Chapter 23. Tracking Documents and Activities with the Journal

Remembering everything that you’ve done during the course of a busy day—e-mail messages sent, phone calls made, appointments set up—can be difficult. However, the Journal feature in Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007, which records your daily activities, can help you keep track of it all. In addition to tracking Office Outlook 2007 items such as e-mail messages and appointments automatically, you can use the journal to monitor every 2007 Microsoft Office system document you create or modify. You can also manually record an activity that occurs away from your computer—a phone conversation, for example, or a handwritten letter that you mailed or received.

The Journal folder provides a single place to track all your work and your daily interactions. For example, you can use the journal to list all items related to a specific contact: e-mail messages sent and received, meetings attended, and tasks assigned. You can track all the hours you’ve spent on activities related to a particular project. Or you can use the journal to retrieve detailed information based on when you performed an action—for example, if you know that you worked on a Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 document last Tuesday but can’t remember the path to the file, you can quickly look up the document if you’ve configured the journal to automatically record work on Office Excel 2007 files.

This chapter shows you how to record your work in the journal both automatically and manually. You’ll also learn how to view and print your journal in standard and customized views.

Understanding the Outlook Journal

The Journal folder, shown in Figure 23-1, provides you with tools to track and record daily activities. Although other components of Outlook 2007 provide similar note-keeping capabilities, only the journal provides a full (and optionally automatic) means to date and time stamp an activity, log the entry type (for example, a phone call or a meeting request), and even track the time spent on an activity for billing purposes.

Use the journal as an electronic diary of events, phone calls, tasks, and other daily items.

Figure 23-1. Use the journal as an electronic diary of events, phone calls, tasks, and other daily items.

Outlook 2007 records entries in your Journal folder based on when an action occurs. For example, a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document is recorded on the journal timeline when you create or modify the document. You can organize journal entries on the timeline into logical groups—such as e-mail messages, meetings, phone calls, or any items related to a specific project. You also can assign categories to journal items and organize the folder view by category. For example, you could assign a project name as a category to all journal items associated with that project, which would allow you to easily group journal entries by project.

You can open a journal entry form, as shown in Figure 23-2, and review details about an activity, or you can use the journal entry as a shortcut to go directly to the Outlook 2007 item or the file referred to in the journal entry.

The journal entry form contains many fields to help you organize, store, and find your journal entries.

Figure 23-2. The journal entry form contains many fields to help you organize, store, and find your journal entries.

The Outlook 2007 journal is an electronic diary. Everything that you normally write in your calendar or day planner (what you did, when you did it, and all the details you want to remember) you can record in the journal.

To open the Journal folder, click the Journal icon in the Navigation Pane. Figure 23-1 shows the journal By Type view, which you see the first time you open the journal. Figure 23-3 shows Entry List view, another way of organizing your Journal folder.

You can switch to the Entry List view of the Journal folder.

Figure 23-3. You can switch to the Entry List view of the Journal folder.

Note

For information about the views available to organize your Journal folder, see "Viewing the Journal" later in this chapter.

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