Timetracking is pretty simple. You set start time, end time, and write down what you did. Be it task description, project, company you worked for as a freelancer. There’s quite a number of tools, web subscriptions and techniques, you name it, but still they lack something. Some sort of easy and elegant way of data input. Of course, there’s an automated way of tracking the computer time you spent working with this or that app, you get those pop ups to punch in / punch out, but I still have got a feeling it is still not what it should be… Maybe someday…

Well, today I will show you how to use MS Outlook Journal. Why Outlook? Most likely you use it and hence you don’t have to install another 3rd party app. I personally tried several e-mail clients and somehow Outlook still wins, although there are so many annoyances and pitfalls. How only do they do it?

You may have found several articles from MVPs describing how valuable Outlook Journal is, how you can track time spent on this task, that task, blah blah. What they do not tell (even if you ask) is how the hell you get a neat report out of it? They start like – export it to Excel, or well maybe Access. Write down a VBA script to get the data to… And you are like …What?!

Trick No.1 – Set Up Your Custom View

On the left side you can see the list of views available for you Journal. You can modify existing one or create a new one. Creating new is the best. You define it exactly as you need it, and leave the others intact.

Selecting Define Views opens the dialog with all the necessary settings. Select the e.g. Table. You get a list of events like Tasks / Phone Calls etc. The controls on these dialogs are self explanatory. There’s no need to get into details. Select All Journal folders, so that you can use the view on all of them. And press OK.

After that you get to the screen with view options. You can set which fields you are going to show in the table, set grouping e.g. company / category /  set sorting, filtering etc. Good option is to set column formatting so that you get start and end date formatted in a human readable form.

Trick No.2 – Create Your Custom fields

In the previous dialog press Fields button. In a dropdown select Journal Fields, and by clicking add button add all those fields you need into the view.

Here comes the essential trick how to get the duration in a reportable format. Journal in its default views returns something like 8hours (8h) and 30 minutes (30m) and you face nasty conversion later on. Even the exported Journal via Menu / Export / MS Excel  / returns duration in minutes!?

Click New Field. Type Name – Total, or New Duration whatever you like. Select Type: Formula and click Edit button. Then you prepare your formula. It is a bit Microsoft clunky, but you can type the formula in as well. And you can create pretty complex ones. All point and click, without any real programming required. For calculating the duration you may use e.g. : Round (([End] – [Start])*24,2). It subtracts the two dates, returns the fraction of the day as difference, multiplied with 24h to get the hours and then round it to precision of 2 decimal places if you don”t want to lose those 30minutes chunks.

Press OK and afterwards it looks like this:

Add a bit of styling / formatting and filtering to meet your criteria. You can set the view to show only the records for this month. Press the Field button and click through condition setup procedure.

Additionally, it is possible to set up custom sorting order on multiple columns.

Format the columns in a nice way e.g. Start date and End date in a human readable form.

Your view should look pretty good now. For summary, just select all the records, copy and paste into Excel and put a sum formula below the Total column. If you are familiar with Pivot tables and named ranges (tables) you can prepare Pivot and just replace the source range with your copied data and you are done. However, fine tuned Outlook Journal View may be pretty sufficient for reporting purposes already.