Use Your Outlook Calendar

For the rest of the month and for all of February, input all of your meetings into your Outlook calendar (it's in your email). Yes, this will take some time—initially, about 30 minutes, depending on how organized you are.

An online calendar, when used effectively, can not only help you keep track of your own activities, it can also help you schedule meetings, appointments, events, and and other activities with colleagues, because it allows co-workers to see your schedule, and for them to see yours. The best of such calendars allow you to update your calendar, and view those of your co-workers, from anywhere with an Internet connection, not just your onsite office computer.

But a calendar is only valuable as a collaboration tool if everyone is using it. If you aren't entering information into your calendar, others won't have the right information to schedule meetings with you.

Here are several online videos to help you with your Outlook Calendar.

Add Your Appointments to Your Calendar

Learning Goal: Add appointments and meetings to your calendar. Here's a 49 second video tutorial.



Make sure that you select the correct item beside "Show Time As." You have several options, including: Free, Busy, Tentative and Out of the Office. This will be critical in enabling other people to schedule meetings with you.

Creating a Calendar Group

The Calendar group schedule makes it easy for you to see the combined schedules of a number of people needed at a meeting. You can look up a resource's availability, compare its schedule to yours, and block out time in its Calendar. You invite resources to your meetings the same way that you invite people.) at a glance.

You can create and save multiple group schedules, each showing a group of people or resources. For example, one group schedule might contain all employees in a department. Another group schedule might contain all conference rooms in a building. A group schedule can include all of the contacts or resources from a public folder.

While viewing a group schedule, you can quickly schedule a meeting with or send e-mail to some or all of the group members. You can get the latest free/busy information for each group member before you schedule a meeting, and you can use AutoPick to find a time that's free for all group members.

The group calendar will by default contain details of all items shown, unless the owner of an item has marked it as private.

Learning Goal: Create a calendar group that includes everyone in the office. Here's a video tutorial (1:29).

Bonus

Share your calendar with your manager or anyone else who often needs to schedule meetings with you. Here's a video tutorial that's less than one minute.