6. Recurring Appointments What happens if one meeting is reschedule or cancelled? Simply delete or change it! It does not affect the rest of the series.
Outlook is a powerful Personal Information Management (PIM) program. It’s purpose and design is to assist you in several different means of communication. Whether that’s e-mail, keeping track of your contact, managing projects, or even simplifying your schedule – there are features within Outlook that can help.
The Calendar within Outlook is perhaps one of the most overlooked features. Yes, it is true that the Outlook Calendar is primarily used to help you with managing appointments, it can do much more than that!Especially because all Outlook Calendars are NOT created equal!
Creating Personal/Profession appointments is one of the basics that All Outlook Calendars share. Simply clicking the “New” button on the toolbar in the upper, left hand corner opens a blank appointment window. Simply fill out the information for the meeting, such as start/end times and dates, location, and any notes you need! Click Save and Close, and the appointment is added to the toolbar.Whoa! What about re-occuring appointments, such as weekly meetings, bi-weekly meetings, or even monthly meetings? Do you have to enter each of those by hand?Well, you could, however, there are tools within Outlook that allow you to create all those in one fell swoop! Those are called recurring meetings.
See, in the Appointment window, there is a button labeled Recurrence. If the meeting is set on a predictable pattern, you can create all instances of that meeting (and manage them on a one-by-one basis if needed). Clicking on this Recurrence button allows you to establish this pattern for the meeting.In addition, once you’ve created those recurring meetings, you can manage each piece separately. As an example, if the department meeting is cancelled for August only, you can simply delete only that occurrence from your calendar, and the rest will remain!
You see, those are the basics that everyone has access to. However, in business environments, Outlook plays a central role in communication. You see, it all depends on the infrastructure behind it, as well as realized needs.The basics reveal that you can manage your own schedule – and while helpful, that may not help in communicating with others. Great you can add your monthly department meeting to your calendar, but will everyone else in your department do the same? Or will John Smith only show up twice this year?Here’s where we stop being basic users, and truly begin to use Outlooks real potential. And it starts with one of the greatest chores in the world of business:Scheduling a New Meeting
In truth, scheduling a meeting is no more difficult than creating a new appointment. What’s different is that after you’ve entered the start/end times, the date, and the location, you also “Invite Attendees”. Clicking this button opens a To: line at the top of the message for the e-mail addresses of recipients. Add these individuals to the list, but don’t hit Send just yet!