If you work on a project with a colleague, you can associate your journal entries for the project with that colleague’s contact entry. All the journal entries that are associated with the contact will appear when you select Activities view on the contact form.

Although you can see the contacts associated with a journal item in the list views (as shown earlier in Figure 23-4), the Contacts field is no longer displayed by default when the journal item is opened. You can add contacts by clicking Address Book in the Names group on the Journal Entry tab, but contacts cannot be deleted or viewed that way. To enable the Contacts field, choose Tools, Options, click the Contact Options button, select the Show Contact Linking On All Forms check box, and then click OK twice. The Contact field will then be visible in journal items when they are open.

For example, Figure 23-10 shows a journal entry for a Word 2007 letter to an associate. To connect a journal entry and document to a contact, click Contacts at the bottom of the journal entry form. In the resulting Select Contacts dialog box, click the names of the contacts with whom the journal entry should be associated, and then click OK. The selected names will appear in the Contacts box at the bottom of the journal entry form.

Figure 23-10. This journal entry shows a Word 2007 document associated with a contact.

So what does this do for you? When you open the contact entry for an associated contact and click Activities in the Show group on the Contact tab, as shown in Figure 23-11, you’ll see a list of every Outlook 2007 item associated with that contact. You can open any of these items by double-clicking it. This is just one more way Outlook 2007 keeps all your information interconnected.

Figure 23-11. The Activities page shows all items associated with the selected contact.