This is the first article in the Simply Put, by Ryn: Microsoft Outlook Tips series. Previous entries:

Outlook. I know all you techie types hate Microsoft. But I’m going to share some tips that you may or may not know about using your Outlook calendar. Not only does using your Outlook calendar help you communicate company-wide, it can be fun! (Yeah, yeah. Quit rolling your eyes.) This is Part I (of how many, I don’t know) in a series of articles about using some of the features in Outlook (not just the calendar). Today I’m going to write about checking availability of your co-workers and using the Label function to color your appointments.

Check Availability

Did you know you can check the schedule of all your co-workers? Now, don’t get excited; you can’t actually see what they are doing, but you can see when their time is available so that you don’t double-book them (which, in all honesty, is just plain polite). When you schedule a meeting with someone who is not busy, it is much harder for them to make excuses that they are busy – because you can see, plain as day, that they are not.

Note: I sure hope you know this, but this feature does not work for people not on your network.

Let’s see if Scott is busy since I need to speak with him about Insights. I schedule a calendar invite as usual, but before sending it, I click the Scheduling tab. In the example below I am trying to schedule a meeting with Scott to meet 11-11:30am.

Outlook_Appt_Free

The schedule shows me that we are both free. Scott’s is booked from 8-10:30am and then again from 12-2pm. I’m booked from 8-8:30am.

Let’s say I had originally picked 9-9:30am. The schedule would have looked like this, and I would have known Scott is busy:

Outlook_Appt_Busy

I could change the meeting time by either typing in a new Meeting start time and Meeting end time at the bottom of the screen, or by dragging the green and red bars to appropriate times.Either way, once you have a time where both parties are free (or more, if you want the meeting to have multiple people), click Send.

That’s it.

Using the Label function

I’m a color freak. I like color EVERY WHERE. So, I like to color my calendar using the Label feature. Below is a picture of my calendar on a very busy week.

Outlook_Calendar

Beautiful, isn’t it? Ok, well let’s color the appointment we just made with Scott. How about orange? Prior to sending (or after you’ve sent; it doesn’t matter), open the Appointment tab and choose a color from the Label drop-down menu (you can see I have an extensive label coloring system).

Outlook_Calendar_Color_Label_Dropdown

By the way, you can use the Labeling with all appointments; they don’t have to be invites. For instance, on July 20th I am going out to dinner. I have already the scheduled the appointment in my calendar but now I want to color it green. I right-click the appointment and the following menu appears. I pick green.

Outlook_Calendar_Color_Label_Menu

You can customize your labels by choosing Edit Labels.

Outlook_Edit_Labels

You are now on your way to having your very own colorful calendar.

Next time: More Outlook calendar tips.

This is the first article in the Simply Put, by Ryn: Microsoft Outlook Tips series. Previous entries:

Karyn Goldstein was given the nickname Ryn when she was 16-years old. (We won’t say how old she is now.) She is the lone technical writer at Network Physics, dabbling in fiction on the side. But mostly, she runs around and drives the engineers crazy. We think they are happy she’s mostly remote. She will be contributing articles like this one regularly to the site.