Christopher Columbus kept a journal of his voyages to the New World, and Thomas Edison kept one about his various experiments and inventions. Now it’s your turn! You can use Outlook’s Journal to keep a log of your important daily activities. Then, when you’re famous, future historians and students will look back and read about your exciting daily activities at the office!
In a nutshell, the Journal keeps track of three different types of activities:
•
Manually Created Activities:
You can manually create a journal entry, just like you would create an e- mail or task. Manually created journal entries can be about any type of activity you can think of: phone calls, meetings, important conversations, faxes, etc.•
Contact-Related Activities:
Outlook can automatically record certain activities that are related to a particular contact. For example, you could configure the Journal to automatically track any e-mails sent to or received from Bob Smith.•
Microsoft Office Documents:
The Journal can also automatically record any documents that you create or modify in any Microsoft Office program, such as Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Word.You will learn how to create and work with journal entries using all three methods in this chapter. You will also learn how to attach a file to a journal entry, how to use the Journal with the Contacts list to perform basic contact management, and how to display the Journal using the available preset views.
Lesson 7-1: Recording Items in the Journal Automatically
The fastest and easiest way to create a journal entry is to do nothing. What?!? That’s right—Outlook’s Journal can automatically record information about any document you create, edit, or print from any Microsoft Office application. The Journal can also automatically track e-mail messages, meeting requests and responses, and task requests and responses to the contacts you specify. Before you can use Outlook’s automatic Journal recording features, you have to turn them on. This lesson will show you how to do just that.
; Prerequisites
• How to use menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, and shortcut keystrokes.
• How to use the Navigation Pane and navigate within Outlook.
Figure 7-1
The Journal Options dialog box.
Figure 7-1
Automatically adds to the Journal the items you specify… …for the contacts you select.
Automatically creates a journal entry with information about any file that you create, edit, or print in the program(s) you select.
1
1..
SelectTools
→Options
from the menu and click thePreferences tab
if necessary.The Options dialog box appears.
2
2..
Click theJournal Options button
located in the Contacts category.The Journal Options dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 7-1. In the top half of the dialog box, you can check the types of activities that you want to automatically record and the names of the people in your Contacts list for whom they are recorded. For example, you might want to record e-mail messages from your boss but not your mother, so you would only check your boss’s name.
The bottom half of the dialog box lets you automatically record journal entries about files you create, open, close, and save from any Microsoft Office program, such as a Microsoft Word document or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
We’re not going to make any changes to the journal in this lesson, so…
3
3..
ClickOK
to close the Journal Options dialog box, and then clickOK
to close the Options dialog box.Chapter Seven: Using the Journal
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Quick Reference To Automatically Record Journal Entries:
1. Select Tools → Options from the menu, and click the
Preferences tab if necessary.
2. Click the Journal Options button.
3. Specify the items you want to
automatically record in the journal.
4. When you’re finished, click OK,
OK. So if Outlook’s Journal can automatically record everything you do on your computer, why do most people decide NOT
to use the automatic recording features? One word: privacy. Many people find the idea of Outlook keeping track of every Microsoft Office document they work on—including personal letters—a little disturbing. If other people occasionally use your computer, you may want to think twice before enabling all of the Journal’s automatic recording features.
Lesson 7-2: Viewing the Journal
The Journal displays its information on a timeline. A timeline makes it easy to view the chronological order of your activities. For example, perhaps you can’t find an Excel spreadsheet that you worked on last week. You could use Outlook’s Journal to view everything you’ve worked on in Microsoft Excel during the past week to find the spreadsheet. The Journal has usually been one of Outlook’s least used and least understood features, and as a result, Microsoft has all but hidden it in Outlook 2003. Before we get started, here’s how to add the Journal to the Navigation Pane.
1
1..
Click theConfigure buttons button
in the Navigation Pane.A menu appears with options for configuring which and how many buttons appear in the Navigation Pane.
2
2..
SelectAdd or Remove buttons
→Journal
from the menu.The Journal button appears at the bottom of the Navigation Pane.
You can change the time scale used in the Journal by clicking any of the following buttons: •
Day:
View one day at time.•
Week:
View one week at a time.•
Month:
View one month a time.Move on to the next step to learn more about how to view information in the Journal.
3
3..
Click theJournal button
in the Navigation Pane.The contents of the Journal appear, as shown in Figure 7-2 (your Journal will contain different information than the illustration). The Journal normally displays its information in a grouped view, meaning items are organized into sections that you can then expand or collapse to display or hide the items they contain. A plus symbol or a
minus symbol beside a section means that it contains several journal entries. You can display a section’s hidden entries by clicking its plus sign.
Figure 7-2
The Journal normally organizes information into related groups.
Figure 7-2
Journal entries are grouped and organized by their type.
Click to expand a section.
Click to collapse a section.
Use the scrollbar to move backwards and forwards through the timeline.
Quick Reference To Manually Create a Journal Entry:
1. Click the New Journal Entry button on the toolbar.
2. Enter the subject in the Subject box.
3. Select the type of entry from the
Entry type list.
4. (Optional) Enter the names of
any contacts associated with the journal entry.
5. (Optional) Enter the activity’s
duration.
6. Click the Save and Close button on the toolbar or press <Alt> + <S>
when you’re finished.