Intro
[Scott] This video is brought to you by Woven.
Woven lets you access all of your calendars in one place and gives you powerful scheduling tools to help you save time.
Stay tuned to the end of the video to learn more.
Do you wanna spend a lot less time managing your schedule?
Do you wanna look like a pro when it comes to managing your Outlook calendar?
Well, in today's video, I'm gonna share with you seven of my best tips for managing your calendar here within Microsoft Outlook.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
Go To Date Keyboard Shortcut
And let's dive right in with tip number one, we're talking about a shortcut key, which will allow us to go to any date on our calendar.
All you need to do is select Control + G on your keyboard, and you're gonna get this go to date dialogue that pops up.
Now, at first glance, you may think to yourself, oh, do I have to type it in, in this format? Absolutely not.
Let's say I want to go directly to November 27th. I'm just gonna type in November 27th, hit enter on my keyboard and boom, here I am at Thanksgiving or I should say Black Friday for this particular year.
Let's hit Control + G again and let's say I just wanna go to the next Saturday on my calendar. I'm just gonna type in S-A-T, hit enter on my calendar and here I'm already selected for the next Saturday from today.
So no, you don't have to put things in, in a particular date or a particular date format as you see here.
How about February, 2021? I'm gonna hit enter and boom, there I am taken to the second week I think it's chosen the ninth because today is the ninth, but it's brought me exactly to February, 2021 and I can even go back and just say today, if I'm somewhere else and hit enter and it's gonna bring me back to today.
So it's gonna save you a lot of time, that's Control + G on your keyboard.
Now tip number two has to do with viewing time zones.
Viewing Multiple Time Zones in Outlook
In particular, viewing multiple time zones here on the left-hand side of your calendar.
Of course, by default, it's gonna show your local time zone, but what if you work closely with someone else or with clients or colleagues in a different time zone?
Wouldn't it be nice to have one or maybe two additional time zones here on the left-hand side?
In order for us to do that, we need to go up to File and then all the way down to Options. It's gonna bring up this dialogue and on the left-hand side, we wanna select Calendar.
Now we wanna scroll down just a little bit here to Time Zones.
Now there's a few different things we wanna pay attention to here. Number one is that we can add labels to our time zones, including the existing one. So just in case you want to remember, maybe I wanna type in here Pacific, just so I know the difference between this particular time zone.
But here, I can show a second time zone. So I'm gonna tick this box here and it's already selected Eastern for me, and that's perfect. I often work with a lot of clients on the East Coast, so I get to select the Eastern time zone. And just so it's easier for me to see that on my calendar, I'm gonna type in East, it's gonna keep it nice and short so I can see it on my calendar.
All I have to do is come down here and say, okay, and now on the left-hand side, I've got two of my time zones. I can see my local time zone here, which is gonna show up in a bold here, but I also have got my Eastern time here.
So when I'm looking at my calendar and thinking about making an appointment, making sure that, oh yeah, 2:00 PM is fine for me, but maybe that's a little late for some of my colleagues on the Eastern time zone.
Now next on our list, we wanna look at viewing our calendar in a different way.
View Outlook Calendar from Email Inbox
And in particular, viewing our calendar when we are dealing with email, because let's be honest when you're here within Outlook, you're probably spending an awful lot of time here in your inbox rather than just your calendar.
But it can be time consuming to go back and forth, right? To click over here, click on the calendar, come over here and then click over here and then go back to your view here within your inbox.
Well, you can actually view a mini view of your calendar and actually see your entire schedule right here from within the email portion of Outlook.
In order to do that, we wanna come up here to the top and select View. And then on the right-hand side of your ribbon, you'll see this Layout area here.
Now there's one that's called the To-Do Bar and it's maybe not the best named label here because it's gonna show us a lot more than just our task lists. We can choose to show our task list as well.
But if we select on this option, we have three options. Calendar, People, Tasks, or Off. In this case, I want to select Calendar and now on the right-hand side, I've got a miniature view of my calendar, but it gets better than that.
