Microsoft Outlook 2010 : Manage Scheduling (part 1) - Scheduling and Changing Appointments

5/23/2013 4:17:41 AM

You can use the Microsoft Outlook 2010 calendar to organize your daily activities and to remind you of important tasks and events. If you're a busy person and use the Outlook calendar to its fullest potential, it might at times seem as though the calendar runs your life—but that isn't necessarily a bad thing! Using the calendar effectively can help you stay organized, on task, and on time. You can schedule and track appointments, meetings, and events, and block time as a reminder to yourself to take care of tasks.

If you have a Microsoft Exchange Server account, an Outlook calendar has already been created for you. If you have configured Outlook to connect to a different type of account, you can manually create a calendar within that account. You can easily create appointments, events, and meetings on your Outlook calendar.

In this chapter, you'll schedule an appointment and an event on your own calendar and work with appointment options including recurrence, reminders, and availability. You'll schedule a meeting with another person, and learn about responding to, updating, and canceling meeting requests. Then you'll experiment with different ways of looking at your calendar to find the view that is most effective for your daily working style.

Important

The exercises in this chapter assume that you're working with an Exchange account. Some functionality may be unavailable if you're working with a calendar that's part of another type of account.

1. Scheduling and Changing Appointments

Appointments are blocks of time you schedule for only yourself (as opposed to meetings, to which you invite other Outlook users). An appointment has a specific start time and a specific end time (as opposed to an event, which occurs for one or more full 24-hour periods).

To schedule an appointment, you enter, at the minimum, a subject and time in an appointment window. The basic appointment window also includes a field for the appointment location and a free form notes area in which you can store general information, including formatted text, Web site links, and even file attachments so that they are easily available to you at the time of the appointment.

When creating an appointment, you indicate your availability (referred to as Free/Busy time) by marking it as Free, Tentative, Busy, or Out Of Office. The appointment time is color-coded on your calendar to match the availability you indicate. Your availability is visible to other Outlook users on your network, and is also displayed when you share your calendar or send calendar information to other people.

Tip

When viewing your calendar in Day, Work Week, or Week view, each item on your Outlook task list appears in the Tasks section below its due date. You can schedule specific time to complete a task by dragging it from the Tasks area to your calendar.

By default, Outlook displays a reminder message 15 minutes before the start time of an appointment—you can change the reminder to occur as far as two weeks in advance, or you can turn it off completely if you want to. If you synchronize your Outlook installation with a mobile device, reminders also appear on your mobile device. This is very convenient when you are away from your computer.

If you have the same appointment on a regular basis—for example, a bimonthly haircut or a weekly exercise class—you can set it up in your Outlook calendar as a recurring appointment. A recurring appointment can happen at almost any regular interval, such as every Tuesday and Thursday, every other week, or the last day of every month. Configuring an appointment recurrence creates multiple instances of the appointment in your calendar at the time interval you specify. The individual appointments are linked. When making changes to a recurring appointment, you can choose to update all occurrences or only an individual occurrence of the appointment.

You can specify the time zone in which an appointment starts and ends. You might want to have different time zones if, for example, your "appointment" is an airplane flight that starts and ends in different time zones, and you want the flight to show up correctly wherever you're currently located.

In this exercise, you'll schedule an appointment and a recurring appointment, and you'll update appointments by using commands in the appointment window.

Note

SET UP You don't need any practice files to complete this exercise. Display the Calendar module in the default Day view, minimize the To-Do Bar, and then follow the steps.

In the Date Navigator at the top of the Navigation Pane, click tomorrow's date.
In the Calendar pane, point to the 12:00 P.M. time slot (or, if you already have an appointment scheduled at 12:00 P.M., to another time when you have 30 minutes available).

Click to add appointment appears in the time slot.
Click once to activate the time slot.

In this default mode, you can enter basic appointment details directly in the Calendar pane.
Type SBS Lunch with Jane, and then press Enter.

