What is an annotation (CRM note)?
Last reviewed September 13, 2026
An annotation is a note that Dynamics 365 attaches to a CRM record, a snippet of text that can optionally carry a file attachment. In the underlying Dataverse platform, notes and their attachments live in a table called AnnotationBase.
What a CRM annotation actually means
Notes are the informal filing system of every long-running CRM. When someone needs to keep a document with a contact, the note is the nearest container: scan the agreement, open the record, attach the PDF. Multiply that instinct by a diligent team and a decade, and AnnotationBase becomes one of the largest tables in the environment, holding much of the institution’s paper history.
Why annotations matter
Two reasons, one visible and one quiet. The visible one is storage: note attachments accumulate in Dataverse capacity at Dataverse prices, and they are a usual suspect when the capacity report shows an environment near its limit.
The quiet one is worse. A note attachment is stored but not managed. Search cannot read the pages inside it, retention schedules do not know it exists, and finding it depends on someone remembering which record and which note. The document is on the right record and still effectively lost, which is why the note attachment is where documents go to die.
Related
See how note attachments can be extracted into an archive while the note keeps showing its file. Related terms: Dataverse, full-text search, retention schedule.
Frequently asked questions
Can I search inside a note attachment in Dynamics 365?
Not by default. Dynamics stores the attachment as a file on the AnnotationBase record, but the text inside a scanned PDF or image is not indexed, so full-text search will not find it. The workaround is running the attachment through OCR and indexing the extracted text separately.
Why do annotations take up so much Dataverse capacity?
Every file a team attaches to a note counts against Dataverse file capacity, and note attachments accumulate for years without anyone deleting them. On a long-running CRM, AnnotationBase is often one of the largest tables in the environment for exactly this reason.
Should I delete old annotations to free up space?
Only after confirming nothing in them still matters, since a note attachment is often the only copy of a document like a signed agreement. A safer path is extracting the file into a proper archive first, then removing the copy from the note.