Microsoft Outlook Calendar: My Favorite Views, Hacks, Tips & Tricks -- for Outlook Local Client

All right. Hi everybody. Uh, I hope you enjoy today's video. Um, this was one of my more popular videos a few years ago, but I wanted to remake it because there's been so many changes to the platform, uh, in terms of the software and the views in the Microsoft Outlook calendar. Uh, and, um, if you don't know who I am, I'm Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. Do me a favor. I want you to be ready to hit your pause and rewind button because I got a page and a half of notes on how to do this. And to make this work, uh, what I'm going to do is switch into my Outlook calendar and turn off my video so you can see this even better. So let's go ahead and do that right now. And I am going to jump into my Outlook calendar here. And the first thing that I want to share with you, which is really funny, is, um, did you notice that they got a Today button? And it's important that you see that there's a Today button here and here. So watch what happens. You hit today, boom, you're back into where you were from wherever you're at. Now, if you're in the Home tab, notice that they have the tabs on the top. That Today button sometimes won't show unless you're on the Home tab, but it is right here now, so you can use it either way to get back to wherever you're at. Now, of course, you know about the day view. Here I am today with all the stuff I'm doing. There's also the Monday through Friday view, the full work week view, and the frankly worth worthless month view. Although I will say this, if you have a big screen monitor, the full month view is actually sort of similar to the old day planner wall calendars that people used to have in their offices on paper. Did you also notice they added this very nice new next 7 days view, which is also very handy today and 6 days into the future? However, one of the things that a lot of people don't realize they can do is this. Let's go back to the 1-day view here for today. And what I want to do is see just this week and next week. And watch this, I'm going to do a shift and I'm going to hold and go all the way out to next week. And by doing that, I can now see a 2-week view. Isn't that pretty cool? And if I want, I can even click on today and drag down to— let's do a 3-week view. I can see a full 3-week view which is on the calendar, or I can truncate it back and just do this week, next week with a drag and see a full 2-week view. So I've got all these different options for being able to see it. Now, did you see right there? I actually clicked on those 2 days in the view, and now I can have a 2-day view. So all of these are viable options. Here's another one that a lot of people don't realize. Let's say I want to see every Tuesday in the month of February. Watch this. I'm going to hold down the Ctrl key. Click on the first Tuesday, hold down my Control keys. Looks like my first two Tuesdays this month weren't that busy, but as we get later in the month, they got busier. And hey, let's throw in an odd Thursday. You see how I did that? I'm holding down the Control key and I'm just clicking on specific dates, and I can put up whatever dates I want to see. All right, so that's another cool one. Now let's talk a little bit about this. I want to go back to the full week view. Today. And now I want to show you something that's really interesting. Um, if you right-click on the time bar, take a look at this. 60 minutes, which is my default. I like this view because it gives me the biggest overview of the screen. But if I want to go into more specificity, I can click on 30 minutes. And if I page down, now I can see the calendar using a more open time block. And notice you can go all the way down to like a 5-minute view. That's very granular at that point. It's going to be really hard to see your calendar from this view, but you know, there might be a circumstance where you might be able to use that. I'm going to go back to 60 minutes. Now I want to show you another thing that's sort of interesting here. Watch this. If I right-click up here over the dates, I can come down here. Notice that you can make recurring appointments, recurring events, recurring meetings, new meeting requests. What I really wanted to show you was this. You can change your color default. So if you don't want everything to be that light baby sky blue, you could make it a nice shade of green. Or if you prefer, right-click. It's a— this is a personal preference thing. Let's come down here and switch it to yellow because I'm feeling yellow today. Actually, I'm going to bring it back and put it back to the automatic, which brings it back to the original view. The other thing that I wanted to show you, which is pretty cool, if you come up here, you can set your location. You just hit Add Location. I'm based out of East Lansing, Michigan. Once you get that in, take a look what it does up here at the top, which is pretty cool. One, it sets your time zone for you, but two, take a look at this, take a look at this. You can see your weather, and if you click on this, you can actually come down and see that it's a toasty 12 degrees, partly sunny. But