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How to use the Today Contact Activities panel

The Contact Activities panel in the Today window shows Contact Activities that are due to be shown today, have not been marked as "Done", and are assigned to you.

Showing a Contact Activity in the Today window

In order to show a Contact Activity in the Today window, we must first locate and existing contact, or create one. The first step is to open the "Contacts" window (click the "Contacts" button on the toolbar). If you already have a contact you'd like to use, then double-click on that contact to edit it. If not, in the Contacts window, select the "My Private Contacts" contact group in the Contact Group list on the left of the Contacts window, the press the "New Contact" button on the toolbar (in the top left corner of the window). For new contacts, you'll need to at least give them a name before we start adding activities for them.

Once you've got your contact open and ready, click the "Activity" tab.

On the Activity tab, press the "New" button to open the "Contact Activity Details" dialog. For future reference, you can add new activities for a given contact quickly by pressing the "Create Activity" button at the bottom of the Contact Details dialog. This will change to the Activity tab for you, and open a new activity for editing.

Enter a brief description for the Activity in the "Description" field at the top of the window. This will appear both in the contact's activity tab, and also in the Today window once you've set the activity to appear there. Now click the "Display in Today window" checkbox in the "Today" panel at the bottom of the dialog, and ensure there's a check in it. Once the "Display in Today window" checkbox is checked, the "Date" and "User" fields in the "Today" panel will become enabled (they'll stop being "greyed out").

Now that the Date and User fields are enabled, select the user in whose Today window you want the Activity to appear in the User drop-down list. By default, this value is set to be the user you are currently logged on as, and so let's leave it as it is for now. In future, if you want to assign tasks to appear in other user's Today windows, simply select them using this drop-down list.

If you've followed the instructions above, you should end up with a window looking roughly like this. In this example, the "Aaron Aardvark" user is selected in the User drop-down list, because that's the user I'm currently logged on as.

If you look at the Date field, you'll notice that the checkbox isn't greyed out, but the actual date itself is. When is field is in this state - with no check in the checkbox, and the date greyed out - the Activity will appear in the selected user's Today window immediately. This is the default setting. However, you may want to set the Activity to appear in the future, especially when setting up customer follow-ups. To do this, click the checkbox in the Date field. The date itself will then cease to be greyed out, and you'll be able to either type in a new date, or click the drop-down arrow and select the date on which you want the Activity to appear. For the purposes of this demonstration, it's best to leave this checkbox unchecked.

Now click the "OK" button, then click the "OK" button on the Contact Details dialog, and go back to the "Today" window.

The Contact Activities panel, in the middle of the Today window, will now contain the Contact Activity we entered, showing both the contact's name and as much of the Activity description as we can fit in.

Removing Contact Activities from the Today window

Now that we can add Contact Activities to the Today window, it's time to find out how to remove them. There are four ways of removing an activity from the Today window.

The most common, and generally most appropriate, way of removing an activity is to mark it as "Complete". To do this, simply right click on the activity and choose "Mark as Complete" from the context menu. Marking activities as complete helps keep your contact records up to do date, and allows you to keep track of what you have and haven't accomplished with a given contact. If you wish to update the activity before marking it as complete, you can double click the activity to open it for editing, then change the description to reflect the outcome of the activity ("Called Fred, shipment reached him okay, he's happy with the goods", for example), then checking the "Done" checkbox, and clicking "OK".

Sometimes it's desirable to keep the activity in place and unchanged, but to merely remove it from a Today window. If this is the case, double click the activity to open it for editting, then uncheck the "Show in Today window" checkbox, and press "OK".

If the activity has simply become invalid for some reason ("Fred's left Acme Plc. so there's no point in calling him there"), then deleting an activity may be desirable. To do this, double click the activity and press the "Delete" button.

The final way activities can be removed from the Today window is if the contact to which they are attached is itself deleted. Whilst this is clearly not the recommended method of removing just activities, it's good to know that should you remove a contact from the system for whatever reason, you and your users won't have any residual activities relating to them hanging around in your Today windows.