Important

The subject of each appointment, meeting, or event you create while working through the exercises in this book begins with SBS so that you can easily differentiate the practice items you create from other items on your calendar.

Outlook creates a half-hour appointment beginning at 12:00 P.M.
Drag the appointment from the 12:00 P.M. time slot to the 1:00 P.M. time slot (or, if you already have an appointment scheduled at 1:00 P.M., to another time when you have an hour available).

Outlook changes the appointment start time.
Point to the bottom border of the appointment, and when the pointer changes to a double-headed arrow, drag down one time slot so that the appointment ends at 2:00 P.M.

While the appointment is selected in the calendar, the Appointment contextual tab is available.

The most common appointment settings are available on the Appointment contextual tab.

You can add more details to the appointment and change the default settings from within the appointment window.
Double-click the SBS Lunch with Jane appointment.

The appointment window opens. The subject, start time, and end time are set according to the information you entered in the Calendar pane.
In the Location box, type Fourth Coffee.
On the Appointment tab of the appointment window (not the Appointment contextual tab in the Calendar module), in the Options group, click the Show As arrow, and then in the list, click Out of Office .
In the Options group, click the Reminder arrow, and then in the list, click 1 hour .
In the Tags group, click the Private button.

Marking an appointment, event, or meeting as Private hides the details from anyone you share your calendar with.

All of these settings other than the location are available from the Appointment contextual tab in the Calendar module.
In the Actions group, click the Save & Close button.

When the appointment window closes, Outlook applies your changes to the appointment shown on the calendar. Your availability is indicated by the colored bar on the left side of the appointment.

Outlook might display messages about the appointment based on other calendar information.

The settings on the Appointment contextual tab also reflect the changes you made to the appointment.
Double-click the 2:00 P.M. time slot.

Outlook opens an appointment window with the appointment start time set to 2:00 P.M. and the end time set 30 minutes later. Because this immediately follows the lunch appointment you just created, the information bar at the top of the meeting window indicates that the meeting is adjacent to another on your calendar.
In the Subject box, type SBS Staff Meeting. In the Location box, type Conference Room. Then in the notes area, type the following sentence:

Bring status reports.
On the Appointment tab, in the Options group, click the Recurrence button.

The Appointment Recurrence dialog box opens.

When configuring a weekly recurrence, you can change the time, day, frequency, and duration from the Appointment Recurrence dialog box.

The default appointment recurrence is weekly on the currently selected day of the week. You can set the appointment to recur until further notice, to end after a certain number of occurrences, or to end by a certain date.
In the End list, click 4:00 PM (2 hours). In the Range of recurrence area, click End after, and then in the box, replace 10 with 2.
To indicate that you want to create a 2-hour appointment beginning at 2:00 P.M. on the selected day of the week, this week and next week only, click OK in the Appointment Recurrence dialog box.

In the appointment window, the Start Time and End Time fields disappear and are replaced by the recurrence details.

Several aspects of the appointment window change to reflect that this is now a series of recurring appointments.
On the Appointment Series tab, in the Actions group, click the Save & Close button.

The new appointment appears on your calendar.
If necessary, scroll the Calendar pane to display the entire appointment.

The circling arrow icon at the right end of the time slot indicates the recurrence.

The completed appointments.
In the Date Navigator, click the weekday of the appointment in each of the next two weeks, to verify that the appointment appears on your calendar next week, but not the following week.

Note

CLEAN UP Retain the SBS Lunch with Jane and SBS Staff Meeting appointments in your calendar for use as practice files later in this chapter.

Adding National Holidays to Your Calendar

You can easily add the local holidays of any of over 80 countries to your Outlook calendar.

To add national holidays to your Outlook calendar, follow these steps:

Open the Outlook Options dialog box.
On the Calendar page of the Outlook Options dialog box, under Calendar Options, click Add Holidays.

The Add Holidays to Calendar dialog box opens.

