Overview of Journal Features

The journal can record the phone calls you initiate from Outlook contacts, all your emails, task and meeting requests , and responses for selected contacts. This enables you to easily go back and verify that you sent an email or see when you edited a document or made a phone call.

Included in the activities you can automatically record in the journal are

• Email that you send and receive to selected contacts

• Task requests and responses

• Meeting requests, responses, and cancellations

• Telephone calls you initiate from a contact

• Office documents you work on

By automatically recording the documents you work on, email sent to specific contacts, and phone calls you make, the journal keeps logs of your activity. Journal entries also include the elapsed time along with the event, which is particularly useful to anyone who needs to know how long she worked on a document or spent on a phone call.

When you use the F ile, Ne w , J ournal Entry menu selection to create new journal entries, you're limited in the entry types you can choose. These predefined entry types cover basic business events, such as

• Letters, documents, and faxes you send or receive

• Telephone calls or conversations

• Notes you take

• Remote sessions you participate in

This list is hard-coded and, although you can't type a new entry type in the field, you can edit the Registry to add new entry types. The instructions needed to edit the Registry are later in this hour .

Understanding the Journal Form

The journal form contains only a few basic fields (see Figure 13.1):

• Subject

• Entry Type

• Company

• Start Time ” includes time and date fields

• Duration

• Notes

• Contacts

• Categories

Figure 13.1. The journal form contains just a few fields that must be filled in. When you use automatic journaling, many of these fields are completed for you.

After you've entered the information in the fields, click the Save button and your journal item is finished.