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How to take notes on a BlackBerry during a phone call
Posted by Rae on January 3, 2008
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We’ve all been there. You’re on the phone and need to “write something down” while on the call. You of course don’t have a pen and paper because your BlackBerry, laptop and other electronic devices in your life have made it so you feel awkward even holding a pen anymore. Never fear… taking notes on your BlackBerry 8800 series while you’re on a call is easy.
While on the call (it won’t work while you’re not on a call, so if you’d like to practice, we suggest you call another phone in your control) press the menu key and then select “notes”. A screen will pop up that shows who you’re connected to and their number, with a field below for you to enter in any notes about the call. Once you’re done typing in what you need, hit the menu screen again and choose “hide notes” and continue your call.
Once you’re off the phone, to retrieve the notes, you must look at the call log of the person you were speaking to when you wrote them (we kind of wish they would simply stick it in the notes section). To do so, from the phone screen, mouse over the person you were speaking to when you took the notes and hit the menu key and then choose “view history”.
Once on the history screen, you’ll see a call list and one should have a notes icon next to it. Mouse over that call and hit the menu key and then hit “edit notes” to see the notes.
Our big complaint about this is that if you need the information in the notes again next week, you may not even remember who you were speaking to when you took them. And even if you do, the person may not be on your call log screen anymore if you don’t speak to them regularly and at that point, getting at their call log history is a bit of a… well, a word we won’t say.
To transfer call notes to another location (like your calendar, a real “note” or email) you can do it the old fashioned way by copying and pasting or you can take the lazy route (we so prefer the lazy route). To do so, mouse over the call log with the note next to it and hit the menu key, but instead of clicking “edit notes”, click the “forward” button.
The forward option will forward a copy of the call log, complete with notes, to any email address you specify. We simply select our own email address and mail it to ourselves. That way, if we need the information in a week, we can search our emails to find it.
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2 Comments ↓
That Notes feature (it should really be called Call Notes to avoid confusion) is fine, but why not just hit ALT+ESC and run the real Notes app? It takes all of a second or two and you don’t have to go through all the pain in this post.
LOL, Cooper (one of the staff) also made the same comment. For me, I often need to find things in notes at a later date and I can’t search the notes function. You can type words next to “find” in the real notes app, but it will only search the titles of notes and not the information within them (unlike the email search function), which is why I tend to prefer to forward to call log notes to myself. For me, the way bigger pain is remembering I took xx phone number down in a note, but can’t remember what I titled it and can’t find it in the sea of notes I take.
Another reason, though less important, is that the official BlackBerry way to “take notes on a call” is via the - as you called them - “call notes” method. Lastly, in all honesty, I always, always forget that I can even do it that way because the notes feature was not on the alt-escape list of my 8700 which I used for years prior to nabbing the 8800. That said, I promise you - and Cooper - that future quick tips post will include the ways I don’t necessarily like to use as well
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