Life can get pretty hectic. Between taking or teaching classes, group meetings, your job/internship, and your social life, you can easily lose track of it all. With Outlook Calendar, your whole schedule is in one spot, so making plans and sticking to them is a breeze. Here’s how to get the most out of Outlook.

Consolidate Everything

You’ve got your class schedule in a nice, color-coded spreadsheet. A Google calendar for personal plans. You’ve clicked that you’re interested in a University Calendar or Facebook event. Your professor sent you a Teams or Zoom invite. Your schedule is all over the place! So how are you supposed to know what you’re doing at any given moment and when you’re free?

Time to consolidate! Put everything in Outlook Calendar. With the mobile app, online portal, and desktop app, you can check it at any time, from any device. So stick it all in there: classes, meetings, social events … even focused alone time so you can finish up a project. Then, get your friends, classmates, and coworkers to do the same so you can schedule meetings and make plans with ease.

Schedule with Ease

Speaking of scheduling … Outlook Calendar is super easy to use. Just go to the day and click New Meeting or New Appointment and enter the details. Use “Make Recurring” if it’s something that happens on a regular schedule (e.g., a regular club, class, or work meeting), so you don’t have to enter each session individually.

Where scheduling gets complicated is when you need to coordinate schedules with other people. Outlook Calendar has a number of tools that make it much simpler.

1. Scheduling Assistant visually identifies free time on both your and other people’s calendars. From a New Meeting window, click on the Scheduling Assistant tab. You’ll see a graph showing everyone’s schedule, with busy times blocked out. Just scroll until you find a time when everyone is free. There’s even an “AutoPick” button that will find the first available time for everyone.
2. Find Time is a free Outlook extension that can create a poll of potential meeting times. Think Doodle. We love Find Time because it looks at everyone’s calendars and suggests times based on people’s availability. Find Time is great when you have a large group, when there is no obvious time that all of you are free, or if only some of you have an up-to-date calendar.
3. Attach a Calendar to an Email a great option if you’re trying to schedule a meeting with someone who doesn’t use Outlook Calendar or isn’t affiliated with Pitt, so you have no idea when they’re free. It’s basically the electronic version of saying, “Here’s when I’m free. You pick a time.” Just start an email and click in the body. Then click Insert > Calendar. You can pick whatever date range you want. People won’t see your specific meetings – just when you are booked.

To-Do Lists = All-Day Appointments

There are lots of apps for creating a to-do list. Even Outlook has a separate Tasks and To-Do section. But if you’re like me, if it’s not in front of your face, you’ll forget about it. Keep it all front and center by placing it on your calendar as an All-Day Appointment.

All-Day Appointments appear at the top of the day’s calendar. They don’t block off your whole day as Busy (unless you manually tell it to), so you’ll appear as free if someone is scheduling something with you. Even when you scroll down through the day, that nifty little list stays at the top. If you don’t get to it, you can just drag and drop it to another day.

Creating to-dos with an all-day appointment has the advantage of helping you to better appreciate how that task relates to other items on your calendar. For example, you might create a to-do for sending out a meeting agenda. If you’re thinking of putting it off, you can see what the rest of your week looks like so you can pick a day when you’ll have time to do it.

Color-Code Meetings

A giant calendar of meetings can seem a little overwhelming — how can you tell what’s what at a glance? You can color-code your meetings, classes, work schedule, etc. by using the “Categorize” feature. To assign a color to an appointment, click on the appointment and click Categorize from the Appointment tab. (While creating an event, click on Tags > Categorize from the ribbon.)

You can pick whatever category color you want, and rename the categories to something logical, like Classes, Club, Work, Personal, etc. Color coding makes it easy for you to visualize everything you need to do and helps you know at a glance what can be skipped or rescheduled vs. must-dos.

Link Your Meetings to OneNote

There are many events for which you’ll be taking notes, e.g., classes and work meetings. We love using OneNote to keep our notes organized and accessible. You can easily link a meeting to a OneNote notebook page. Send to OneNote will automatically create a new page for the meeting, and will include the meeting information (including location, date/time, and link) right at the top of the page.

Save yourself the hassle of creating a new OneNote page by opening the meeting and clicking Send to OneNote from the ribbon of the meeting window. From the OneNote task pane that appears, select the notebook and section where you want your meeting notes to be saved.

Add Another Time Zone

If you regularly communicate with people in a different time zone, it may be helpful to add their time zone to your Calendar. Maybe it’s a colleague in a virtual internship or your family who lives on the other side of the country (or world!). Adding their time zone make sure you don’t schedule anything in the middle of the night for them — no conversion math required. Click on File > Options. On the Calendar tab, under Time zones, select the “Show a second time zone” box. Label the time zone appropriately and then click the time zone to add.

Get and Stay Organized with Outlook Calendar

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re thinking about all the things you need to do, but with Outlook Calendar, students, faculty, and staff alike can easily organize everything they have to do. To learn more about the magic of Outlook, check out this page on all things Outlook email and calendar tips.

-- By Claudia Huggins, Pitt IT Student Blogger