About recording information in Journal

Journal automatically records actions that you choose relating to the contacts that you choose and places the actions in a timeline view. In addition to tracking Microsoft Outlook items, such as e-mail, or other Microsoft Office documents, such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel files, you can keep a record of any interaction you want to remember— even something that is not located on your computer, such as a phone conversation or a handwritten letter you mailed or received.

Use Journal to record the dates and times of your interactions with contacts, such as tracking hours spent on a particular account. If you want to create a list of all the items related to a contact, use activity tracking, instead, to link the items to that contact.

Do you remember the day you worked on a file, but can't remember the path to it? Use Journal to locate information based on when you perform actions. For example, you can quickly look up an Excel document you worked on last Tuesday if you set Excel documents to be automatically recorded in Journal.

Journal entries are recorded based on when the action occurs. For example, a Word document is recorded on the timeline when it is created or was last modified. You can organize Journal entries on the timeline into logical groups— such as e-mail messages, meetings, and phone calls— to quickly locate information, such as all the meetings you attended in the past week or month.

You can open a Journal entry and review details about the activity, or you can use the Journal entry as a shortcut to go directly to the Outlook item or the file that the Journal entry refers to.