It’s always a good thing when you feel like you are making software work harder for you, getting more out of its feature list. And sometimes it’s a really simple feature that does the trick.

On Windows Mobile devices, just as on Desktop PCs, we quite often only use a small percentage of the real functionality of an application, never get round to using a lot of its powerful features. 

PhatNotes is a very feature-rich app for note-taking on handheld devices. I still probably take advantage of very few of its most powerful features, and largely use it to do ‘what it says on the box’ – i.e. just for taking notes – but I do have one current favorite add-on feature that I find myself using nearly every day.

Sending mail directly from PhatNotes has been a huge help to me recently. I use this feature to send client site visit notes, formatted to work with our work order system.

Because you can’t do color and bold text formatting etc within Pocket mail clients, it is very handy to take all my notes – with color and formatting as required – and just quickly send them off as .rtf attachments.

To use this feature, when you have a note open, all you need to do is go to the Note menu (in classic view) and choose ‘Send Mail’, then walk through the wizards to choose your recipient, and your mail service (Active Sync by default).

In just a few taps, you can choose to mail your note, include it as a plain text or .rtf attachment, choose a recipient from your Contacts folder, and send it off.

This is not one of those deeply hidden features, just a very useful one that (for me anyway) went overlooked for too long.