Microsoft® Outlook® 2007 Bible

Chapter 12. Working with Schedules and Meetings

IN THIS CHAPTER

• About scheduling

• Scheduling a meeting

• Inviting attendees to a meeting

• Working with the Scheduling window

• Answering meeting invitations

• Keeping track of meeting invitations

• Working with meetings

• Understanding meeting options

In the previous chapter, you learned how you can use Outlook to keep track of appointments. As useful as this is, it is only one of the tools Outlook provides to help you organize and manage your time. Scheduling goes a step further. In a nutshell, scheduling refers to arranging your time commitments so they do not conflict with other commitments you may have or with commitments that other people have. For example, scanning your calendar to find a mutually agreeable night to go to dinner with friends is scheduling, as is choosing a meeting time at work that will permit the whole project team to attend.

Understanding Scheduling

An appointment is an event that lasts less than a full day and does not require coordination with anyone else's time. A meeting, on the other hand, is an event that must be coordinated with one or more people's schedules. Outlook provides two tools that help to automate the task of setting up meetings:

• Viewing other people's calendars to see when they are free.

• Sending meeting requests via email allowing the recipients to accept or decline.

You may use just one of these tools to schedule a meeting, or you may use both. The following section takes a look at how this is done.

Creating a Meeting ...