


There are third party plugins that facilitate adding notes to mail messages, but for this article I will limit the scope to Microsoft Office products.īelow are a few options you can try. For now, we can only pick one or two imperfect workarounds and hope that Microsoft will some day add this as a feature. There are numerous imperfect ways to add notes to email messages received or sent but no perfect method. In that case you must do something to make sure that Word treats first and middle names as if they are a single word for instance, by separating them with a non-breaking space.A question I have been asked numerous times is how to add personal notes, annotations, additional information or comments to an email that you have sent or received. In those instances, even the convert-to-table approach first mentioned will not work properly. Problems creep in, however, if there are two names for some people and three for others. It will also work fine if there is a first, middle, and last name for each person-the only difference is that you would select Word 3 in step 8. If there is only a first and last name for each person, then the sorting works fine. You should note that this approach only works properly depending on the construction of the names in your list. For instance, if you want to sort by last name (the word after the first space), you should choose Word 2 in the Sort By drop-down list. Use the Sort By drop-down lists to specify the word by which you want to sort.Click on OK to close the Sort Options dialog box.(You are telling Word that you want to consider spaces as the dividing point between sort fields.) Erase whatever is in the box to the right of Other, replacing it with a single space.Word displays the Sort Options dialog box.

Click the Sort tool in the Paragraph group.Make sure the Home tab of the ribbon is displayed.Select all the paragraphs containing names.Make sure the names in your document are arranged so there is only one person per paragraph.You can do that by following these steps: This process might sound difficult, but it can go very quickly and allows you to easily see what Word is doing during the sorting.Īnother approach that doesn't require messing around with tables is to simply sort the text by words. Sort the names based upon the second column, which contains the last name.Convert the text to a table, using the space between the first and last names as a separator between columns.All you need to do is follow these general steps: There are several ways you can accomplish the task, however. For instance, if the names are in a FIRST LAST order, then it can be more challenging to sort them than if they are in a LAST, FIRST order. The format in which the names appear can be bothersome, however. It is not unusual to have a list of names in a document, and then need to sort those names.
