I'm a new Outlook user, and I'm having some difficulty understanding the differences between the various Outlook items—appointments, tasks, and journal items—that include date information. Can I have all these items appear on my calendar? For example, I'd like to be able to see that I worked on a specific task for 2 hours today and print that on the preformatted filler for my organizer.
No, these different types of items can't all appear on one calendar. Your appointments, tasks, and journal items live in different folders, and the Day/Week/Month view shows the items in only one folder at a time.
You can use a contact's Activities tab to get a consolidated view of all the items related to a contact, but the Activities tab supports only table views. It can't display your items in a calendar view.
For the scenario you described—tracking the time spent on a task—you might try dragging the task to your Calendar folder. That action will create a new appointment with information related to the task, and you can set the start and end times accordingly. The result is that you'll see the time blocked out for the task in addition to the regular appointments on your calendar.
Another approach that might help you organize information related to a particular project or task is to use a consistent category for each project. You can then use the Advanced Find feature to search across all your folders for items with that category and get a list (but again, not a calendar view) of them.
