Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Using the Microsoft Outlook Calendar”.
In this Microsoft, Outlook tutorial we’re gon na focus specifically on the calendaring options in Outlook. In a previous video, I showed how to use the email capabilities in Outlook and if you haven’t already watched that video, I do recommend that you watch that, as you see here in the lower left corner, it’s easy to switch between the email functionality, the calendaring functionality. Your contacts and your to-do lists, but again in this article we’re going to focus on the calendar. So let’s take a minute just to look at the screen as it appears when I open up the calendar. What exactly am I seeing here? Well right now I have a monthly view of my calendar here at the center of the screen and that’s pretty self-explanatory. Pretty traditional the current day today is marked here in dark blue now I can advance to next month by using these arrows here. So I can look ahead and I can look ahead again and you can just go forward as far as you want to in this calendar. I can also go back and I can look at last month and the month before it cetera now when you’re doing that. It’S easy to get kind of lost, and so it’s nice to be able to just go up here to the Home, tab, home, ribbon and just click on today, and it jumps you right back to today’s date and you probably noticed it wasn’t in dark blue until I clicked on it, but now yes, it is in dark, blue.
It’S because it’s selected now at the left, we get a handy tool called the date picker, and this may be a faster easier way to do. What I just showed you, instead of using these arrows here, you can go here to the date picker and you could just select in this case April 3rd and it jumps to April 3rd. I could pick April 22nd. It jumps to April 22nd and notice that it changed to the day view.
That’S another part of the screen that you need to be aware of. You can change the way. The calendar looks on your screen right now it’s day by day, and it switched to that when I clicked on April 22nd.
But what if I want the whole week, I just click work week and that’s Monday through Friday or the entire or I can look at the month. You can also have a schedule view. That’S a little bit different, just kind of shows the different scheduled items in your calendar now going back here to the left to the date picker, you can click and drag to highlight specific days so instead of selecting April 17th, maybe I select April 16th through the 20Th and that’s exactly what will show up here in the center of the screen: ok, so I’m gon na click back on, let’s say March 7th and it’s in week view so I get the entire week.
So what other aspects of the layout do? I have here in Outlook in the calendar, I have a search calendar button and I can click there and I can do a search for let’s say a person’s name looks like someone’s birthday is coming up. I can do a search for an event or a location, and it should find those things in my calendar. We also have a location, and this is useful for a couple of reasons, but the main reason is for weather, so I can add in a location for where I am, and so now it does give me a weather forecast. So that’s nice, ok! So now that we’ve looked at some of the layout here in the calendar settings for Outlook, let’s look at how to add some events here in the upper left. If you’re on the Home tab home ribbon, you should see a couple of options for adding events. The first is an appointment, so new appointment, so let’s say next Saturday I have an appointment, maybe it’s a golfing appointment with a friend.
I can just go up, there click new appointment and then I can just type in the subject. If I want to, I can put in the location, but it’s not necessary, I can put in the start date and time and the end date and time so I can change this from 8 a.m. let’s say to 10 a.m. now.
It is possible that it’s an all-day event and I’ll show you what that looks like in just a minute, but all you have to do in that case is check. The box and it’ll show up as an all-day event. I’M just gon na leave it here from 8:00 to 10:00 on the 30th. I click Save and close, and it appears now there is a shortcut instead of going up here to new appointment. It is possible just to double-click on that date and enter your appointment. That way, now, generally appointments only involve one person from your organization you. So if you set up an appointment, it involves you and often that’s all. If you want, though you can double click to set up a new appointment and you can invite another person to attend.
So I can click there put in the person who’s gon na attend this appointment with me and just put their address here. If I want subject location all of the same stuff and then send – and this time it’s an all-day event – and I want you to see the difference in how an all-day event looks versus a shorter event, so to demonstrate this, I’m gon na switch to week view You can see there’s my two-hour event from 8:00 to 10:00 the next week, though I have an all-day event and because it’s an all-day event, it shows up here at the top, so everything that shows up here at the top of this weekly view, that is, for The entire day, if it’s an hourly event, it will show up down here below lining up with specific hours. So that’s the difference between an hourly event and an all-day event that doesn’t show up so easily in month view it’s harder to tell the distinction in day view it’s easy to see the distinction a couple other things with appointments that you need to be aware of. One is it’s a good idea to mark yourself as busy during those appointments that way, if other people in your organization are trying to schedule, you they’ll see that you’re busy and that there’s a conflict, if you’re not sure about it, you could mark it as tentative.
It may or may not happen you could mark that you’re free or that you’re out of the office. So these are some important options that you can choose from I’ll. Just leave it as busy. You can put in a reminder for yourself so that maybe 30 minutes before the event you’ll be reminded with a sound and you can adjust what that sound is.