if I click on more details, you'll know that there's a giant winter storm coming through later tonight. Oh joy, uh, maybe I should put this on my calendar. Start shoveling. That could work. And by the way, you just saw how easy it is to create a new item on your calendar. Now one other thing that I want to talk about here is notice that from the Home tab— this is something sort of new— do you have a Zoom account? You can get the Zoom widget that adds in to allow you to schedule a Zoom meeting and/or schedule and start an instant meeting in Zoom. And you have the same capability with Microsoft Teams. So these are some things that you can get set up as part of your Home tab to allow you to more quickly and easily put these in. Now let's take a look at one more thing. Um, do you have more than one calendar? Oh, well, wait, let's take a look at something here. I'm going to come down and notice I've got some other calendars. I want to click on this Randall F. Dean calendar. Now I have to tell you what you're seeing right here, which is interesting. This is my Google Calendar. Now it's not an actual live working version of a Google Calendar, but I did another YouTube video a couple months ago which I showed how easy it is to bring in a copy of your Google Calendar that that you can see next to your working Outlook calendar. And I'll put the link to that video in the comments below if you'd like to be able to do this. Look at your, you know, maybe your work calendar in Outlook and your Google Calendar with your personal events side by side so you can see them both. Now, it's that easy to be able to take a look at it and see this. Now, since we're showing this, I'm going to close this calendar. I want to show you another thing that you can do here. I'm going to go up to View. And let me ask you this, are you a task list user in Microsoft Outlook? Um, I've done several videos on this, including a really popular video on my favorite view in the Microsoft Outlook task view called the Today view. I also did a pretty recent video on the 3 different other views I use fairly frequently in Microsoft Outlook task. Look for that in the comments also below. But what I wanted to show you is this: if you've got a task list that you've set up, you can come in here and turn on Normal, and this will bring up your task list for each day at the bottom of your screen. Now you can also use the Minimize view, which changes it to make it more down here, or what you can do is this— just turn it off. You've got options. That's one way to see what's going on in your task list. You could also come up here and do the to-do bar. And if I come down here and hit Tasks, this will bring up a different way to view it. I probably like this view better. Um, I think that this view gives you a little bit more detail and information, uh, but it gives you that option. You can also come in here, by the way, and turn on People, which means you can see your contacts Contact Manager over here to the side if you'd prefer to have that. Once again, I'm going to turn it off though, because I want to give you yet another option that you could consider. Take a look at this. If you're a big-time task user and you use dual monitors, you can come down here, right-click on Tasks, and hit Open in New Window. And then you can bring up— there's my Today View task list. You can see the video on this on another, but now if I've got dual monitors, I could drag this over to the second screen, thus allowing me to have my Outlook calendar on one screen and my Outlook Task Manager on the other. So I can very clearly see everything's going on. And by the way, you can do this with any of these. You could right-click and open a new window on your calendar. You could right-click and open a new window for your inbox. So you could have Calendar on one screen, Inbox on the other. Set it up and configure it however it is that you want to use it. But by right-clicking over these items, it gives you the option to be able to see one Outlook function on one screen and another Outlook function on the other. I don't know if you can hear my security team upstairs, but my teenagers clearly didn't follow Dad's rule of, hey, keep the dogs from barking when Dad's filming a video. All right, we're going to keep rolling anyway though. I also want to show you this. Um, you can actually go in and edit any appointment that you have simply by double-clicking on it. When you double-click on it, it opens up the full appointment screen, and that gives you the option to be able to do some changes in your appointments. Now, one thing that I want to talk about here real quick is this: I actually use the categories in the Outlook calendar as well as in several other functions. I think I'm going to make a new video just about what I'm doing with these categories here. But here's my simple, um, simple description. These are labels, and they're color-coded labels. And notice that you can come down to the bottom in pretty much any place where you see this and hit All Categories, which allows you to then see what you've already created labels for. And notice that a lot of these labels are my key projects, sub-projects, clients, customers, vendors, co-workers. And