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General discussion

can I use Outlook to track time by category?

Aug 31, 2005 11:35PM PDT

Lets say I work some place where we all must track our time. We book our time to different projects. IE: "12222 Improve Phase"

We might have as many as 15 of these in a single week, different codes to manage. I use a spreadsheet to track it manually.

What would be interesting, is if there is a way to use a special field in our normal outlook meeting functions to track time individually. IE: IF I could block out 4 hours of time in my outlook and assign it to 12222 improve.

Aggregating this data in a report at the end of the week would make my time keeping more accurate and simpler.

In addition, when a person is creating a message request, they may create a request with the project code already embedded in it, so everyone knows what to book the time too.

Is there a simple solution to this?

Discussion is locked

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Yes, but I doubt it would involve Outlook.
Aug 31, 2005 11:40PM PDT

While one could write a lot of VBA or other code to do this, I'm unsure you will write it or find the person to do so. I won't be doing such but can assure you that timekeeping and reporting is not part of outlook.

Bob

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but thats the question, extra fields in outlook
Sep 2, 2005 3:26AM PDT

we have a tool to track it already.

The idea though is that since we use outlook to schedule meetings and time via email notification, you could use this as a way to keep your time straight of what you actually did for teh week ebfore entering it in the official tool.

its hard to remember all those numbers, and what you did on wednesday when its friday now.

not looking for VBA, so much as a simple way to turn on an extra field for meeting requests and appointments, preferably from a common pick list in a text file.

then some way to simply pull a report of that time for a user.

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What can be written?
Sep 2, 2005 5:09AM PDT

From your response it appears you may be an user of said program and "wish" for a simple click here solution. Sadly this is not the case. VB and VBA is your simplest language to ask Outlook for the information you put into the messages.

Non programmers will need some time to digest the answers and this dicussion.

But...

I already use the calendar for my personal timesheet for billing. I do nothing more than look at the weeks view sn then move that information from there to my billing. I don't bother with any additional software since it's good enough for what I need.

Bob