Outlook 2000 in a Nutshell

Chapter 11. Journal

Journal provides you with tools to track and record daily activities. Journal entries can range in complexity from a manually created record of a phone call to an automatic entry generated every time an email message is sent to a specific contact. In addition to tracking Outlook items and Office documents, Journal also provides the proper context for recording activities not tied directly to your computer, such as a handwritten letter or the receipt of a courier package.

While other components within Outlook provide similar note-keeping abilities, only Journal provides a fast (and optionally automatic) means to date/time stamp an activity, log the entry type (for example, phone call or meeting request), and even track the time spent on an activity for billing purposes.

Journal functions in two distinct modes: automatic and manual . This chapter begins with a section detailing the preference settings that relate to automatic journal entries. It then covers the Actions menu, which provides commands to create and send Journal entries. This is followed by a description of the View menu, where the various ways of viewing Journal items are detailed. The chapter ends with a section on the context menus available in Journal.