Top 25 Microsoft Outlook Calendar Tips and Tricks

Start default meeting times early/late these are my top 25 tips and tricks for the outlook calendar the first tip is changing the default start or end times to your outlook meetings especially during the pandemic this is great to ensure that people have breaks between online meetings in particular so i'm here in my calendar and outlook i'll go to the file menu go down to options and now choose calendar right here there's the option shortened appointments and meetings i'll check this on maybe i want to have all meetings end early and i can say if it's less than one hour and five minutes early or if it's one hour or longer maybe i want it to end 10 minutes early and instead if you want to say i want to actually start them a little bit late you can do that but we'll have it do end early and i'll hit ok now when i go here and click new meeting you'll see the default time is five minutes early so in this case maybe i want it to be an 11 a.m meeting it is going to end five minutes early the second tip is a Insert Calendar to email really easy way to share your calendar in an email with someone with just a couple of clicks so i have an email from bill lumberg here he wants me to come in and work on a saturday i'm going to reply to this message and insert and there's an option here for calendar now i can choose to insert all sorts of days right into the calendar i'm going to send specific days that go from this friday all the way until next saturday so we can see my availability i can also have advanced here if i want to show and hide different email schedules and layouts and other information but we'll keep it simple and i'm going to not show time within my working hours because he wants me to work on a saturday i can also now just hit ok and it inserts all of my schedule right here it has my pacific time zone it has all of my calendar inserted so he can see oh i'm free on a saturday it also adds an ical file in case you want that person to be able to have the ical imported into their calendar in this case i'm just going to remove that and i'll send my calendar to bill Teams meetings on by default the third tip is enabling teams meetings by default for all meetings that you send out so i'm going to go to the file menu and go down to options go to calendar and there's a new option that is add online meeting to all meetings and this will be with a teams meeting check that on and then hit ok and then reboot your outlook now when i go to new items and i choose meeting it's already a team's meeting now i just hit send Access Teams Meeting Options in Outlook the fourth tip is also a calendar integration with teams feature i've made this a teams meeting and meeting options is right here so now i can click meeting options and all the team's meeting options are pulled right into this dialogue so i don't need to go to the web so i can set who can bypass the lobby who can present is the meeting chat enabled or disabled or recording automatically all those can be set right here from outlook and then just hit save and now my team's meeting is all ready to go and i don't need to go into teams right before the meeting to configure things the fifth tip is a long time Reply with Meeting under known but useful outlook feature which is reply with meeting bill lumberg sent a mail out to cara ella and alex here i want to reply to this mail to set up this meeting right here under respond there is a reply with meeting button shortcut is ctrl alt r click this this opens up a brand new meeting the title of the mail is right here is the title of the meeting the required people are all from the mail that was sent from bill it's even got teams all ready to go because we set that default and the details of the mail are at the bottom right here so this is all ready to go and just hit send the sixth tip is Conditional Formatting on calendar items conditional formatting on outlook calendar items this means that i can format the color of my meeting item based on things like who sent it to me so i want to make sure that all meeting items from bill lumberg have a certain color i have this meeting from bill here so i'm going to go to the view menu in my calendar up top then choose view settings then choose conditional formatting now i'm going to choose add and we'll call this boss because it's my boss rule and the color we want is black black for bill lumberg and then set the condition so anything organized by click here and let's choose bill lumberg and choose organize by and click ok now hit ok and then ok and one last ok and check that out all my bill lumberg meetings are now in black and you can do this for lots of other conditions i just chose organized by bill lumberg in this case Teams Meet Now in Calendar the seventh tip is meet now is exposed right in the outlet calendar and this is teams integration so up on the home tab you have new teams meeting but you also have meet now so if i click this hey here i am give your meeting a title and meet now is ready to go in teams click join now and you're set the eighth tip is onenote integration OneNote Meeting notes integration for meeting notes in your outlook calendar so i've got my tps report cover sheet discussion with bill lumberg i'm going to open up this meeting i want to prepare ahead of time i can choose send to onenote right here and it will create a page in onenote with all the meeting details so i can be prepared so i'll click this choose take notes on your own now onenote dialog pops up with all of your onenote notebooks i've got my micro tips here and i'm going to put this into my research for researching tps and i'll click ok now you can see it creates a new page in onenote with the title right here the meeting date the participants and i am ready to take notes with bill lumberg when we meet there's even a link to get back to that outlook meeting item right here it says link to outlook item i'll click here and it will bring that meeting right back up so now i've got a bi-directional link between an outlook