Using DocketCalendar for Outlook and leveraging Microsoft Outlook's Calendar Search with some advance considerations can create detailed on the fly reports for all your clients and matters. Combine Outlook with Microsoft excel and you can easily create a report that can be used to show all client matters and all events calendared leveraging the power of Microsoft Excel’s filters.

This tutorial will walk you through the steps of setting up your Outlook with a few simple customizations that will not require technical computer understanding or IT support. Anyone who follows these instructions should be able to produce detailed litigation reports using DocketCalendar for Outlook, Microsoft Outlook search, and Microsoft Excel.

Searching for events in your Outlook Calendar will produce a list of all events meeting your search criteria. Outlooks out of the box will create a list report that includes the Subject, Location, Start, End Recurrence Pattern & Categories.

Outlook Default Search View:

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For deadline reports, you will not need End and Recurrence Patter so you can right click on their names in the List View Header and select "Remove this Column" You can also remove the two Icons a the far left of the Report View. The Calendar Icon and the File Icon can also be removed.

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You may or may not use Location and Categories but if you don't need them, if you remove them, the base report will have the Subject and Start Date. If you drag the Start date to the left of the Subject and widen the Subject field , this view can be printed right from Outlook using the Print function in your Calendar.

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DocketCalendar populates all deadlines with a unique text string "DocketCalendarEvent" You can type this in to the Search box in the Body field and you will get a list of all events on the calendar created y DocketCalendar

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Standard Deadline searches would typically be, All Deadlines, All Deadlines for a Date Range (This Week, Next Week), All Deadlines for a specific Case, All of a Type of Deadlines ( Deposition Days)

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You can add Search Options by clicking on the "Add more options" button. Two important search options are Categories, and Start (which is your event start time)

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With the Categories Option you can search for the default category "Court Rules" or you can create any category and use it to produce reports.

With the Start Option you can select This week or Next Week or any of the typical quick date range searches required for typical reports.

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You can customize your search results to include DocketCalendar fields

Right Click on the header of your search results and select Field Chooser

Click on the Dropdown Arrow next to "Frequently used fields" and select "User defined fields in folder" Drag and Drop Trigger Item Description and Event Type Onto your Search Result Header.

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To get the best report, you will want to select all of the items in the Results. Control A or you can Click on the first line item, hold your shift key down and then click on the last item. Right click and copy or Control C.

Next Open a new Microsoft Excel Document. Right Click and Past the text in Cell A1

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Click in cell A1 again and the Ctrl A to select only the pasted fields. Then right click and select "Format Cells"

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On the Alignment Tab, Select "Vertical -Top" & "Wrap Text"

On the Border Tab, Select the Border button second down that creates a single line separator.

Press Ok - You will have an easy to ready report of your Deadlines

Press Ctrl P to Print - You will need to set the page orientation to Landscape and select Custom Scaling. If you follow the format of this guide, 90% should give you a good print result. If you add more fields to your report, you may need to experiment with settings to get a good print result.

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Once you have printed your report Save a copy and then Set up a template copy for future reports. You can select, in this example, from A2 to D2, click and drag down to the bottom row. Right Click and Delete. You will be left with only the first Row (The Header). The next time you need to produce a report, use this template and you will not have to format your document to print. You will only have to past your data ( Note: You may need to remove the additional header row) and a quick format of the cells, Wrap Text, Align to Top, and Line Separator and you are ready to print.

Report Template