sticky Notes
folder.
Those are just three of the many Sticky Notes tips discussed by TechRepublic's Windows blogger Greg Shultz. I'll link to his articles on the subject in the blog notes.
And as always, for more teachings on your path to becoming an IT Ninja, visit trdojo.techrepublic.com, or you can follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/billdetwiler.
Thanks for visiting the TR Dojo.
