Introducing the Journal

Enterprise Architect provides a great facility for maintaining a daily journal, in which you can type all kinds of ideas, comments, notes, suggestions, events, to-do lists and other reminders of what you have done or intend to do within the model. This is a good way to keep the momentum flowing day to day. The facility is simple to use, allowing you to quickly jot down your thoughts as they occur to you.

The 'Journal' page is part of the Collaborate window, which allows you to take notes as you engage in formal or informal discussions and chats with other team members, as well as during your work on other screens and dialogs.

Because the Journal entries are specific to your login, this facility is only available within a model for which User Security has been enabled.

Access

Creating the first Journal Entry

When you first access the Journal page, it has the single entry 'Today' in the 'Date' column. You can type freely in the 'Journal Entry' column against 'Today', including carriage returns and text formatting. Right-click on selected text to access the editing options, which include:

• Creating a Glossary definition from the text, and inserting existing definitions in the text
• Generating a new element in the same Package, with the selected text as the name and linked to the text
• Creating a link from the selected text to an existing element in the model (in the Notes window only)
• Creating a hyperlink to a wide range of target objects, including image files, diagram images, web pages, text files, Help topics and Enterprise Architect commands
• Searching for instances of the selected text in a range of sources (options derived from the 'Code Editor' context menu)
• Editing the text, with cut, copy, paste and delete, setting fonts, and setting paragraph format

When you have finished typing your note, click off the Collaborate window.

You can return to the Journal Entry at any time and:

• Add further notes; you use the same Journal Entry to record all your notes and comments throughout the day
• Edit the existing text, including reformatting
• Delete text or complete notes; select the text and click on the Delete key or use the 'Delete' context menu option

Journal Entries Each Day

Every day, when you open Enterprise Architect and the 'Journal' page, it has a 'Today' item at the top, against which you record the day's Journal entries. Beneath the 'Today' item are the entries for previous days, identified by the date on which you made them. This only list dates on which you have made an entry; there are no blank lines for days on which you did not make an entry.

As well as formatting and editing today's entry, you can edit the entries for previous days. This means you can remove information that is no longer relevant (such as old reminders) or things you listed to be achieved that you have now completed. On the other hand, you can also highlight entries that are still significant, and refer back to them from the 'Today' entry.

Whilst the Today entry is always at the top of the page, you can change the order of display of earlier entries to show the oldest first, or the most recent. Simply click on the column heading to change the sort order.