GETTING STARTED

Getting started
Welcome to the latest release of IBM® Lotus® Notes®. Lotus Notes is a powerful, multifaceted software for Microsoft® Windows®, Macintosh, and Linux® computers that gives you instant access to all the information that is important to you. You can use Lotus Notes to send and receive Internet mail, schedule appointments, browse the Web, contribute to Internet newsgroups, and take advantage of the Home Page for tracking all your important daily information.

Home Page

The Home Page is a great place to start. This page, which was previously called the Welcome Page, gives you immediate access to your mail, contacts, calendar, and more. And you can create new Home Pages, customized to suit your needs.

Help

To get Help while you are exploring Lotus Notes, press F1 (Macintosh users, press Command+Shift+?) or click Help > Context Help from the menu. To see all the Help available, choose Help > Help Topics from the menu.

Database is now application

In previous versions of Notes, the word database was used to mean a Notes application that you could open, such as Mail or Calendar. For Notes 8, the term application is used instead. However, since Notes applications can be comprised of more than one database, you may still see the term used in the user interface and in Help.

Advanced menus

For advanced users, a set of advanced menus can be displayed. Advanced menus are targeted for administrators or designers, and include options such as archiving or deleting applications, or replacing a Notes application design. If you enable advanced menus (View > Advanced Menus), they are on for subsequent Notes sessions.

Opening applications

If you opened your applications from the File menu (File > Database > Open) in previous releases, you may notice that the File menu has changed, and you now use File > Open > Lotus Notes Application.

Use control key sequences to select documents

In list views, you can select multiple documents using Ctrl and Shift keys. Selected documents have a check in the margin.

For a more complete listing of the new features in Notes, see New Features.

See Also