Not only can I go up here and select certain dates and see what my schedule is like, but as you can see, if I go in today, it's actually showing me an agenda view of my calendars. So I can quickly see what's coming up today and what do I have for the remainder of the week.
And let's say, I need to change this consulting session, or maybe I just wanna see more details about it. All I need to do is click on it and it opens right up here. It doesn't take me to the calendar, right? I haven't switched to the calendar view, but it's opened up this event. I can add the location, change the date, add invitees, do everything that I would regularly do.
And when I'm done, I can hit Save and Close or I can just close it here, if I just wanted to find out more information and I'm back to this view.
It still gives you a lot of real estate, a lot of room to deal with your email and view your inbox, but a helpful little view so you can see your email here within Outlook as well.
Share Your Outlook Calendar via Email
We're gonna stay here within the email side, even though this is a video about calendar tips, I wanna show you how to share your calendar with someone via email.
So all we need to do in this case, I'm gonna select Home up here to get to our traditional or default format here. And I'm gonna create a new message. And it really doesn't matter who I'm sending this to in this example, I wanna come down here to the body of the email itself. And so maybe I'm gonna write something and tell them that, "Hey, just look below. This is what my schedule is like for the next week. What's your availability or which of these times works well for you?"
So in order to do this, what we need to do is come up here to Insert and you can see in this first section here under Include, there's one called Calendar. So I'm gonna select this one. You can choose the particular calendar, if you manage multiple calendars. I'm gonna use my default calendar here and you can also include the date range. So in this case, I'm gonna say the next seven days, and I can choose the amount of detail that I'd like to include as well.
So I can include limited details, full details or availability only. This is probably the one that you want to use most often because it's gonna basically just show free and busy. It gives us the other ones like tentative, working elsewhere or out of office. So they're not gonna see your specific meeting names or invitees or anything like that. You can also say show time within my working hours only, which is probably pretty smart, right? You don't want someone to pick a time that's outside of your working hours.
There's a few more advanced options here, but in the most part, I typically just use it at this level. I'm gonna say Okay, and what's gonna happen is that within the body of that message is gonna be included a miniature calendar. In fact, it looks very similar to what we saw in the email view, but as you can see, it's just showing free and busy, free and busy so they can take a quick glance and see that, okay, on the 10th, I'm available in the morning for about an hour and a half, only a half hour window here, and then most of the afternoon. So they can get back to me and say, "Hey, Scott, that’d be great. Let's meet on the 10th at 3:00 PM." Or something like that. I've given them enough details. But again, they don't know the specifics as to who I’m meeting with or the titles of those meetings.
Now I'm just gonna close this one and show you an example of what the person on the other end will receive. And this is what I think is really neat 'cause they actually get sort of a dynamic link here. If they want to look at this mini calendar and say, "You know what, I'm really wanting to meet on the 13th." They can click on this 13th. That's gonna jump down here and they can quickly see my free and busy information. So a great way to share your availability with someone outside of your organization.
Now let's jump back to the calendar itself because this next one is something that I was not aware of, but I find it so powerful.
Automatically Apply Colors to Outlook Events
And it might just change the way that you look at your calendar. It has to do with color coding or other things that you'd like to do for your calendar and make it happen automatically. So you don't have to waste your time picking up a specific color or category for every meeting that you create or the ones that you receive from other people.
So here you can see in this example. I've got green as my default color here for a number of meetings. Maybe purple is for personal things such as this lunch and anything related to a consulting session is red. But instead of wasting my time typing in consulting session and then changing it to red or receiving a consulting session appointment, check this out. I'm gonna create two different meetings just so you can see this in real time.
So let's say I'm gonna create a new meeting here. I'm just gonna call it a New Meeting. So I haven't done anything, right? I'm just gonna say new meeting. I'm gonna say save and close. There's my default color green, but I'm gonna create another meeting over here. And this one, I'm going to call, Consulting Session. Again, haven't done anything, but just giving it a name. I'm gonna hit, save and close. And this one is red. Hey, what happened there? I didn't pick red. No, that's because I'm using conditional formatting here within Outlook that whenever that term, consulting session is included in the appointment title, it's going to make the appointment red so it stands out.
