* Outlook uses your system clock (located in the very bottom right of your desktop) to determine the date, and so will automatically come up on the current day. *

The yellow middle section that dominates most of the screen is where you will create and view your appointments. Over to the right, you’ll notice a “month” view at the top – days with appointments will appear in bold. Underneath that is the TaskPad, which you can use to takes notes on tasks and check them off as completed when you’re done.

In the toolbar, you can see there are four buttons: ‘Day’, ‘Work Week’, ‘Week’, and ‘Month.’

These buttons toggle on and off, and only one view can be selected at a time. Try each one now, and you’ll see how the “main” appointment view changes to reflect each of those settings. (Later, after we create some appointments, mess with these again to get a better idea of how they work).

Also, going to “View,” and “Current View” gives you a wealth of other useful options for viewing your calendar information:

These views are also toggle on/off and only one can be selected at a time. Day/Week/Month is the default view, while Day/Week/Month View With AutoPreview is the same thing except it will replace the Task Pad with more miniature month views (this is the one I prefer). Active Appointments will display all your currently active appointments in a list, etc. Take a minute to explore some of these, though many may currently be blank if you haven’t used the Outlook Calendar before.

* Creating Appointments *

The main function of the Outlook Calendar is to schedule appointments. You can create a new appointment either by going to “File,” “New,” “Appointment,” or, even better, highlight however much time you think the appointment will take, then right-click and select “New Appointment”:

Once you’ve clicked “New Appointment,” however you choose to do it, you should get this screen:

1st – Fill in the Subject field with whatever text you would like to display that will remind you exactly what the appointment is about (try and keep it fairly short)
2nd – Fill in the Location (you can pull down the arrow menu to choose past locations)
3rd – Make sure the start time and end time are correct
4th – Decide whether or not to check the “Reminder” box, which will ding and pop up a dialogue box reminding you of your appointment however long before it you specify.

5th – Add in any extra information, comments, or notes to yourself.
6th – Select whether to display this appointment as “Busy,” “Tentative,” “Out of Office,” etc. *optional*
Finally – Click “Save and Close”

*Optional* Set the appointment to automatically occur at a set interval by clicking “Recurrence”

If entered as the above example, you should see this:

That’s it! We’ve just created a basic appointment and Outlook will automatically send us a reminder 15 minutes before it starts.

There are other types of appointments as well – one we’ll go over quickly is an “all-day event.” Creating one of these is almost exactly the same as creating a basic appointment. Just right click and select new all-day event instead of new appointment:

Then fill out the form as with a regular appointment. I’m going to call this event “John Doe’s Birthday.” Notice that all-day-events appear up at the gray area along the top rather than in the yellow:

* Inviting Other Users to an Appointment *

One of the best features about the Outlook calendar is the ability to invite other users to an appointment you’ve created. To do this, right click and select New Appointment, as normal:

This time, however, before clicking “Save and Close,” click on the “Attendee Availability” tab (make sure you’ve filled out the subject, location, and typed a message that you’d like to include in your invitation to your other attendess):

As of now, this won’t tell you very much, so the first thing you should do is click the “Invite Others” button below the list of attendees. You’ll get a screen that looks very similar to when you are using the global address book to find an email address:

Once you’ve selected the attendees, click OK. Now that we have some more attendees, let’s look at the “Attendee Availability” window once more:

You’ll notice I now have information about when each person is available (and, looking at the very top row labeled “All Attendees,” you can see if there’s any time at all that works for anyone. good luck!) You can modify the time for the appointment by adjusting the borders of the white area to see if you can make it fit better. Also, you’ll notice the color-coding down at the bottom. These correspond to whatever is set in this part of the appointment box:

Now, one thing to keep in mind about this feature is that, like spell-check, it’s not perfect. It depends on the attendees actually using their Outlook calendars to schedule all their appointments – just remember, Outlook retrieves this information from the exchange server, not the attendee’s mind (unfortunately). Another thing to keep in mind while scheduling your own appointments (or trying to schedule a good meeting time) is to allow for some buffer time. For example, if you have a Dentist appointment at 3:00, but need to leave at 2:30 in order to get there on time, then be sure and schedule it at 2:30, and not 3:00 so that people don’t think you’re available right up until 3:00.

In any case, even if the person doesn’t use Outlook to schedule all his/her appointments, you can still use this feature to send invitations to one. Keeping with my above example, once you’ve decided on a time (3:00 – 4:30, in this case) you’ll click “Send” in the upper left (just like an email).

Once you click “Send,” as long as you’ve typed in a “subject” earlier (it will make that the name of the meeting, so to speak) it will send the invitation to each person on the list. (If you haven’t yet typed a subject, it will prompt you to do so):

If your attendees accept the invitation, Outlook will automatically place it on their calendars for them. An invitation message looks like this:

Notice the three buttons along the top: “Accept,” “Tentative,” and “Decline.” (It also has a Calendar button, which gives you quick access to that day so you can see if you can make it or not). Once you know, click the appropriate button and it will send back an acceptance or denial, depending on what you choose, as well as placing the appointment on your calendar for you.

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