if I want to change one I can just simply click on orange and hit rename and turn it into agencies and bureaus. That easy. Or let's say I need a new one because all the ones that I have are already being used. Well, it's easy enough to hit new and it'll come up with a color code for you that's different from what's already up there. You give it a name, you hit okay, boom, you got yourself a new label. And what's nice about this, let me show you. Notice that I have this one categorized personal. Well, by doing that, now if I close this, it's a color-coded item. Now, do you remember what I had for next week? Look, all of these are color-coded. I wanted to show you how quick and easy this is to do. This is a— that was a right-click, by the way. Let me show you that again. Right-click, category, client prospect. Right-click, category, YouTube. Right-click, category Household, and so on and so forth. And so I can keep going through all of these. This one's e-newsletter, that's Timely Tips, and Biz Accounting category, Accounting Finance. That's how you can have a nice color-coded calendar to give you a little bit of a feel for exactly what it is that you want to do. Now let's go back inside of an appointment. Let's say this doctor appointment on Thursday. I want to invite you. Well, I could just come up here and click Invite, and now it switches from being a singular calendar event for my calendar into something where I can invite people. And notice I can have required and optional, so I can tell people whether they don't need to show up or not. Um, but here's the interesting thing. If you're using Microsoft 365 as your backend, or maybe you're— you've got calendar, uh, sharing set up on your server before you even hit send to invite people to this doctor appointment, you could come up here and click Scheduling Assistant. And all you need to do is start typing in the names right here. And notice they've added— they've got required attendee, and you can put in all the people that are required. You can put in your optional attendees here, and you can even declare the room that you want to use if that's been set up on your system. And notice up here, you can add attendees, add rooms, and you've got a Room Finder option that's over here, all inside the Scheduling Assistant. Now I can go back to the main meeting, and right here I can cancel the invitation to just turn it back into a normal calendar event for my calendar. Oh, and hey, since we got this open, take a look at this. You can actually set it up to save your meeting notes from the meeting right into the affiliated OneNote app inside of the appointment. So get in, you'll probably have to be logged into your OneNote for it to work, but you can basically set it up so that when you're in a meeting, you can save stuff right into your OneNote app while you're in here. One last thing, let's say this is a doctor appointment and it's a recurring appointment. I need to see my doctor twice a year. I can do that every 6 months, or I am having some thing going on. Maybe it's every day for the next 10 days. That easy. Or maybe it's not every day, maybe it's every week. Oh, okay, that's not a valid pattern. I'll cancel that. Let's do another recurrence. I'm going to go in and say, let's say it's every week, maybe it's every 3 weeks, maybe it's every year. Maybe it happens every year on that date. Gentlemen, gentlemen, anniversaries, birthdays, no end date. This is called the saving your relationship slash marriage tip of the video, right? So yeah, just put it in there. And here's the thing, if you put it in there, then do yourself the common sense thing that you need to do. Once you got that set up, then come in and turn on a reminder. Not 15 minutes before, uh, gentlemen, 1 week, 2 weeks before. Come on, you can do this. All right, um, but all of these are ways that you can set it up so that you'll get the information you need to get when you need to get it so you don't make mistakes. That's good. All right, let's close this appointment and keep rolling forward. Now what I want to do is show you some bells and whistles up here in the far left corner. See this thing called the File tab? Not a lot of people go up in here in their Outlook, but if you're a calendar user, you might want to go check this out. Watch this. I'm going to go into File and I'm going to come down to Options. So see, I came way down here and I'm going to click on File, Options, and notice that there is one in here for Calendar Options. And what's nice about this— start time 8 AM. Well, I have to tell you, since we've been on the pandemic, that has changed more to about 9:30, and the end time is actually stretched out a little bit too, to say 6:30. You can set the start and end times I typically work a bit on the weekends too. Notice you can set your day of the week and when the calendar year begins. Now this one's sort of important. Take a look at this default duration for new appointments. It doesn't have to be an hour. Everybody's got these set up as an hour. What if you tried changing your meetings 30 minutes and had your whole team agree to that? Maybe you could shorten your meetings a