I use the Journal to not only track my work on office documents, but
also to keep a record of how much time I spend doing things that aren't
specifically entered as tasks. For some reason, the "entry type",
start, end, and contacts fields don't display in the journal view. The
columns are there, but field are blank or have the value none. The
values were entered when I made the entry, and if I click on a
particular entry, the values displayed on the form for that particular
entry are correct, but they don't show up under their column in the
journal view, and accordingly, I can't view the entries in a display
that uses start, end, type, duration, or contact fields. I can only
use the created field.

That means I can only use the "Entry list" and "last seven days" views.
By type, by contact, by category just give me a blank timeline view,
with no entries displayed. Is there any way to, say, create a custom
field that takes its value from where the entry type field is supposed
to be taking its values?

I'd like to be able to look at a timeline view of the entries I've
created, grouped by entry type. I can change the view settings for the
By Type view, so that the Start value is taken from the Created field,
and that shows me a timeline view of items, but they're then displayed
without duration info, so it's not exactly doing what I want. Also,
when I started messing around with
this, having the "By Type" view take values for start and end from
different fields(like using the start date from task fields), swapping
start and end, and so on, I got outlook to throw an DLL error in about
7 or 8 outlook dlls, which I was then unable to reproduce.

Since I know the right values are being stored, because I can click on
an individual entry and see that the right values are there, I thought
perhaps there's a view setting that's messed up.
Is there any way to create a custom field that takes its value from
where the entry type field is supposed to be taking its values?

Would the problem be solved by backing up my PST, uninstalling and
re-installing office? I'm worried that something's wrong in a registry
setting somewhere that isn't removed upon uninstallation of office and
re-installing would just be a big waste of time.