Category Archives: Calendaring

Calendar Permissions

Posted by on April 23rd, 2013
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Question: Why can someone see my calendar entries when I didn’t give them permission? I have only given a few people permission to edit my calendar.

Answer: More than likely you have inadvertently given access to everyone to view or edit your calendar. To check this from the calendar view, right click on your calendar and click Properties> Permissions (or click Calendar Permissions in the ribbon). You will see Default listed first, followed by those you gave permissions. Default is what anyone in the global address book can see. If  Default lists something other than Free/Busy time, you probably accidentally selected permissions when having Default selected. To change permissions, click the name (or Default) and click the permission level desired (normally it is Free/Busy time for Default). Free/busy is convenient for scheduling meetings and finding freetime of people across campus without allowing others to see your entries. You can also customize permissions by selecting various options in the Read, Write, Delete Items and Other categories.

Too many calendar notifications

Posted by on January 29th, 2013
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Question: I am support staff for my manager and I receive numerous meeting requests for her calendar. How can I stop getting these notifications?

Answer: If your manager sets you up as a delegate, the permissions causes the delegate to receive copies of meeting related messages by default. Your manager would need to uncheck the options for your delegation permissions.  In Outlook 2010, go to File > Account Settings > Delegation. Click your delegates name (or add a delegate here) and click permissions. Under Calendar permissions, uncheck the box that says, “Delegate receives copies of meeting-related messages sent to me.” In Outlook 2007, select Tools > Options > Delegates tab. For Outlook 2011 on the Mac, go to Outlook > Preferences > Accounts and click Advanced and select Delegates.

Creating reports from Outlook Calendar

Posted by on November 14th, 2012
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Question: Is there a way to generate a report of time from your outlook calendar if you’ve used the “categorize” function?  Or generate any type of reports from your Outlook calendar?

Answer: Yes, you certainly can create reports. From your calendar view, select View > Change View and select the List view. You’ll see your entries listed in column/row format. You can sort on headings, including a category. You can then select the entire list or a partial list and copy and paste into an email message, Word, or better yet, into Excel so that if you wanted to use filters or pivot tables, you can do that, and modify any way you want without affecting your calendar entries.

Custom Calendar Entries in Outlook

Posted by on November 14th, 2012
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Question: I would like to create a custom recurring calendar entry, but Outlook doesn’t allow this like Lotus Notes did. Do you have any suggestions to make it easier than having to create separate entries?

Answer: We former Lotus Notes users miss that feature and are hoping Microsoft will adress that in a future release. Below is what I do to save time rather than creating separate entries:

  1. Create the entry with any invitees or information in the body of the entry and save and close the entry.
  2. Go to the day view of the calendar and press your control key and using the small calendar in the upper left of the screen, move to the next date and click, select the next date and click and continue until you have all of the dates select.
  3. Those days will appear in the calendar view. Your original entry will be listed on the first day. Press the control key on the keyboard while dragging that entry to the other days. This will copy that entry to those days.
  4. Unfortunately, if you need to make a change to all of these entries in the series or delete it, you would have to edit each one separately and make the change, since they are not “connected” to each other like they would be in a true series.

 

Changing recurring meetings in Outlook

Posted by on August 28th, 2012
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Question: How do I change recurring meetings in Outlook without changing or losing previous meeting history?

Answer: This seems to be an annoying problem in Outlook, and one you have to be very careful with.  If you make any changes to a recurring entry, it could change your previous entries. In addition, if you have information in your message area in individual entries that is not part of the series, that information will be deleted. This is what we recommend when working with recurring entries:

  1. Do not include important data within your repeating entries. Instead, use the Notes feature within Outlook, which you can view in a list to see dates of the notes (click Notes at the bottom of your Outlook navigation pane – left side). You may also want to consider using OneNote or even a Word document.
  2. Do not schedule recurring meetings with “No end date.”
  3. If you are making changes to just one entry, do not select changing the entire series.
  4. If you change information on the repeating series, existing repeating entries will change to include the same information. For example, changing the location will change it on all entries. If you change the End date or other fields, you may get prompted with “Any exceptions associated with this recurring appointment will be canceled.” This means that anything you have included or changed on individual appointments in that series will be deleted.
  5. Instead, copy an existing repeating entry to another date by holding Ctrl and dragging to another date, then change the new recurrence information (start date, end date, location, etc) for the new series.
  6. If you change the original series end date, just realize that any notes on individual entries will be deleted.
  7. When creating recurring meetings, it is recommended you change the “No end date” to include no more than one year.

Below is a suggestion found on using Onenote to keep notes from meetings (from http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2008/12/change-outlook-recurring-appointments-without-losing-exceptions/)

“OneNote offers some workaround here as well. You can right click on an appointment and click “meeting notes” which will create a new page in OneNote with all the information from the appointment and any notes that are stored there, including the date, time, and location of the meeting. Then everything can be “filed” into notebooks. Then you don’t have to rely on Outlook to store any data and it doesn’t matter if appointments in the past are lost because you have a record of it in OneNote. I find it convenient to be able to sort things into notebooks in OneNote and put everything in my own order instead of having to search through my calendar for information. OneNote will also store links to documents or screenshots of documents and keeps attachments available when you export an email message to OneNote.”