How to Setup Appointments and Meetings in Microsoft Outlook 2013
Outlook 2013 features a Calendar mode that gives users access to multiple color-coded calendars corresponding to different accounts. The Ribbon function is noticeably different in Calendar mode than in Email mode, featuring different options in Tabs as well as unique Contextual Tabs. Calendar mode involves two general types of events, Appointments and Meetings, and allows users to create and manage them through various options. Appointments and Meetings appear in bold numbering within the Calendar, and hovering over these dates brings up general information such as Subject, Location, Date, Start/End Time, Notes, Reminder and People Invited.
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Video transcripts:
Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take our first look at the Outlook 2013 calendar, and to get into the calendar all we need to do is to click on Calendar there, just above the Status Bar.
Now the first thing to notice here is that if you look at the bottom of the folders pane here, you can see that it says My Calendars, Calendars with an S. It’s actually showing two calendars. One of them is associated with this installation of Outlook as I’ll explain later on and one of them is associated with the email account that I’ve just setup. Now it’s perfectly feasible to have more than one calendar in force and if you’ve setup your new email account in the way that I’ve done so far on this course, you’ll probably finish up with two calendars as well. Now you may want to keep two calendars. You may want one for work. You may want one for home. You may want to merge them together. You may want to keep them separate. But for the moment to do the basics of calendars, I’m really just going to only use one calendar. So I’m going to uncheck the calendar that is associated with that email account, toby.a@live.co.uk, just for the moment. So I’m going to uncheck that and revert back to having just the one calendar.
Now as you’ll have realized by now everything that we can see on the Ribbon is totally different when you’re looking at a calendar than when you’re looking at email. Let’s start with the Home tab. We did look at this very briefly earlier on, but the most basic arrangement really is whether you want to see a day in the calendar, a work week which in my case is Monday through Friday, a week which is the whole week with a week starting on Sunday, or a month. Now on the left in the Folder Pane which, of course, holds completely different things to the Folder Pane in email, we have a Date Navigator and the date navigator lets us step through the calendar in a few ways. Now currently at the top I’ve got March 2013. I can see the next month below it. If I use these little arrows to the right here, I can go through a month at a time. I can choose a particular day; so, say, the 17th of July 2013. That then appears and I see in the main window there what’s happening on July the 17th. Now at any time, I can get back to today by clicking on the Today button here. That takes me back to today. I’m recording this on March the 1st 2013.
Now before we start to create appointments, let’s just have a look at the View tab in Calendar View and we have the usual selection here under Layout. We can choose to show or not show the Folder Pane. So let’s switch the Folder Pane off; it disappears. Switch it back on again, it’s there in normal view. I think you’ll get the hang of the Folder Pane by now. It’s different in these different modes of operation when we’re looking at mail, calendar, people, tasks, but I won’t keep mentioning that. I think you should have the hang of that by now. Similarly, the To-do bar works in much the same way as well. So, on the To-do bar I could choose to show people. I can choose to show calendar. I can choose to just close the whole thing, one step at a time. And, of course, the Reading Pane when we’re dealing with Calendar View will give us information not about emails but about appointments and I’ll come back to that in a little while. So let’s go back to Home again and let’s create our first appointment.
Now in Outlook 2013, there is a definite distinction between an appointment and a meeting. An appointment is basically something that just involves you. If you don’t need to check anybody else is available, you don’t have to discuss the time with other people, or expect people to confirm that they can or can’t attend. All you’re doing is putting an appointment in your calendar. Now I’m going to put myself down for a dentist appointment next Friday. Bad news I know, but let’s suppose I’m going to the dentist next Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. So I click on New Appointment and now I see this window where I’m going to fill in details of the appointment. Now as you’re probably expecting by now there are an awful lot of things that I can specify about an appointment and most of them we’re going to cover later. For the moment, all I’m going to do is to put in a subject which is going to be Dentist. Fortunately, it’s just my regular check-up. So maybe I’ll get away without needing anything to be done. The location. Well, my dentist is in the town of Darlington in County Durham. And it’s next Friday so I can use the date picker here under start time and next Friday is March the 8th and the start time is 2 p.m., so the time picker 2 p.m. And finish date gets changed to the same as the start date automatically. So that’s already on March the 8th and I can say well hopefully 30 minutes will be long enough for a check-up. It’s certainly not an all day event which is what I would check here if it were an all day event. Now while I’m there, I can perhaps just make a little note to myself to say, Ask him about the new insurance scheme. He’s running a new insurance scheme whereby you can pay a fixed amount each month to cover all of your dental treatment for the year. I think that sounds like a good idea but that’s just a reminder to myself to check that with him. And when I’ve put in all the details that I’m going to put in, I just click on Save and Close.
Now this may be very slightly difficult for you to see but if you look in the Folder Pane on the left, you’ll just see now that Friday the 8th has a slightly bolder number in it and that indicates that I have at least one appointment on that day. If I wanted to check what that appointment was, I could just click on the day and I can see down here Dentist check-up Darlington. If I hover over the appointment, you’ll see that the main information appears in that little balloon on the left there, Dentist check-up. And if I select that and then switch on the Reading Pane, put it on the right, you’ll see that the details of that appointment appear in the Reading Pane. Similar sort of idea behind reading an email, of course, but this time I’m looking at the details of an appointment. I’m not going to leave the Reading Pane there. I’m going to put it off for the moment.
