Wednesday, February 20, 2008

OUTLOOK CALENDER FOLDER

The Calendar Folder

The Outlook Calendar folder can be overlooked as a valuable storage area and source of

information relating to diary events. This chapter will introduce you to ways of viewing

your calendar that will enable you to extract quickly, and in professional formats, data

relating to meetings and events without the need to replicate the data or use any other

application or program.

We can use the following examples:

A Meetings Schedule

A Record of Goods or Services

A Staff Leave Calendar

A Staff Leave Calendar—Daily View By Department

A Staff Leave Calendar—Sick Leave View

A Calendar View that Records Conference Costs

A Calendar View that Records Your Expenses

A To Do List for Calendar Items

A Meetings Schedule

In a busy calendar, there will be a variety of events, teleconferences, appointments, visits,

internal and external meetings, and at times it would be useful to extract and/or print

schedules of particular types of calendar entry, such as a schedule of various current and

future internal meetings.

Such a schedule can be produced by creating a table type view of the calendar that filters

on items assigned to the internal meeting category, with start dates on or after the current

date and that groups items by Subject.

How to Create Calendar View

In the above example, all meetings within the organization have been assigned to the

internal meeting category and the view highlights those meetings taking place within the

current week. The steps to create the view above are as follows:

1. Create a category named internal meeting. To do this, first open the Categories

dialog box by either right-clicking on any item in your calendar or selecting

any item in your calendar and clicking the Categories option in the Edit menu.

From the Categories dialog, click the Master Category List button, enter the

name internal meeting in the New category: box, and click Add.

2. For those meetings in your calendar that are internal (in other words within

your organization), assign them to the internal meeting category by

right-clicking each item in the calendar, selecting Categories, and choosing

the internal meeting category.

3. Create a new table type view from the Define Views | New option. In Outlook

2003 you will find this option under View | Arrange by | Current View |

Define Views | New.

4. Name the view Internal Meetings.

5. In the View Summary dialog box (or View | Arrange by | Current View |

Customize View in Outlook 2003), click Fields, and select the fields: Subject,

Location, Start, and End, and click OK.

6. Set Group By to Subject.

7. Set Sort items by to Start.

8. From the Filter | More Choices | Categories option, select the internal

meeting category we created above.

9. From the Filter | Advanced tab, create the following filter:


10. From the Automatic Formatting option, click Add, and create the following

formatting rule:

We have just created a simple but very useful view of a very busy calendar. The view has

enabled us to simplify the calendar by extracting only certain items and condensing them

into a neat table format that will enable us to plan and manage the items more easily.

Result

The result, when printed, can produce a schedule to show either all or only selected

meetings. The Internal Meetings heading of this report was created from the File menu |

Print Preview | Page Setup | Header/Footer tab.

A separate Outlook Calendar, reserved for the purpose, is also a convenient place to

record the ordering or purchase of specific goods or services.


For example, if you are required to book taxis on a regular basis, make entries for

these bookings in a calendar especially for taxi bookings. The Taxi Calendar in a

Day/Week/Month type view may look something like this:



However, if we create a table type view of this calendar, as in the screen shot below, we

can produce something that will allow us to analyze and print the data. This view will

enable us to reconcile taxi company invoices and records and apportion the costs against

the relevant members of staff.

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