Something has come up, and we need to move our pizza party to Saturday night. This is no problem for us but what about our attendees? Well, their plans are entirely up to them, but Outlook at least makes it easy to alert them to changes.
To modify a meeting and alert your attendees, first open the event from your Outlook calendar and make the changes you need. In this case, we’re just moving the meeting back one day. Note, that you can click “Send Update” and your invitees will be updated on the change.
At this point, if any attendees had previously accepted your invitation, they will need to re-accept it.
Now might be a good time to show how to track your meeting’s progress. Click the “Tracking” button and from here you can see your meeting’s progress. Right now, only one invitee has accepted so maybe this Saturday isn’t such a good time.
Again something has just come up and we need to cancel the meeting. Simply click the “Cancel Meeting” button. Your invite will now change and you will get a “Send Cancelation” button to click and send out the news of cancelation.
Your previous invitees will receive an updated email and the event will be removed from your Outlook calendar.
Events
With your appointments-turned-meetings entered and saved, you’ll see it on your calendar. When you hover over it, you’ll see the pertinent details.
If, however, you want to change or delete it, you can open it by either double-clicking it or using the appropriate action on the Ribbon, which here is the “Open” button.
You can also access many of the same ribbon controls from the right-click context menu.
With your meeting or appointment open, note the Options tab, which will let you affect some changes such as changing your status (Busy, Tentative, Out of Office, etc.), set a reminder, change the time zone, and finally set the event as a recurring one.
Recurring events are common, such as a weekly meeting or quarterly earnings event, or just lunch with a friend, so it’s good to know how to set them. You can set the time of the appointment, the pattern, and the range or how long the recurrence will occur.
You see in the following image, we’ve set up a recurring event for every Monday at 1:00pm, which will continue indefinitely.
It’s important to remember that while meetings and appointments do have several key differences, they still look and can be modified the same way, so all the options you see for appointments will be the same for meetings.