little bit. Look at this one right here, default reminders. What this is, this is really nice. Let's— if you turn on default reminders and you forget to turn on a reminder for a new appointment or meeting or event, Outlook will automatically put a 15-minute advance reminder pop-up on your screen for you. And right below this, add holidays. That way you can see what the holidays are if your company celebrates the holidays. And I think you can customize that a little bit depending on the holidays you actually celebrate. And if you come down here, take a look at this. I want to show this. I live right on the western edge of the Eastern time zone. So I'm in Eastern time, but a whole bunch of my clients are in Central time. I could show their time too on my calendar. I can show mine and theirs if I wanted to set that up. And if you're doing a lot of cross-time zone stuff, maybe you got an office out on the West Coast and you're based in Chicago. Well, you could set up and show Pacific time, or you got the office in London. You could show that right here too. All of these are ways for you to see this and look, they, they allow you to show up to 3. So if you got 3 different offices and 3 different time zones, you can sort of know what's going on and what time it is there too. Handy, handy tool. All right. Now one more, and this is pretty cool. One more that I want to show you. And this is probably one of the most important tips I'm going to share. Let's go back up into the File tab. Let's go to Options, but this time I'm not going into Calendar, I'm going into Advanced. And I want to just show you something really cool. Take a look right here. Start Outlook in this folder. 99% of working professionals have this on, and I will show you inbox. I went down and picked Calendar and selected it, hit OK. And I want you to just think about this from a bigger picture perspective, okay? And I'm gonna— I think what I'll do is I'll, I'll go back to my PowerPoint now. Um, and by the way, little PowerPoint tip: if you're in PowerPoint, you want to quickly shift to presentation mode from management mode, do a Shift+F5 on your keyboard, bring that in. And hey, I'll bring myself back in here. Uh, let's go ahead and restart the video. Hi everybody. I'm back. Uh, but what I wanted to share with you here is this. If you set up your Outlook so that the first thing you see is your calendar, then your inbox doesn't take over. A lot of people, myself included, say that probably one of your most important assets is your time, which is reflected in your calendar. If your most important asset is your time, why are you looking at your emails first? I'm going to argue that maybe what you should do instead is look at your calendar first. Look maybe not just at today, but maybe a week or so in advance. See what's coming up, anything you need to get ready for. Is there any big open blocks of time? Maybe you should take that block of time and block in some time for one of your most critical projects, activities, events. Make a meeting with yourself. And, you know, the last thing that you might want to do before you look at your email is then check your task list and make sure that's ready also. That's a different startup. I hope you like these calendar tips. So, um, what's coming next? Let's talk about what's coming next here, and I'm going to move myself a little bit out of the way and resize myself. I'm probably going to make a similar video sometime very soon for the Google Calendar users. They have a lot of the same capabilities. So you could even take what you saw here and play around with your Google Calendar. I'll make that video I promised on how I'm using categories in all of the different functions of Microsoft Outlook. And I've got some MS Teams videos that I'm working on. What's Wiki? I think we're going to find out pretty soon. And some more Zoom and GoToMeeting videos too. I've noticed that I've had quite a bit of people that have been signing up for my GoToMeeting and Zoom videos, uh, on my YouTube channel, uh, viewing those and checking those out. So I'll try to get some more content for you there. Um, if you'd like to learn more about me— hey, watch this, this is sort of funny— here I am, but here I am. Hi. Uh, if you want to get a little bit more info about me, I want to thank you for your time. I'm Randy Dean, like I said, the Email Sanity Expert. You can learn more about me and my different programs out on my website, randalldean.com. Including my full-length video programs, uh, training programs on several different topics, uh, for a little bit of a fee. You can take a look and see what those are. If you like my videos, please hit the like button, consider subscribing to the channel. And if you'd like to get a whole slew of productivity PDFs on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Gmail and Google usage, uh, smartphone and tablet usage, better using your virtual meeting tools and software send me an email, randy@randalldean.com. Put YouTube PDFs in the subject line, and I'll send you more information than you could possibly need, but maybe some tips that you'll really like. So with that, I'm going to say thank you for your time. Bye now.