A couple of Outlook 365 calendar questions

[Kermit power]

Afternoon all!

I am, once again, tearing my hair out trying to get Outlook to behave how I want it to, so I'm hoping someone here can help, as seems to invariably be the case!

The two things I'm trying to do, which I would've thought would've been really straightforward, are the following:

1. Display only my working day in the calendar. I have it set to only show my working week with no problem, but it's still showing the full 24 hours of the day vertically, often with meetings squeezed in tight. It would be far more logical to just have my working hours on screen, as there's essentially never anything in my work diary between the hours of 19:00 and 08:00.

2. I'd like to colour-code entries in my calendar to green when there are no other attendees, orange when there are other attendees in my company only, and red for meetings with external attendees, so I can see at a glance which I can most easily rearrange if necessary.

Can anyone help me with either of these things, please?

[JeffreyD]

Kermit power said:

Afternoon all!

I am, once again, tearing my hair out trying to get Outlook to behave how I want it to, so I'm hoping someone here can help, as seems to invariably be the case!

The two things I'm trying to do, which I would've thought would've been really straightforward, are the following:

1. Display only my working day in the calendar. I have it set to only show my working week with no problem, but it's still showing the full 24 hours of the day vertically, often with meetings squeezed in tight. It would be far more logical to just have my working hours on screen, as there's essentially never anything in my work diary between the hours of 19:00 and 08:00.

2. I'd like to colour-code entries in my calendar to green when there are no other attendees, orange when there are other attendees in my company only, and red for meetings with external attendees, so I can see at a glance which I can most easily rearrange if necessary.

Can anyone help me with either of these things, please?

I think this may help

1. when you are in Calendar click on the "view" menu, then schedule view - on mine that shows only my working hours Monday to Friday

2. there is conditional formatting in "view" then the setting wheel of current view. I'm not sure if it's sophisticated enough to show external attendees though.

[Kermit power]

JeffreyD said:

I think this may help

1. when you are in Calendar click on the "view" menu, then schedule view - on mine that shows only my working hours Monday to Friday

2. there is conditional formatting in "view" then the setting wheel of current view. I'm not sure if it's sophisticated enough to show external attendees though.

Thanks for the suggestions.

1 is rather weird, in that it moves everything from vertical to horizontal and shows it in one big stream of events. All I really want is for it to effectively fit to screen with the 5 days of my work week running horizontally and the work hours of each day running vertically, but this rather mind-bogglingly doesn't seem to be an option! I would've thought it would've been one of the most common requests?

2 looks like it would be the right place. You can colour-code meetings if they have a specific attendee based on their email address, so maybe I just need to find the correct syntax for "all @emaildomain.com" rather than "[e-mail]"?

[JeffreyD]

Kermit power said:

Thanks for the suggestions.

1 is rather weird, in that it moves everything from vertical to horizontal and shows it in one big stream of events. All I really want is for it to effectively fit to screen with the 5 days of my work week running horizontally and the work hours of each day running vertically, but this rather mind-bogglingly doesn't seem to be an option! I would've thought it would've been one of the most common requests?

2 looks like it would be the right place. You can colour-code meetings if they have a specific attendee based on their email address, so maybe I just need to find the correct syntax for "all @emaildomain.com" rather than "[e-mail]"?

On number 1 have a look at
File menu
then options
there are a few calendar options in there - looks like you can show your free time as well as meetings and also change to vertical view.

I get round these problems by no longer having anything serious to do!!

[Harpoon]

I'm not aware that you can hide the non-working hours. You can change the timescale from 30 minutes down to 10 or 15 minutes to make the working day fill more of the screen though - right click on the time bar at the left edge of the calendar and there's options from 5 to 60 minutes per slot.

For #2, do you want that to happen automatically? I use categories in my work calendar to show different things eg green is personal, yellow is online/remote (so everything these days!), red is on-site etc. When I accept an invite or create one, I just manually pick the category.

Edited by Harpoon on Tuesday 8th February 17:31

[Kermit power]

Harpoon said:

I'm not aware that you can hide the non-working hours. You can change the timescale from 30 minutes down to 10 or 15 minutes to make the working day fill more of the screen though - right click on the time bar at the left edge of the calendar and there's options from 5 to 60 minutes per slot.

That's close enough, thanks!

Harpoon said:

For #2, do you want that to happen automatically? I use categories in my work calendar to show different things eg green is person, yellow is online/remote (so everything these days!), red is on-site etc. When I accept an invite or create one, I just manually pick the category.

Ideally I'd like it to be automated, yes, but this has given me a simple, straightforward way of doing it manually, at least, which I wasn't previously aware of.