Tip 8 (Week 8 Winter 2012): Scheduling Assistant In Depth

Scheduling Assistant in Outlook: a Few Niceties

-Open a new meeting

-Click on “Scheduling Assistant”

1. You can schedule a pre-set group.

I have e-mail groups for several subsets, for example, Reference.  So I can type in the name of the group and then click the + to expand the names.  

It will ask you if you really want to do this; you do.

Now you can check for a time when everyone is free.  If you were trying to get this group together, you’d be having a hard time…. 

2.  Don’t forget to check the room, too, while you’re at it.  I can click on the resources button below this list, find the Alden Rooms, and choose more than one at a time by holding down the shift key.

Slick.  

Now I can choose a meeting time and etc., as we have seen in other Tech Tips.

3.  

You can make some stipulations when you set your meeting: 

-request responses, for example. IF you turn this off, people don’t have to respond to your meeting request.  This is useful for an all-staff meeting, maybe, for which you do not need to know how many people plan to come.

-Allow people to suggest a different time for this meeting. I don’t recommend this unless it is a very small group! 

4.  I can force my calendar to see this meeting as busy or not busy while I am setting it up.

The guy that makes the meeting has the power!

 

5.  I like to color-code my meetings. I can do this from this screen, or later, after the meeting is in my calendar.  

You can see I’ve already made categories, and all I have to do is click on the categories tab, choose my color, and the meeting shows up in color. 

If I want to create new categories, I click on “All categories” and it lets me make a new one. 

6. I can mark this meeting “private,” so other people can only see the block, not the details. I can mark this meeting “important” and that little icon will be highlighted on the meeting page. 

You can check off TT 8 when you have used Scheduling Assistant to make a meeting with more than one person, marked it important, and color-coded it.  

Tip 7 (Week 7 Winter 2012): Scheduling a Meeting Room & Inviting Multiple Attendees

By now, you’ve probably got the hang of inviting people to meetings. Today we will review that as we learn some other tips about scheduling meetings:

• How to find an available room in the library for a meeting
• Two ways to schedule a meeting in a particular room

FINDING AN AVAILABLE ROOM IN THE LIBRARY FOR A MEETING

To find which rooms are available, click the “Rooms” arrow in the left sidebar of your calendar.

You can click on as many rooms as you want. Each room’s calendar will open up next to yours. 

In the above view, I can easily see that if I wanted to schedule a meeting for Feb. 20^th from 10-11, both the Friends Room and the ABC Conference Room are available.  I find it easier to do this step before creating a meeting and inviting people, so that I know what room I can use.  But you don’t have to do it that way.

SCHEDULING A MEETING IN A PARTICULAR ROOM

There are two ways to schedule a meeting in a particular room.  First, click the “New Meeting” icon in the upper left corner of your calendar and set the subject and time for your meeting.

For choosing a room and inviting people, you can use two methods.  Method 1 uses the “To” button.  Method 2 uses the “Scheduling Assistant” feature.

Method 1: Use the “To” button

Click the “To” button in your meeting. You should see the familiar “Invite Attendees” window.  Type “alden library” into the search box (the same place you would type in a person’s name to find them).  Choose the room you want, and click the “Resources” button at the bottom. 

NOTE: You could just double-click on the room name, but be careful – it may go next to “Required” or “Optional” (for people names) instead of “Resources.”

Now, invite some people as you’ve done in the past by searching for a person’s name, selecting the right person, then clicking either the “Required” or “Optional” button, depending on whether they are required to come to the meeting.

In this case, I have chosen to invite the Library Staff. 

Click OK. You will be taken back to the meeting screen, where you can see the room you chose next to “Location.”  You should see “Library Staff” and the room you chose next to the “To” box. 

If you want to change the meeting location before sending, you can click the “Rooms” button to the far right of the box.

If this were a real meeting, you would then click “Send” to notify those invited to the meeting.

This method works best if you’ve already checked room availability as described at the top of this blog post and you know the room you want is available.

What will happen is that an email will be sent to you that says the room “accepted” or “declined” your meeting, depending on whether or not the room was available.

Method 2: Use the “Scheduling Assistant”

This method shows you the calendars of everyone invited as well as the room you chose, so that you can see if everyone is available (and the room) at the time you want the meeting.

First, start a new meeting. Click the “Scheduling Assistant” icon. A window will open that shows your calendar (in a different format than you may be used to).  There are two buttons toward the bottom of the window called “Add Attendees” and “Add Rooms.”

Click Add Attendees and add a few people as you have done before.  Note that the names are divided by semi-colons. If you want to delete a name, just back up your cursor or select it and hit the delete button on your keyboard. But be careful to leave a semi-colon between each name.

When you click OK, you will see the calendars of all the invitees below yours. If you see that someone has a conflict and can’t meet at that time (in purple) you can either adjust the meeting time by dragging the red and green lines to a new time slot, or you can go to the bottom of the window and change the meeting day/time.

Now that you have a good time for your meeting attendees, click the Add Rooms button, search for “alden library” and choose a room. After clicking OK, you should see that the room has been added to the list. Whether or not it is available will be indicated in purple or shown as open, just as in the attendees’ calendars.

Click the Appointment button at the top of the window. You will be taken back to the window where you can see the attendees and room listed, make any needed adjustments, and send the meeting invitation.

YOU HAVE FINISHED THIS TECH TIP WHEN YOU HAVE:

1. looked at today’s available rooms using the checkboxes in the left sidebar of your calendar.

2. scheduled a meeting room in the library for a specific date and time, and invited more than one person.


Post Author: Diana Nichols

Tip 6 (Week 6 Winter 2012): Inviting others to an event

Inviting others to meetings using your Outlook calendar is similar to choosing people for email messages. After opening the meeting box, you can enter email addresses in the “To” box, or if you don’t know their address, you can click on the “To” box:

This opens the “Select Attendees” box. The default address book is “Global”--which includes all of Ohio University’s personnel, students and most meeting rooms.

After searching for their name (last name first), please make sure you have the correct person (look for ALDEN LIBRARY in the location). There are at least two Alden employees’ names which look exactly the same in the global address book. See below for Derek Malone—the first one is the famous one from Alden ILL, the second one is an unrelated student.

Another person who has this same scenario is Wei Yan. Again, please make sure to check the location or other identifying factor for the person you are choosing.

You can double click on the person you want to invite, or single click and then click on the “Required” box at the bottom of the “Select Attendees” box. This places their name in the “Required” field.

 Then click OK, and their name is now in the “To” field on the meeting. When you have the meeting ready, hit send and the invitees will receive the email inviting them to the meeting.

Note that after their name is entered into the meeting box, you can scroll over their name and see some information about them. This is also an option for many of Outlook’s windows.

In order to complete this tip, create a meeting and invite some people, making sure to look at Derek’s and Wei’s names in the global address book. Then mark the checklist.

Post Author: Jo Brown