Calendars show your schedule but your Outlook
Calendar can do much more. In this video, I'm going to share my favorite tips that help me
save a lot of time. If you also want to get more out of your calendar, just watch the full video. Number 1: Personalize Your Calendar most users just go with the default settings and
then, they miss out on useful customization options. Don't make this mistake. The first thing you
want to do is to set your working days and hours. Go to File, Options and click on Calendar. In the
section "Work Time", you can specify which days of the week are workdays for you. For example,
if you're a nurse, your working days may be Sunday to Tuesday. You can easily set this up.
Just check or uncheck the boxes next to the days. You should also specify your regular working hours
by fixing the start and end time with these dropdowns. And with the dropdown here, you can set
what is the first day of the work week for you. In my case, it's Monday. The other thing I recommend
is to take advantage of the option to schedule shorter meetings. Usually meetings are scheduled
for 30 minutes or full hours. Now often, this leads to back-to-back meetings where you don't even
have time to rush from one session to the next. In the Calendar settings, you have the option to
end meetings early with this dropdown here. Shave off 5 or 10 minutes with the settings below.
This way, when you schedule your next meeting, it's going to automatically suggest a shorter
meeting duration. If you're like me and you're working with colleagues across multiple time zones,
it can be a pain to find the right time to meet. You don't want to set up a meeting that's too
early or too late. Of course, you could figure out the time difference with Google every time
you want to set up a meeting, but there's a much easier way. If you scroll down in the Calendar
settings, you're going to see time zones. You should set the first one to your own time
zone and add a label. To add a second time zone, just click the check box here, add a label and
set the right time zone with the dropdown. If you need it, you can also set a third time
zone below. So next time you schedule a meeting, you're going to see the time zones here on the
side of the calendar. For example i can see right away that 3 pm my time, is 9 am for Brian. This
makes it much easier to pick the right time. Final tweak is to add the week numbers to your
calendar. In the past, people would tell me, "Let's meet in calendar week 20", and I'd have to Google
when that actually is. But it's easy to do that in Outlook. Let's go back to settings. This time we're
going to take a shortcut. Just click on the arrow in the Arrange section. This will take you directly
to the settings. Scroll down to the Display options and check the box next to "Show week numbers...", that's
going to do it. But while we're here, let's do one more thing. Scroll all the way down to the Weather.
Check the box "Show Weather" and select if you want to see temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Now,
when you go back to the calendar, you always know which calendar week you're in. It will show right
here in front of the week. And up here, you'll even get the current weather and the forecast. That's
always good to know. Number 2: Calendar Views. In your calendar, you have several
predefined views that you can use. You can look at just a single day or your work
week. Remember, we set that up in the settings before. You can also select the week or the month.
But you can also apply a custom period. Over here in the date navigator, you're going to see the
months and you can expand this by pulling this down or across. When you move the mouse over to the
week numbers, you're going to see that the cursor changes. So let's say, I want to see the first
three weeks in June. I just click on the first week and drag it down to highlight the other weeks.
And this way, it just shows me the selected period. But it doesn't even have to be consecutive days,
you can also just pick selected days. Let's say I'm interested in June 9th. Then, hold down Control and
select the other days that you're interested in. I'm going to pick June 16th, 23rd, and 25th.
And now, I just get these days side by side. Some of us have more than one calendar in
Outlook. You can choose how you want to see them. In my case, I have my own calendar selected right
here in the "My Calendar" section, but I'm also part of a group calendar for finance. Let's select that
one too. By default, Outlook is going to show these calendars side by side, but you can also overlay
them to better see availability across calendars. Just click the arrow here for the overlay mode.
You'll still be able to distinguish them because each calendar is going to keep its own color.
To undo an overlay, just click the arrow again. Another great tip is to use color coding. Now,
this works for emails too, but it's especially useful for your calendar. There are two ways
that you can visualize your events with color. The first one is manual with categories. When you
right-click on a meeting, you're going to see the option Categorize. Let's go with All Categories.