meeting and my onenote page the ninth tip is natural language in Natural language meeting time outlook meeting date pickers so i'm going to open up a new meeting here i've opened my new meeting and let's say i want to have a meeting that is next thursday i can just delete this date here and type that next thursday hit tab it automatically calculates that in the date and this works for other types of natural language and it's just a nice little handy tip for your date pickers Change calendar timescale the 10th tip is changing time scales in your outlook calendar so by default it has a time scale where each slot here is 30 minutes i can change that though if i go to view i can go to time scale and maybe i want those slots to be 60 minutes now each slot is basically an hour but i can also make it smaller so maybe i want each slot to be 15 minutes now i can do 15 minute increments for meetings or my calendar and that gives you a little more granularity if you even want to get smaller you can go all the way to five minutes Change the Calendar view with the keyboard the eleventh tip is a set of handy shortcuts to change your views in the calendar really easily i'm here in work week which shows five days at once if i just wanna show one day i do alt one now it's showing monday alt two shows tuesday two days alt five will do five days all the way up to alt nine showing nine days if i do alt zero it shows 10 and then alt equals will show the entire month view and we'll do alt 1 to go back to that first day the 12th tip is To Do bar to show your Calendar in the Inbox showing your calendar in your inbox so if i go to the view menu here from my outlook inbox over here on the right choose to do bar and then choose calendar this brings up your entire calendar right here on the right i can make it a little bit bigger if i want and it's nice to be able to navigate very quickly so i don't have to leave my inbox to glance at my calendar to see what's coming up Join online from Todo Bar the 13th tip is a related feature and that is the ability to join a teams meeting directly from your to-do calendar bar so on my right here i have my calendar bar open and i've got a teams meeting i can now just go here and choose join online so i'll click here that pulls up the team's meeting dialog right here and i'm ready to just click and join that meeting so it's a nice time saver to go directly from your to-do bar the 14th tip is an oldie but a Create appointment from email goodie and that is the ability to drag an email right into your calendar to create a meeting so i have a mail from bill about coming in on a saturday i guess i need to make a meeting in my calendar or at least an appointment for that so i'm going to drag this email left click and drag down to the little calendar icon and drop it that creates a new appointment here's the title let's set it for this saturday and i guess it's going to be an all-day event then just hit save now it's in my calendar the 15th tip is Response options a nice one that i use quite a lot in my job and that is turning off response options in a meeting so i'll go here and drop down new items and choose meeting and i'll give it a title and the set of people that are required now this research shareout i don't necessarily need to see all the different responses from people i actually don't care if they come or not so if i go here to response options i will uncheck request responses what this means is when people respond it still goes into their calendar but it's not going to send me a response because i honestly don't care so i'm going to send this meeting off right here and i'll show what it looks like on the recipient side i'm signed in as bill lumberg here and here is that meeting about the tps report top learning research sharea i definitely want to go to this so i'm going to go here and click yes but it doesn't ask me to send a response to kara it still puts it in my calendar so here it is in the calendar let's switch back to cara just to show that it did not give her a response when bill responded so here is cara there's no meeting acceptance that came in so that's how the request response works Disallow Forwarding the 16th tip is disallowing forwarding of meetings not a lot of people know about this one so i have a meeting here and i'm about to send it to bill lumberg about super secret tps report designs and i don't want him to forward it to other people i'll go to response options and i'm going to uncheck allow forwarding this means that he can't forward it in outlook to other people so i'll click send now we'll switch over to bill lumberg and show what it looks like on his end when he gets this meeting okay here's that super secret meeting that says don't forward i'll click here to open it and even though it says don't forward i'm bill lumberg i just do what i want so i'm just going to go and forward that i'll click the three dot menu wait a second there's no forward there even if i open this meeting oh the forward right here it's disabled i can't forward it ah i've been foiled by cara coleman the 17th tip is category colors Categories on calendar items i personally use this one a lot in my job it helps me glance at my calendar and have a sense of where i'm spending my time so i have a lunch meeting here that recurs daily and i want to make this a specific color so i'm going to right click on one of these and i'm going to go to categorize and i'm going to choose yellow and now all of these are yellow maybe i want my one on ones to be red i right click here and categorize these as red i can also select a meeting here and then the appointment little context menu opens here and go to categorize that's another way to get to it i'll go to all categories here are some of the default ones i can create new ones as well so i'll click new here and this is going to be for top secret and we'll make this one brown and even a shortcut key in this case i will make the shortcut key control f2 hit ok so now anytime i hit ctrl f2 or manually right click and change it for top secret