Hi Milly,

Thanks for taking the trouble to look into my questions. I must admit that I
did not use Outlook until recently, so I am not (yet) familiar with the terms
MS uses. Let us use the old world metaphores: you would have an agenda
(litterally a book) for each year. At the end of a year, say 2004, you would
already have written in some appointments for next year. Then Jan 1st 2005,
you would not write anything in that 2004 agenda anymore, but use a new one.
You would however not throw it away, because there might be moments in 2005
where you want to know what you did on a particular date in 2004. So, you put
your 2005 agenda aside, take out of the drawer or closet or library your 2004
one and start turning the pages until you find what you need. Then you close
it, put it away and take your 2005 one and continue your work. Hope it makes
sense to you what I write.
Likewise you would still keep (at least I would) your books of 2003, 2002
etc. This is basically what I would like on my PC (and what I had under my
old system). The option of just continuing in the same agenda is one I would
like to avoid, as the file would grow very big over time. Just as you could
imagine having a huge book with pages for all of 2003, all of 2004, etc. this
would become impractical.

What I did so far is this: I had a HP 200LX pocket sized computer since
1994, which was basically an DOS machine with a wonderful keyboard (including
numeric pad!). I always carried it with me, as my PDA and only kept my agenda
on that machine, as I did with notebooks, telephone lists etc. The desktop
only served to back up the files, (and of course to do wordprocessing,
spreadsheets etc). At the beginning of a new year I would export all my
calendar items of the previous year to a file called agenda2003.adb and the
easy thing was that this was a regular agenda file for the built in agenda
program. So whenever I needed to look something up in a previous year, I
would just, from within the calendar program do "file-open", the program then
automatically closed the one in use and showed the contents of the calendar
directory,  choose the required file from all the ones shown, and push
""Enter". Then I could use all the program possibilities to search, display a
particular date etc. When finished I would do again "file-open" and choose
the calendar of the current year to pull that into the program. I could do
something similar with my pre-1994 agenda program, which ran on my laptop.
Since that program (being DOS based) also ran on the HP LX, I always had my
agenda with me from 1998 on, and could pull it up within moments (at least if
I knew the exact year ;-)  )

It is this same way of working I am looking for (if possible) in Outlook
2003. If that is not possible I would like to know what other people do to
keep a long-time00 (searchable) agenda.

Since I now use an iPaq MS based PDA that works integrated with Outlook on
desktop, I do work now with the Agenda on the desktop as well, hence my
quest.!

Many thanks in advance
irfl (Belgium)

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