There are some predefined ones that you can rename or you create a new one. I'll just rename
the orange category to Formal. If you want, you can also assign a shortcut key with a dropdown.
When you're done, click on OK. Now, the meeting appears in orange, and I can apply
this category to any other formal meeting. This way, when I check my schedule in the evening,
I'm going to know if I need to dress up the next day. An even better way is to use conditional
formatting. Here's how. Let's say you want to highlight all meetings with your boss. In the
Menu, click on View and then, on View Settings. Select Conditional Formatting, click on Add to
create a new rule. Give it a name and pick a color. I'm going to go with red. Now, we need
to assign the condition. In this case, it's easy. We want each meeting that's sent by my boss
to be in red. So, you just need to add your boss's name in the organizer field, then click on OK and
OK again. And now, you're going to see right away for which meetings you have to be extra prepared.
There are many more possibilities with conditional formatting. You can create a rule if a meeting
is in a certain location, for specific meeting names, and so on. Just give it a try. Number 3: Schedule Meetings. Let's talk about some tips to make scheduling meetings a lot easier. Now, I often see people constantly switching back and forth between the inbox and the calendar, or their tasks.
But you can easily pop them out and show them side by side. So, let's say you want to have
email and your calendar open next to one another. When you're in your email, just right-click on the
button calendar in the navigation bar down here. And from the dialog box, select "Open in New Window".
This is going to open the calendar in a second instance of Outlook. Just position the windows the
way you want to have them. That's it. Now, you can quickly go back and forth. And of course, this works
for contacts or tasks just as well. One more thing, when you close Outlook, don't click the "x" in
the corner of the windows, instead go to File and select "Exit". This way, it's going to remember, and
next time you start Outlook, it will open it the same way you left it. The other thing that can come
in handy is to duplicate meetings. Let's say that you're recruiting someone and you have several
people that you're interviewing for the position. Of course, you need to set up individual
appointments in Outlook but the content of these different meetings like your subject,
location, notes, and so on, they're all the same. The only things that change are time and the
person. So, once you set up the first one, you can just click on it, use the shortcut Control-C, click
on the time and date that you want your next meeting to be, and use the shortcut Control-V. This
is going to create a copy of the first meeting. Now, just go in and change the invitee and hit
send. And just repeat the process as you need. Another great feature is to schedule meetings
directly from an email. So, let's say that you get this email, but you can't answer right away
because you need to do some research first. In this case, I always recommend scheduling some time
in your calendar to get it done. Otherwise you're probably going to forget. Simply drag the email
down to the calendar icon. It's going to create the meeting for you, take over the title and add
the content of the email. Now you just need to find a time slot to get it done. Scheduling a meeting
with lots of different people in your organization can be a challenge. You don't want to just pick a
time, send out your invite, and hope for the best. Let's increase the chances that everyone is going
to be available by using Scheduling Assistant. Let's say you need to schedule this meeting with
two other colleagues. Create a new meeting and add the attendees either as required or optional. Then,
click on Scheduling Assistant up here. You'll get this view where you can see the availability of
the participants, the proposed meeting time is displayed as a rectangle that overlays everyone's
schedule. In this case, it looks like the time doesn't work for Chris. You can just click on the
timeline and select a slot that works for everyone. Or you can use AutoPick to let Outlook find the
next time that everyone is available. If you're meeting someone that's outside your organization,
you can simply send them your calendar and let them do the work. Create a new email,
just click on Insert and select Calendar. Now, you can select a date range that would be the
range where you want to find the right time for your meeting. You can either use the presets
here or you can specify the dates like this. Then, you can select the amount
of details that you want to share. Down here, you have an option to just show
time within your working hours. This way, you can eliminate weekends or late hours from
the options. When you're done, just click on OK, and it's going to insert your calendar into the
email. Now, you can send this off and the other person gets a full overview and they can easily
pick a date. I hope these tips will be helpful for you to make better use of the calendar in Outlook.
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see you in the next video.
