Outlook Journal gone crazy

[Johannes Czernin]

Being slightly behind time I'm still running an old, outdated computer, with
Win98 and Office97 installed, updated to Outlook98, including all updates to
that Microsoft ever offered. The mode OL98 is running in is "Internet Mail
only".

I have more than 1.000 entries under "Contacts", and many of them have
numerous Journaeantries associated with them.

A few days ago I had to print a large batch of envelopes and did that with
the usual method of running a batch printing procedure in Word, collecting
the addresses from Outlook Contacts. For this purpose I created a new
subfolder under "Contacts". Then, instead of COPYING the appropriate
contacts into the new subfolder I inadvertently MOVED them. I did realize my
mistake some while later and re-copyied these contacts back into the main
Contacts folder. However, soon after I had done this I suddenly discovered,
when clicking on the "Journal" tab of an individual contact, that there were
no journal entries displayed.

Going over to the Journals folder however, and grouping the entries under
the "Contact" field, I saw that all thes entries were still here. When I
opened one of those associated with one of the contacts I had shuffled back
and forth, and then clicked on the "contact" field I was shown the usual
message box informing me that the contact could not be found.

Thniking what clever guy I really am I then proceeded to create a single new
journal entry for that particular contact, copied the "Contact" filed into
the Windows Clipboard, and then one-by-one manually replaced the existing,
error-message-creating entry in each of the journal items by the fresh one
from the clipboard. That done I checked my Contact page for that person, and
lo-and-behold all the journal items that had been missing before had
re-appeared.

And now comes what is driving me crazy: Whenever I run a check on any of my
contacts, they act totally randomly - sometime they do show the correct list
of journal entries associated with them, and sometimes they don't! Even
after re-running my replace-the-association procedure several times I still
get this horrible, erroneous and unstable behaviour.

What is going on here? What have I done wrong to the internals of the
system? I would highly appreciate if anyone could kindly volunteer to help
me out of my problem.

Many thanks in advance,

Kind regards,

Johannes

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Are the contacts that don't work resolved? i.e., are they underlined?

BTW - Rather than copy and paste, you should have either clicked the
contacts button and selected the contact or tried pressing enter at the end
of the name.

 

[Johannes Czernin]

Hi, Diane,

Thanks for the quick reply. I have tried your suggestions and immediately
discovered a new, extremely odd phenomenon:

Opening any of the problem contacts directly from the Contacts folder and
then clicking on the Journal tab will NOT show any of the problem entries.

Opening one of the problem journal entries in the Journal folder will
display the problem name "resolved", i.e. underlined. Right-clicking on the
name, and then clicking on "Properties", or double-clicking on the name,
will open the entry card for that contact, and here ALL the problem journal
lines ARE DISPLAYED!

Of your suggestions the second one, pressing Enter at the end of the name,
does not accomplish anything. The first one, however, though being a PITA in
view of the fact that some of my contacts have more than 100 journal
entries, actually DOES work properly - the journal entry does appear in the
contacts page when the contact is opened directly from its folder.

So as soon as I find the time I will start applying this tedious procedure
to all of the problem journal entries, but in the meantime I sincerely hope
my cries for help will lead to some better solution.

Thanks anyway,

Kind regards,

Johannes