But it’s not necessary to have a reminder if you don’t want one. Another important feature is this: when you’re editing an event whether it’s an appointment or a meeting, you can go here to recurrence and you can say it repeats weekly on the same day on Saturday, or maybe it repeats monthly on the 30th day of the month or On the last Saturday of the month for every single month, you can have this series end, let’s say in 2020 or no one date. It will just go on forever. So those are nice features as well.
So that is how you set up an appointment, which again is generally just for you, although you might invite someone else to that appointment as well. I’M gon na go back to the month view because now I would like to look at how to set up a meeting. Let’S say I want to have a meeting on the fifth. I can just double click there or I’ll. Just click on it once and then go up here and choose new meeting, because I want to specify that this is not an appointment. It’S an actual meeting here, I would put in a list of email addresses for people that I would like to attend the meeting.
I would click to put in the subject of the meeting the location and it’s possible that your Outlook, admin, whoever that is, may have set up some rooms like conference rooms or study rooms, and you would be able to select those and reserve them. Basically, for your meeting, if you do add a room, it’s set up almost like it’s one of the people attending, and so it shows up as someone invited to the event kind of interesting one of the nice features. When you’re setting up a meeting is you can insert an attached file, so I could attach, let’s say, an Excel spreadsheet that we’re gon na use or a PowerPoint presentation that we’re gon na watch or a word document that we need to read together or revised. So that’s really nice to be able to attach files that are relevant to the meeting that we’re gon na have back here on the meeting tab again you’ll see, I can make it a recurring meeting. I can mark myself as busy, but one of the important features is here in the attendees group. If I go here to response options, I can request responses from each of the people that I invite.
Are they gon na? Come yes, no or maybe, if I don’t need that, I can uncheck it now. If you are gon na request responses, it’s possible to allow the people that are attending to propose a new time. Maybe they don’t like the time that you want to have the meeting, they could propose another one.
So now that that’s ready, I can just click send and it would be sent to the people that I put here in the to box. So this next part is hard for me to show, but basically the people that I invite they would go in and they would say yes, I’m attending. No I’m not. Maybe I am maybe I’m not, and then I as the meeting planner, would go in here to scheduling assistant and what the scheduling assistant does is. It gives me an overview of everybody’s schedules, so I can see if there are some potential conflicts where they may have. Events that overlap my own planned meeting so, if necessary, I can adjust the time here by clicking and dragging or down here. I can use this drop-down arrow to change those times or even the date. So that’s really useful to try to pick a day where everyone’s gon na have a chance to be able to come once. You’Ve checked that and you’re ready to send it.
You can click send right from here, or you can go back to appointment and send it that way. Once you’ve sent that meeting invitation, you can open up that meeting and you can go to the tracking button that wasn’t there before, but now it is and it lists every one that you’ve invited and their response are they coming? Yes, no or maybe so. Those are great options for planning and setting up meetings. Ok back here on the main calendar view, I want to show you that it is possible to look at other people’s calendars, other people in your same organization up here at the top. If you click the add calendar button, you can look at people’s calendars of people that are in your address book. If they’re sharing that you can also look at calendars that are shared.
So if you open shared calendars from within your organization, you might be able to search for a person’s name and look at their calendar. So that’s a nice feature. You can also create brand-new calendars.
So let’s say I want to set up an exercise calendar for myself to just track and plan my exercises. That’S not really something dealing with work, so I can just create a separate blank calendar. Give it a name, click, OK, and it’s added here so now, when I click on that calendar, look I have two calendars selected.
There’S one here at the left one here at the right now: this can get confusing with two separate sides of the calendar, so it sometimes make sense to click this little tiny arrow here and what that does. Is it overlays the two calendars you can look at both pretty well simultaneously, you can see one on top of the other, but you just need to make sure that the calendar that you want to work with is on top okay. So if I want to add a calendar event to my exercise calendar, I just click with that calendar selected and I’ll put in some basketball notice down here.
It says it’s on my exercise calendar, so I save it and close and there it is now. If I want to add something to my work calendar, I should click here on the work calendar and I can double click on the same day, if I want or a different day and look, it does not say, exercise calendar now so finish, work, project, okay and That event comes in in a different color, because it belongs to a different calendar, all right, that’s great! Now what if I want to invite other people to participate with me in this exercise, that would be a good idea with basketball. Probably what I can do is just make sure that the calendar I want to share is active and then click share calendar and I can send it out to the people I would like to share with. I can even give them different permissions for what they can do. Can they add their own events or only see my events, so thanks for watching, I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful.
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