Many times when we send a message, we want to format it in a particular way. There are several formatting options in Lotus Notes. Note that whatever formatting we can do in mail, we can also do in calendar entries, To Dos, and documents in Lotus Notes application which have rich text fields.
We can access formatting options in the following different ways:
- From the Toolbar
- From the Text menu as shown here:
- From Text properties, which can be accessed by the right-click menu or via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K
- From the right click menu there is a subset of formatting options available
- Using keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl+B for bold
The following is a screenshot of the right-click menu, the formatting options are highlighted:
The Toolbar has several formatting options. The following is a legend of the Editing Toolbar for our reference:
Here is an example of the text properties dialog box, which has several tabs with options. The following screenshot shows the Font (a) tab with the Color options selected:
We mentioned as a tip the Permanent Pen and the Highlighter Pen as great tools to use when replying to messages because of their ability to allow us to show our text in a different color and also to highlight text. There is also the Text Color icon in the Toolbar; highlight text or put your cursor in a position where you want to change to another color then click this button to select a color.
To use the Permanent Pen, simply click the Permanent Pen icon in the Toolbar and start typing. To turn it off, we just need to click the icon again. When using the Permanent Pen, our cursor will have a pen-like icon.
To use the Highlight Pen, click the Highlight Pen icon and highlight text by dragging left to right over the text; to undo anything we have highlighted, drag right to left. To turn off the Highlighter Pen, click the Highlighter Pen icon again—basically it is toggle on and toggle off.
By default, the permanent pen font is red, bold, and Default Sans Serif. To change these options, follow these steps:
- Create a memo and put the cursor in the body of the memo.
- Click on the Text menu, then Text Properties. Alternatively right-click and select Text Properties from the menu.
- Click the Font (a) tab.
- Select a font, size, style, and/or color.
- Go to the Text menu and select Permanent Pen - Set Permanent Pen.
- Discard the memo.
We can drag-and-drop text from within a document or message. We can also drag text from one document or message to another via the window tabs. We just need to highlight the text we want to move and then drag it to the desired location.
The Ctrl key on our keyboard comes in quite handy when we are editing text within Lotus Notes. Following are some common usages of the Ctrl key within Lotus Notes:
|
Keyboard shortcuts |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Ctrl+B |
Selected text is made bold |
|
Ctrl+I |
Selected text is made italics |
|
Ctrl+U |
Selected text is underlined |
|
Ctrl+Z |
Undo option |
|
Ctrl+C |
Selected text is copied |
|
Ctrl+V |
Selected text is pasted |
|
Ctrl+X |
Selected text is cut |
If we click on the Create menu, we can see more formatting options. We can add pictures, page breaks, a horizontal rule (which is similar to a thick line), sections that collapse text under a heading, computed text that allows you to add animated text, hotspots that can link to URLs or file links, tables, images, and objects.
