Having access to another person’s calendar can be really useful when you’re scheduling meetings. To start planning a meeting, open your calendar folder. Then click the Actions menu and click Plan a Meeting. This dialog box will open:

 

 

On the left hand side, you’ll see your name. On the right hand side, your calendar (with calendar entries represented as blue blocks) will appear in the line directly across from your name. When you add other users to the chart (and if you have access to their calendar) their calendar entries will also appear next to their name.

 

Remember that if the user has marked calendar entries with different properties, they may appear as different colours. There is a legend at the bottom of the Plan A Meeting dialog box: blue means busy, blue with white stripes means a tentative commitment, and purple means out of the office. If the calendar shows as white with green stripes, it means the information is not available. (This usually happens when you don’t have permission to view the user’s calendar, or the user is not on your network.)

 

You can add an attendee in one of two ways:

-       Type their name in the indicated spot in the chart on the left.

-       Click the Add Others button to choose people from your address book.

 

If you choose to add attendees from your address book, you will be prompted to enter them in one of three categories. Your name will automatically appear as required. You can click any contact and then click the Required, Optional, or Resources button to indicate their status. Also, remember that you can use the “Show names from the” drop-down window to pick a different source (such as the Global Address List). Once you’ve picked your contacts, just click the OK button to add them to your meeting.

 

If you’ve just typed in someone’s name in the Plan a Meeting dialog box, you can set their status by clicking the small icon next to their name in the chart.

 

 

After you’ve entered your attendees in the chart on the left, you can pick a meeting time using one of these methods:

-       Scroll through the calendar to find a convenient time.

-       Use the drop-down menus below the calendar to manually choose a time.

-       Click the AutoPick next button. This will tell Outlook to find the next time that all attendees are free.

 

Once you’ve added attendees and chosen a time, click the Make Meeting button. This will open a meeting request:

 

 

You’ll see that this looks a lot like a normal calendar appointment. However, we have some mail fields like To and Subject. The To field lists the people that you want to send your meeting to. The Subject field, obviously, lists the subject of your meeting. In this window, you can also check the All day event check box to send an event to people.

 

We can also click on the scheduling tab to see the Plan a Meeting window:

 

 

This allows you to change scheduling options without having to go through the whole wizard again.

 

Once we’ve got our information filled out, we can click Send to send our meeting.

 

 

When people receive the meeting, they will have options to accept or decline it. They can also respond “tentative,” which means maybe, or propose a new time.

  

Once we’ve sent the meeting, we can open the appointment to track those responses:

 

 

This tab sums up who you invited, what their status was (required or optional), and what their response was. In the example above, you can see that most people we invited can attend this meeting, so it can proceed as scheduled. If too many people declined or weren’t sure that they could attend, we could click on the scheduling tab to find a new time and re-send the request to keep everyone updated.