So in order to make this happen, we wanna come up to our ribbon and select View. And then we wanna select View Settings. And within this view settings dialogue, we wanna come down here to Conditional Formatting. So here you see this first rule that I've put into place. It's called Consulting Session. This is actually just the name of it. We're gonna select our condition elsewhere, but here you can see I've selected the color red.
Now let's add a new one so you know how to do this as well. I'm gonna select the add button and we're gonna give it a name. In this case, I'm gonna call it a Trello Meeting, okay? 'Cause I wanna give any meeting that has Trello in the name, I wanna give it the color blue, just like the application Trello. So I'm gonna call it Trello meeting and I'm gonna pick this color blue here as the color I want to use. Now remember, this is just the name. We actually haven't specified the condition just yet.
In order to do that, we wanna come down here and select the condition button, which is gonna open up a new dialogue. So here at the top, I'm gonna say search for the words Trello. And I can choose if I want it to be only in the subject only, if I want it in the notes fields, if I want it in other places as well. In this case, I only want it in the subject. Now it's using the term subject because this is the exact same menu that you can use within the email side of Outlook. But remember subject essentially means the name of the appointment or the event.
Now I can choose other options in terms of what it was organized by, who it was organized by and other attendees. There's more choices in advance, but let's keep it simple for this example. I'm gonna hit okay in this case and I'm gonna hit okay once again. We're gonna hit okay a third time here just to close this dialog off and let's test it out and see if it's working. So here on Friday, let's create a new event and I'm gonna say, this is a Trello meeting with Bob, for example. I'm gonna hit save and close.
Convert Any Email to an Outlook Calendar Event
And automatically it's received the blue label. Next up on our list, we wanna look at quickly converting any email to an appointment because let's be honest, you're probably spending a lot more time here on the email side of Outlook than the calendar itself. But let's say someone has sent me a message like this, and they've included a lot of good data or information in it. And I wanna be able to create a meeting so we can talk about this. So in order to convert this to an appointment,
all I need to do is take the email, click and hold, and I'm gonna drag it over the calendar icon here on the left. When I release it, what's gonna happen is it's going to create a new appointment with the subject of that email is now the title of the appointment and everything within that email is going to be listed below. So here's that table I was talking about earlier. It's all there for myself and whoever I invite
to this meeting, we can now reference it together, either in advance or during the meeting itself. So I'm gonna close this one out. Again, you can drag any email,
just click and drag hover it over the calendar icon and it will automatically convert it,
getting you set up to create a new appointment.
Add Public Holidays to Outlook Calendar
Now next on our day has to do with adding important dates to your calendar, because I wanna make sure that you don't miss anything important, especially if you're dealing with someone perhaps outside of your country or outside of your faith or geographic region. And that has to do with adding public holidays to your calendar.
Here you can see I've got both some Canadian and US holidays listed here, but I didn't add these myself. No, I wanna let Outlook do the hard work for me. So in this case, what we need to do is go up to File. We're gonna come back down to options and yes, we are going to select calendar here.
And under the second menu calendar options, we wanna come about halfway down and here you can see we can add holidays to the calendar. So if we click this button, we're gonna get a dialogue here. Now there's a combination of both countries. There's some religious holidays. There's a variety of different things. Some things may be specific only to Vatican City, for example. There's a variety of different things that you might have to search through here but all you need to do is select the few that are important to you. The ones that you would like to add and hit Okay, and they will be added to your calendar.
Now, if you'd like to access all of your calendars in one place, I recommend that you check out Woven. Woven allows you to bring in all of your Google and Microsoft calendars into a single view. They also allow you to create custom tags so you can keep track of everything that you're doing in a given week. I especially like their template feature, so I don't have to type out the same thing again and again. It also comes in with some very powerful scheduling tools, so you don't have to use third-party apps. If you'd like to check out Woven for yourself, go to woven.com or see the link in the description below.
