At some point the Properties Shelf (what you get when you press N) was split into four separate shelves: Item, Tool, View, and Create. Pressing N now only toggles the one you most recently accessed open and closed. There is not, to my knowledge, any way to have more than one of these shelves open at once.
In the old version of Blender, all of these were part of the same shelf. You could toggle sections open and closed as you needed them, and if the shelf ever got too long to fit on the screen at once, you could scroll up and down in it.
The new design means you have to physically click the different menus open. If you want to be able to read the coordinates of a selected vertex, and the coordinates of the 3D cursor, you have to physically click open a different shelf to do it. You can’t just press N and see them both at once.
Suggestion: Please let people open more than one of these shelves at once by manually clicking on the buttons. Then have pressing N toggle all of the shelves that you’ve enabled. Make it functionally equivalent to the old shelf, or at least give us the option to have it back.