More than 80 countries are available in the Add Holidays To Calendar dialog box.
Select the check boxes of the countries whose holidays you want to add to your calendar, and then click OK.

Tip

If you've already added the holidays for a selected country to your calendar, Outlook prompts you to verify that you want to install a second instance of each holiday. Assuming that you do not want to do this, click No.
After Outlook adds the selected country's holidays to your calendar, click OK in the confirmation message box and in the Outlook Options dialog box.

Outlook 2010 assigns a color category named Holiday to all the local holidays it adds to your calendar. To view all the holidays on your calendar, enter category:holiday in the Search box. Note that Outlook adds each holiday for the next 20 years to the calendar, so the entire list of results might not be displayed immediately (only the first 200 results). If the search returns more than 200 results, add search criteria to narrow down the field (for example, start:2012 to view all holidays in 2012) or click the information bar at the top of the search results list to display the entire list. You can narrow your search by using any of the displayed column headers followed by a colon and a search specification.

A basic search returns only the first 200 results; click the information bar to display all the results.

To remove national holidays from your calendar, follow these steps:

Use the Search function to locate the holidays you want to remove.
Select individual holidays you want to remove; or click any holiday in the list to activate the list, and then press Ctrl+A to select all the holidays in the search results.
Press the Delete key.

Tip

If you inadvertently add two sets of holidays from one country to the calendar, the easiest way to rectify the situation is to remove all of that country's holidays and then add them again.

Creating an Appointment from a Message

Many e-mail messages that you receive result in your wanting or needing to schedule an appointment on your calendar based on the information in the message—for example, a friend or co-worker might send you a message containing the details of the grand opening for a local art gallery that you want to add to your calendar. Outlook provides a convenient method of creating a Calendar item (an appointment, event, or meeting request) based on an e-mail message; you simply drag the message to the Calendar button in the Navigation Pane. When you release the mouse button, an appointment window opens, already filled in with the message subject as the appointment subject, the message text in the content pane, and any message attachments attached to the appointment. The start and end times are set to the next half-hour increment following the current time. You can convert the appointment to an event or meeting in the same way that you would create an event or meeting from within the Calendar module. You can retain any or all of the message information as part of the Calendar item so that you (or other meeting participants) have the information on hand when you need it. After creating the Calendar item, you can delete the actual message from your Inbox.

To create an appointment from an e-mail message:

Drag the message from the Mail pane to the Calendar button in the Navigation Pane, but don't release the mouse button.

As you hold the dragged message over the Calendar button, the Navigation Pane changes to display the Calendar module information instead of the Mail module information.
After the Navigation Pane content changes, release the mouse button to create an appointment based on the message.

You can convert the appointment to an event by selecting the All Day Event check box, or convert it to a meeting by inviting other people to attend. You can edit the information in the content pane without affecting the content of the original message, and you can move or delete the original message without affecting the appointment.
In the appointment window, click the Save & Close button to save the appointment to your calendar.

Others

- Microsoft Access 2010 : Customizing Fields - Assigning a Data Type, Viewing or Changing Field Properties

- Microsoft Access 2010 : Customizing Fields - Working with Tables

- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Connecting Shapes - Adding and Editing Connection Points

- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Connecting Shapes - Changing the Appearance of Connectors

- Microsoft Visio 2010 : Connecting Shapes in Multiple Ways

- Microsoft Project 2010 : Formatting and Sharing Your Plan (part 6) - Customizing and Printing Reports

- Microsoft Project 2010 : Formatting and Sharing Your Plan (part 5) - Printing Views

- Microsoft Project 2010 : Formatting and Sharing Your Plan (part 4) - Copying Views

- Microsoft Project 2010 : Formatting and Sharing Your Plan (part 3) - Drawing on a Gantt Chart

- Microsoft Project 2010 : Formatting and Sharing Your Plan (part 2) - Customizing the Timeline View