IBM Notes provides an easier, faster and more efficient way to work with documents (mail/calendar invitations/To Do documents, etc.), using the drag and drop feature.

1. Drag and drop the following types of documents to a document in Edit mode
(Note: A document in Edit mode implies a new Mail/Calendar/To Do entry, or an existing document in when doing an action like replying or forwarding, or just double-clicking a document.)

● Mail from Inbox / Folder / View
Note: The behavior of drag and drop to a document in Edit mode is platform-specific.

In Windows, you can drag multiple mail items, but only one mail item will get dropped at a time, creating a single document icon. Following is a sample screen shot:






In Linux and Mac, you can drag, as well as drop, multiple mail items at the same time to the document in Edit mode.
These get dropped in the form of hyperlinks, with the subject of the respective mail items, as in the following screen shot:





● Text, Microsoft Word document, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, and Microsoft Powerpoint presentation files

These items get dropped with a file icon and their name, as shown in the following screen shot:.





● Calendar entry / To Do entry / Contact

Drag and drop works the same way for these documents as it does for mail.



2. Drag and drop the following types of documents to File Navigator and Microsoft Windows Explorer :

The file navigator is a sidebar plugin that allows browsing through the OS file system. From the sidebar, you can also open and delete files, and drag and drop files, between the file navigator and Notes documents.

● Mail from Inbox/Folder/Different View




● Microsoft Powerpoint/Excel/Word/Text Files
● Calendar entries / To Do entries / Contacts
● Mail attachments


You can also drag and drop documents to file navigator/Windows Explorer, and vice versa.
Whenever you drag and drop documents to file navigator or Windows Explorer, there are two ways to do that: drop as .eml files or as .url files.

The following Notes preference controls how dragged and dropped items are attached:
Go to File → Preferences → Basic Notes Client Configuration



To drop as .eml files, enable the following preference: 'Drag and drop saves as eml file'



To drop as a .url file, this option should not be enabled.

Difference between .eml and .url:

EML: Files that contain the .eml file extension are email files that have usually been sent or received by a POP3 email application. The EML files contain the contents of an email message, and may also contain attachments that were sent by the sender with the original email message. EML files can also contain hyperlinks and linked attachments.
EML files are normally stored in plain text format.

When dragging and dropping Notes messages to the desktop after enabling the above preference, you can see files as follows:

URL is a link to a document, instead of the whole document itself.

When dragging and dropping Notes messages to the desktop without enabling the above option, you can see files as follows:

And the URL looks like the following:

Performing the drag and drop operation without enabling the above mentioned option, i.e. dragging and dropping documents as .url documents, it is much faster than dragging and dropping .eml files.

3. Behavior of drag and drop feature on local and server mail file replicas:

The drag and drop feature works for local as well as server mail file replicas, however it is faster with local mail replicas as compared to server replicas. This difference is clearly seen when you want to drag and drop a large number of documents simultaneously.


4. Activities:

Activities is a widget used to organize, share and reuse your work. Track your current work projects as activities in either the Web-based Activities application or the Activities panel of the Notes sidebar.
Use Activities to share files and bookmarks, post messages, track To Do items, and manage your deadlines.

Activities can be integrated within Notes by installing this widget.
You can then use the drag and drop feature for creating/adding entries to an activity. Simply drag and drop a mail or calendar entry to the Activities widget, as shown in the following screen shots:





To see the original mail from the activity, double click the activity shown in the widget. Then click “Open Original Mail” from the opened activity, as in the following screen shot:




5. Drag and drop documents to Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Notepad, and text documents:

The drag and drop feature can also be used to save links of Notes mail, calendar, and Contact documents into external documents like Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, or text files, as shown in the following examples.
However, this does not work on Linux.

● Mail document from Notes inbox to Microsoft Powerpoint:





● Calendar entry to text file:




● To Do document to Microsoft Excel:

About the Authors :

Arti Singh is working with IBM - India Software Labs, as Notes Client QE . You can reach Arti at artsing1@in.ibm.com.

Chaitrali Talegaonkar is Senior Software Engineer working in Pune, India Software Lab of IBM. Chaitrali has been a developer in the Lotus Notes Client PIM team since April 2012. You can reach Chaitrali at ctalegao@in.ibm.com.