How to Setup Calendar Options in Outlook 2013
Outlook 2013 provides various options for customizing the Calendar, and these options are found in the Backstage View’s Options section. The first set of options deal with Work Time, defining work days and the Calendar’s format. The Calendar Options section includes a Reminder option and Propose New Time option for event attendees. Another option is Add Holidays, allowing the user to import public holidays to the Calendar automatically. Display Options involve the appearance and layout of the Calendar, including color and week numbers, and the Weather Bar incorporates weather conditions and temperature into the Calendar.
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Video transcripts:
Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at calendar options. So we need to go into Backstage View, into Options and select Calendar.
The first set of options are labeled Work time and here you say that your work hours are, specify start time, in my case 8 a.m., end time 5 p.m. That’s the default. And then you specify which days of the week are your standard work days. Monday to Friday are my standard working days. And then you can choose which day of the week is the first day of your week. So on my calendar, you may have noticed that the first day of the week is Sunday which is a nonworking day and then the last of the week is Saturday. And you can also specify which of the weeks of the year is the first week of the year. And in my case, basically week number one in the year is the one that contains January 1st.
The second set of options is labeled Calendar Options. And the first of these, if it’s checked, means that you get default reminders when you create an appointment and the time period for the reminder is set here. By default, it’s set to 15 minutes but you can set it to any of those values there. I’m going to leave it set at 15 minutes. And it also gives you a checkbox where you can allow attendees to propose new times for meetings. If you propose a new meeting time, then the response type that you send will be tentative. Now I’m going to explain a little bit about those response types a little bit later on.
But the next option is Add holidays to the calendar so that you don’t have to add all of the public holidays in yourself for each year that you’re using your calendar. You can click on this button and specify whose public holidays you would like copied into your Outlook calendar. Now for mine it’s defaulting to United States but I actually want the United Kingdom holidays in mine so I’m going to click on OK for the U.K. holidays. The holidays are now added to the calendar. I’ll take a look at those in just a moment.
Now a couple of these options are outside the scope of this course. The change the permissions for viewing free and busy information, free/busy options, options there to publish your calendar to a location where other people can see it. That’s outside the scope of what we’re doing. You can enable an alternate calendar. Again, outside the scope of what we’re doing.
I’m going to move on now to these later sections one of which is display options. You can choose a default calendar color. These tend to be fairly pale sort of pastel colors. If you want to change the color of your calendar, you certainly can there. And you can also choose whether or not to show week numbers in the month view and in the date navigator view. Now I’ve actually got week numbers switched on at the moment and I’ll show you what those week numbers are in just a moment. And then you have a couple of switching options here. Automatically switch from vertical layout to schedule view when the number of displayed calendars is greater than or equal to five. You’ve already seen what happens when we have a number of calendars shown. Well, if you go above a certain number you can rearrange them from being in a vertical layout to what’s called schedule view. I’ll leave you to experiment with that. It’d take a little while to demonstrate that. And also you should setup here your time zone. Mine is on UTC which is the U.K. island Portugal time.
Now I’ve got another couple of options down here that you may find useful. One of them we’ve already seen screen tips. Well, if you want to show calendar details in screen tips, there’s a checkbox there for that. And you can also setup Outlook to automatically accept or decline meeting requests; certain conditions under which you can do that. Again, outside the scope of this course but if you want to find out more about automatic scheduling and so on, that’s another one of the options you’d need to look at.
And finally I mentioned one of the new features of Outlook 2013 is the Weather Bar on the calendar. And you can certainly choose whether or not to show the weather bar on the calendar. There I’ve got it ticked so that the weather bar is shown. And you can choose whether to show the temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
So we’ve been through the calendar options. I want to just now quickly show you what a few of those have achieved.
So first of all, let’s look at week numbers. If you look at the little date navigators on the left here, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday through Saturday, the tiny little numbers to the left of the days of the month there, they are the week numbers in the year. So it’s currently March 6th, the Wednesday. That’s week 10 in the current year and that’s what the week numbers that are shown mean.
So now let’s look at the weather bar. You can see the weather bar there. There’s the forecast for today; cloudy, 42 degrees. Hover over it to get a little bit more detail. If you can’t see the location, sometimes you need to just minimize the Navigation Pane there, and you’ll see the location. Now it defaults to being New York. I definitely do not live in New York. So I’m going to find my location. Nearest location for me would be the city of York in the United Kingdom. So if I search on that there’s York, Great Britain, and that’s today’s and tomorrow’s forecast for my location; quite handy seeing it there just above my calendar.
Now a little while ago, you will have seen me select the United Kingdom public holidays to go into my calendar. But just to demonstrate something you need to be careful about here, the calendar I’m looking at, at the moment is my toby.a calendar. That’s the one associated with my Microsoft Live account. When you make a setting like the one we just did in Options for public holidays, that’s in the Outlook data file calendar. So I need to switch that on so I can see that and you’ll see that in that one, the one that’s blue here, you can see one of the public holidays. The public holiday there is Good Friday. There isn’t an equivalent in my toby.a calendar. It’s not shown in there automatically by this option in Outlook because it’s a calendar associated with a Microsoft Live account. If I go through to April 2013, you’ll see there the next public holiday in the U.K. is Easter Monday, but again no equivalent there in the toby.a account. So that’s something to be careful about.
Now there’s just one other thing to show you in this section. If I go to mail, you’ll see that I’ve actually received an email from my colleague Larry inviting me to a meeting. Now so far, I’ve sent out a meeting request. I sent one to Steve that you may remember which he accepted. But so far, you haven’t seen the receipt of a meeting request. It comes in the form of an email. You can tell it’s a meeting request because of that little icon there with the two little people on it and the calendar behind it. And on the meeting request apart from the simple title of Discuss production review, and I can see briefly what the proposed date and time is. It’s Monday, March the 11th 3 until 4:30 in Larry’s office. And I also then get the options and these are the terms that I was referring to earlier in this section. I can accept the meeting request. I can edit the response before sending. So if I were to accept this request, I would say Accept and an email would be created accepting it ready to go back to Larry, and I could edit the response before I sent the message. I could just send the response now or I could accept it but not send a response. I then have an option for a tentative acceptance. I have an option to decline the meeting and I have an option to propose a new time, and they’re all the things that we talked about earlier on in this section. I also have an option here to click into my calendar, and if I click into calendar, what happens is that Outlook 2013 takes me to my calendar, to that particular day and time. It’s 3 o’clock on Monday afternoon. I can see the status in the little bubble on the left round the bottom. The meeting has not been accepted. And if I click within that meeting request, I open up the meeting calendar tools. Look at the tab at the top of the screen, and there I have the same range of options. I can accept, tentative, decline, propose new time, etc. And in fact, even if I just right click here, the right click menu gives me those options: Accept, Tentative, Decline, and so on. So these are the available options and commands for me to deal with an incoming meeting request.
Now Larry’s requested that meeting. I can’t see any reason why I shouldn’t attend. I’m quite happy to talk about that subject with him so I’m going to accept the meeting request. I’m a little bit busy to type in a message just to thank him or just to put a greeting in there so I’m just going to say send the response now and he will just get an accept response. Now once I’ve done that, if I now hover over the meeting again it’s no longer a not accepted meeting; it’s actually in my schedule and you’ll see that there is a 15 minute reminder on it as well.
So we’ve looked at calendar options in this section and we’ve looked at some of the most significant consequences of those calendar options. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
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!
