MS Outlook Calendar
Advanced Options for Appointments
Need more functionality out of Outlook’s Calendar? It offers much, much more. Here’s how you add more advanced features to an appointment.
Modifying the Appointment
Double-click one of your entries or a blank entry to bring up a window full of options. Here, you can:
- Color-code your entries.
- Alter the delay time for the alarm notification or switch the alarm off entirely.
- E-mail this appointment to someone once you've turned it into a meeting.
- Add lots more information. If you send the appointment as an e-mail, this will form the body.
- Define the category(ies) this appointment belongs to.
- Make the appointment recur.
- Schedule this appointment as a meeting for a few people, and e-mail the appointment to them.
- Set this appointment up as an online meeting.
- Set the importance of this appointment.
- Make the appointment private.
That's not really an exhaustive list, but most of the other options are just further functions of sending it as an e-mail.
Common Tasks
There are too many variations on an appointment to list here, but there are a few common functions we'll go over.
- Changing the Alarm
Note the area marked by a b in the sample. Here, you can change settings for alarms.
Check or uncheck the box to turn the reminder on and off. Use the drop-down menu to change how much warning Outlook will give you before the appointment, from none (0 minutes) up to 2 weeks. If you'd like to change the default from 15 minutes, click Tools in the menu bar, then Options, then change it there. - Color-Coding
There are two forms of color-coding, which outlook calls "Label" and "Show Time As."
Label will determine what color the line will be, while Show Time As will determine what pattern the border will have, giving you information as to whether this is supposed to be busy or free time - it's busy by default. Use the drop-down menus to alter these variables and make your calendar more readable. - Making the Appointment Recur
If you've got an appointment scheduled for each Monday until the end of September of '07, you needn't type it in every time. Instead, click Recurrence, the space marked with an f in the sample.
From here, you have numerous options. You can set it up to recur on a daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly schedule, specifying the days on which the appointment will occur. At the bottom you'll define the range of the recurrence, whether it will last for 10 days, 10 months or eternity.
From now on, this appointment will be a series, and when you open any occurence of this appointment, Outlook will ask whether you'd like to edit just the one occurrence or all of them (the "series"). - Making an Appointment Private
To make an appointment private, check the box in the lower right-hand corner of the meeting box (letter j in the sample). When you leave this checked, only you may view this appointment, even if you've shared the calendar.