meetings they'll be brown so let's click ok oh tps report offsite that's definitely top secret and brown if i want to clear this out i can right click and say clear all categories now it's back to boring old light blue and again if i do control f2 on this tps report offsite to make it top secret brown let's do control f2 look at that brown the 18th tip is also Schedule View a newer one not a lot of people know about it it allows you to switch your normal work week view or your daily view into a schedule view where everything starts to go horizontal so right here on the home tab under arrange you see schedule view if i click this now i can see all of these arranged horizontally with the actual hours across the top and the meetings here this is actually much more helpful if you're looking at multiple things going across at once but it aligns your schedule to go the opposite direction like this and i can scroll across and have the time across the top it's kind of a similar view like you have in a meeting request so when you open up your meeting here and go to scheduling assistant it's a similar view where the times are on top and then everything else the people are over on this side and to switch back to your normal view just go to work week like this Show multiple time zones the 19th tip is showing multiple time zones in your outlook calendar this is really handy if you're working with other people who are geo-distributed and instead of having to calculate all the time zones for meetings in your head you can quickly glance and see these things i'm going to start by going to the file menu then go down to options now choose calendar and then scroll down a little bit and you'll see time zones so first you can label yourself so in this case i'm in seattle here's my time zone pacific i can show a second time zone in this case we'll say india and then you drop down time zone you have all these choices so let's find the right one there we go and let's show a third one let's do beijing there's beijing and now i'll click ok what you see is it's added beijing india and seattle so now i can just glance and say oh if i make an 11 a.m appointment it's 2 a.m in beijing and 12 am in india that's probably not a good time you can also go and you can swap the order of these things if i go back to file and options and then calendar let's scroll down and i can say swap time zone so i can do this now india is on top click again beijing's on top so now if i hit ok it swaps the order where beijing is farthest on the right Default color for calendar the 20th tip is the default color of any appointment created in your calendar so i'm going to type right here hit enter and it's a light blue color so by default any new appointment created in your calendar is this light blue maybe i want to change that for this one and for future ones just click anywhere in your calendar right click and choose color and maybe i want the default color to be magenta so you can see now a default color is that and if i type a new one it uses that new default color even the highlighting over here on my calendar is that same magenta colors this lets you spruce up that boring old light blue you might have seen for the last decade or so to a little bit nicer color Dark mode the 21st tip is dark mode which can make your calendar look a bit easier on the eyes especially with all these colors so i'm going to go to the file menu here and then go down to office account drop down office theme here and then choose black now i'll hit the back button oh my calendar looks quite nice now i'm like in dark mode Change work hours the 22nd tip is changing your default working hours and this will show up for other people who are also trying to schedule meetings with you i'm going to go to the file menu here and then go down to choose options then choose calendar right here is your work hours by default outlook will set this from eight to five monday through friday hey maybe i like to sleep in and i work a little bit later so 10 a.m and we'll see my end time is 6 p.m and maybe i don't work on friday so don't schedule me then and you can even set first day of the week or first day of the year but in this case we'll keep it simple and click ok you can see what happened here is it just shifted now this light wider part goes from 10am to 6pm and you can see it looks more gray all the way from 9am and all friday is now all grayed out in addition when people are looking at my calendar to schedule me it will show this gray zone implying you probably shouldn't book the person then because they're not working then the 23rd tip is Date navigator numbers adding numbers to your date navigator here which is kind of nice if you're looking at one through 52 weeks so i'll go to the file menu go down and choose options go to calendar now scroll down you'll see a show week numbers in the month view and in the date navigator we're going to turn this on and click ok now it's nice all the little numbers of the weeks come on the left hand side so if i go all the way back i see one here for the first week of january 2 and it goes all the way to the end of the year so i can know it's the 20th week on may 2022 the 24th tip is a cool shortcut Calendar Options shortcut directly to calendar options so instead of having to go to the file menu and then down to options and choose calendar i can just right click here and choose calendar options bang there we go it's all set really easy to quickly update your calendar options the 25th tip is Calendar weather using the weather component in outlook so right now it has the weather pulling up it has washington dc well i'm not from there i'm going to add one for seattle type in seattle and search for that seattle washington now it pulls it up oh it's always cloudy in seattle but it's kind of nice to be able to just quick glance and see your weather right in the calendar if you want to keep up with all the latest microsoft updates and tips and tricks subscribe to my channel and then just ring the bell so you get all the latest videos that i post