And one of the things that I’ve just realized I’ve done wrongly with this. Let me just hover over it again. It says Dentist check-up. There’s the date and time. Location Darlington; reminder 15 minutes. Now hang on a minute. That’s no good, 15 minutes, because it takes me 30 minutes to get there. Reminding myself 15 minutes before it that that appointment is there is not a very good idea. So what I think I’m going to do is to warn myself the day before.
Now if you want to modify an appointment; easy to do, just double click and we’re back in that appointment window. We look at the details of the appointment and in the options section on the Appointment tab, one of the options is it’s got a little bell next to it and it’s the reminder. Choose when to be reminded of this item. Now currently I’m saying reminding me 15 minutes before the appointment occurs. Something that’s half an hour away, that’s not going to be particularly helpful. If I click on the drop down, I have a number of options there, a whole range. I’m going to ask to be reminded about it one day beforehand. Now that means that Outlook, provided I’ve got it open, of course, will remind me a day before the start time of that appointment which is 2 p.m. on Friday. So 2 p.m. Thursday, I’ll get a reminder to say you’ve got to go to the dentist tomorrow. When that happens what I would normally would do is to reset the reminder to say an hour before to make sure I have time to get myself ready and still give myself plenty of time to drive to Darlington to my dentist, and so it’s as simple as that. When I finish making my changes, I click on Save and Close and the updated appointment is stored in my calendar.
Now I mentioned earlier on in the course about context sensitive tabs and with this appointment selected, Dentist check-up Darlington, I have the Calendar Tools Appointment tab. You’ll only see this when you’re working in the calendar and if I click on that Appointment tab, I have access to many of the settings for that appointment that mean I don’t have to actually open the appointment up in a separate window in order to reset things like the reminder. I can do that right here on this tab. I can also setup recurrence which I’ll look at later and I can categorize the appointment. I can give it a high priority, make it private, etc. We’ll look at all these things later on in the course.
So the next thing I’m going to do is to schedule a meeting and this time, I’m going to schedule it in my other calendar mainly to show that I certainly can. So if I switch on my toby.a calendar and off my Outlook data file calendar, more of both of those later. I’m now going to schedule a meeting, so I click on New Meeting on the Home tab. Now for this meeting, the first thing I’m going to do is to invite somebody else to it and the person I’m going to invite to it is Steve. There he is. Note that because Outlook is aware that I’ve typed an email address in before starting with an S, steve@tobyarnott.com, there it is. Now I’m going to send Steve the presentation on Monday and I really want to review the presentation with him. So I’ll type as the subject, Review presentation, and the location we’ll make My office and let’s say Wednesday. I’m going to send it on Monday, so let’s say Wednesday. Let’s say Wednesday morning at 10. There’s a reasonable amount to cover then so let’s allow a couple of hours, say until 12 p.m. Now as with the appointment, there are many other things that I could specify here; other options available, reminders, etc. but I’m just going to say in here. So there we are and that’s just a little note to Steve to tell him what the meeting is for and I’m happy with that. All I need to do is to click on Send.
Now if you look at March the 6th in the calendar, there you can probably just about see it’s a bolder number six than the surrounding numbers. It might be quite difficult to see there but you should be able to make that out. Click on the six and there, of course, is my proposed meeting with Steve.
Now Outlook 2013 knows that I have multiple calendars and it color codes them. This calendar, the toby.a calendar, the one that’s selected at the moment, I’m thinking of this as my work calendar whereas the other one I’m thinking of as my home calendar. My work calendar is color coded green. If I hover over that proposed meeting, the main details of the meeting are shown: Review presentation, I’ve got a start and time, organizer, that’s me, location, reminder. If I click on that meeting, I get calendar tools for a meeting which some of them are the same as for an appointment such as the reminders. Some of them are those more relevant to a meeting like add or remove attendees, contact attendees, and tracking which basically keeps track of who said they can attend and who said they can’t.
And to get some more information about the status of attendees, if I click on the View tab and then on the Reading Pane, I’ll put it on the right. Not only do you get a little summary of the meeting on the right, but in this case you get a summary at the top in terms of the responses to these invitations to the meeting. So no responses have been received for this meeting. So I know that I’ve invited Steve but I haven’t heard anything back from him yet. And until I do, I won’t really know whether the meetings on or not. So let’s see what Steve says.
So I’m going to do a few other things while I’m just waiting for that. Let me just go back into my email, see if there’s anything new there. Let’s go to the Inbox. Ah that’s good, Steve has accepted this meeting. That’s great.
Let’s go back and have a look at the meeting again. Let’s go back into the calendar and I’m going to go to that particular meeting again, click on it. Oh, there we are. Attendee responses, one accepted, zero tentatively accepted, and zero declined. And in fact on the Meeting tab, if I click on Tracking, I’ll see there that Steve, a required attendee, has accepted. So that’s good news. Steve’s okay for that meeting.
So that’s a pretty straightforward meeting that we’ve arranged there with just one other person. But you get some idea of the power of arranging meetings using Outlook and you can actually do a lot more than that when you’re arranging meetings. You can look for available time slots and all sorts of other things, but we’ll come back to those topics later on in the course. For now that’s enough on the calendar for the moment. We’re going to move on in the next section to look at people or if you like, contacts. I’ll see you then.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
