Tip of the week # 557
30 November 2018


Send a copy of your calendar as an email attachment (Microsoft Outlook) *

Following the large interest in and attendance of the PA Day earlier this year, the Møller Centre in Cambridge held another event for PAs and EAs last Friday and I was - once again - invited to be a guest speaker. This time I helped the 50-odd delegates (odd, as in being in excess of the indicated number; not odd as in strange) to gain control over their and their boss' busy Outlook calendar. The feature I showed to help scheduling a meeting with someone outside your organisation seemed to strike a chord... As they don't have access to your calendar this can be a bit of a pain, with lots of messages being sent backwards and forwards. Instead, why not send your calendar to someone in another company as an email attachment - or ask them to forward their calendar to you.

Here's how:

  1. Open your Calendar as normal (CTRL + 2, anyone?)
  2. Click on the Email Calendar button in the Share group on the Home tab.
  3. Change the calendar information you want to include using the various options.
  4. Click OK.
  5. Complete and send the message as normal.

The recipient will see the time as "Free", "Busy", "Tentative", or "Out of Office", unless you changed the level of detail in step 3. The calendar attachment will open side-by-side to their own, which means they can easily compare its content. Click on the Schedule View button to show the calendars in a horizontal layout.

By the way, you won't be able to use the Scheduling tool to help you find the best time for a meeting with the "external calendar", but as all dates that contain appointments in either of the calendars are bold in the tiny calendars in the To-Do Bar you can use that to quickly find suitable dates. (For some weird reason Microsoft has removed the days-with-appointments-in-bold feature from version 2013 onwards.)

Oh, and the recipient does not have to use Outlook in order to see the information.

Related tips:
Tip # 512: Find the best time to schedule a meeting (tip_512.php)
Tip # 438: Display multiple calendar months in the Date Navigator (tip_438.php)
Tip # 428: View multiple calendars at the same time (tip_428.php)
Tip # 259: Quickly jump between the various Outlook components (tip_259.php)

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* Unless stated otherwise, these tips were written for Microsoft Office 2010.