From the course: Optimizing Your Work with Microsoft 365

Creating powerful meetings

From the course: Optimizing Your Work with Microsoft 365

Creating powerful meetings

“

- [Instructor] With busy schedules, sometimes it's hard to find free time to meet with a group of people. What if there was an easy way to find open meeting times and invite attendees all in one step? Outlook is a powerful tool you can use to schedule meetings. After this lesson, you'll be able to use Outlook to schedule meetings and manage your attendees easily. I'll start from the Microsoft 365 homepage and open Outlook. From here I'll open the calendar I'll be scheduling from. In this example, I'll look for a common time to meet with the speakers of an event that I'm organizing. Before I jump into actually scheduling meetings, I need to see where there are openings in their schedules. The scheduling assistant is a tool that checks the calendars of all potential event attendees for common openings at the same time. In the menu bar select the new event button. This opens the schedule a meeting page. I'll select scheduling assistant from the menu bar at the top. I can add the date and time that I would like to schedule my meeting. I'm going to schedule my meeting for March 11th from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM. To add people to the meeting, select add required attendee or optional attendee. You can also add a meeting room from the same window. I'm going to add my attendees. This outlined bar represents the meeting time. You can check the legend at the bottom of the scheduling window to see what the colors in the bars mean. By default, you can only see free or busy information in the bars. You cannot see any other details unless an attendee shares their calendar with you. Just knowing if an attendee is free or busy gives you enough information to try and find a meeting time that doesn't conflict with everyone's schedule. If scheduling conflicts appear, you can move the meeting time by changing the start and end time up by the dates and times near the top of the scheduling window. After you find a time that works for everyone, you can send an update. Select done in the top left corner of the scheduling assistant window. Add a title to your meeting and select send. And now each attendee gets a meeting request and the event appears on their calendars. It can be quite a juggling act to find a meeting time that works for everyone, but the scheduling assistant makes the search much simpler. Now you try, use the scheduling assistant to schedule your next meeting.

Contents