The calendar is the scheduling component of Outlook that is fully integrated with email, contacts, and other features.

To display the calendar, click on Calendar in the navigation pane.

You can change the display of the calendar with the Day, Work Week (5-day week), Week (7-day week), and Month buttons on the Home tab.

You can move about the calendar using the Next and Previous arrow buttons. There is also a Today button on the Home tab, and a View Date button which lets you select a date to display.

Guidance:

Click the New Appointment button to create an appointment to indicate when you are busy. You can also configure the below options:

  • Use the Subject area to give the appointment a title.
  • Use Start time and date and End time and date to specify when the appointment starts and ends.
  • You can also optionally select a Location plus any additional notes within the text box area.

In the Appointment tab, in the Options group, the Show As status defaults to Busy, but the other options are Out of Office, Tentative, or Free. You might use "Free" to remind yourself when something is going to happen, even though you won't personally be attending. Set the Status as appropriate.

Reminder defaults to 15 minutes before the appointment and will give you a reminder at the specified time. Amend this as required (scroll up for None).

There is a Private button in the Tags group, which you may wish to use if you choose to share your calendar details with others but you want the details of this appointment to be private.

Make any other settings required and click Save & Close to create the appointment.

Note: That you can have multiple events at the same or overlapping times. You will get a warning if there are overlapping appointments not marked as Free.

Either right-click in the all day area at the top of a particular day and select New All Day Event or create an appointment as above and select the All day event checkbox. This is very like an Appointment, but it lasts for one or more whole days.

Make any other settings required and click Save & Close to create the all day event.

Note: that the Status defaults to Free, so set it as required.

Quite often you will have appointments (and perhaps all day events) which regularly repeat. You do not have to create a new appointment for each occurrence, you can set these up in one go using the Recurrence button on the appointment (or all day event).

The Recurrence button will give you common options such as Once only, Every Wednesday, Day 18 of Every Month, Every 18 May, Every Day, and Custom.

The Custom option gives you further options:

  • Recurrence pattern can be set to Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly
  • For all options you can specify the End by date, or End after so many occurrences, or leave at No end date for it to continue indefinitely
  • For Weekly, you can specify Recur every so many (defaults to 1) weeks
  • For Weekly, you can specify one or more than one weekday (with Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday checkboxes

With Monthly, you can specify a particular Day date, like the 9th. Alternatively, you can specify the First, Second, Third, Fourth, or Last and then choose from Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Day, or Weekday, or Weekend day. Thus, you can have the appointment being the Third Tuesday in the month, or the First weekday.

Note: That as well as having recurring appointments, you can have recurring meetings (which involve other people) – you can invite a group of people to a recurring meeting such as a committee meeting, e.g., once a month.

If you open a recurring appointment or a recurring meeting in the calendar, you will be asked, Do you want to open only the occurrence or the series?

  • Choose Open the Series and click OK to open the series.
  • Click on the Recurrence button to change the rules of the recurrence for the entire series.

An example of what you can do here, in the Action group you click the Delete button, you will remove every occurrence of this repeating event (including those in the past) or you could could set the End date for the series.

Changing One Single Appointment in the Series

  • If you double-click on an occurrence of a recurring meeting or appointment in the calendar,
  • Click on Open this occurrence and click OK, you will open up that single occurrence and not the entire series.

If you make any changes here, they apply to just this once occurrence of the series.

Note: You can change the time and/or date of this once occurrence.