Welcome to this Halloween edition of "Where There's a Will, There's a Way" (queue the cheesy Halloween music).

Having a ton of notes on clients can be a good thing. But sometimes, finding specific notes can be a nightmare. There is a way, however, where you can make some notes vanish when hunting for a specific note and re-appear when you want to view all notes. Filters can be used to specify the type of note that gets displayed in the notes following. You can switch between filters, just like how you can switch between column setups. 

Effectively using filters is frighteningly easy. It all starts by classifying your notes. When creating your notes, you can set the category of the note.  There are some system defaults, like email, phone calls, mail-outs, and these automatically get assigned to the notes when you perform these actions. When you create manual notes, however, you can assign it a custom category.

You can configure manual note types in Administrator by going to File > Preferences and selecting the System Fields tab. Select the Address Book Notes category and click the Add button to add values to the list. As you can see, there are many other categories you can select and add values to, but we'll keep this discussion focused on note types.

So after you create the note, set the category to whatever you want. Notice that the values that appear in the notes drop down are the ones that we configured in the System field tab? Scary!

So to filter the notes in the notes following window, select the Filter drop-down list and select Custom. Then, in the Type of note area, leave manual selected, choose the type of note you want to display, and de-select any other note types you don't want visible.

Click OK and only notes of the types that you selected in the manual filter will appear in the Notes following window.

Have a happy Halloween!