Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

News

  • Add to Technorati Favorites
Cool Trick: Making Miniature Calendars

Remember that cool mini calendar from Melissa MacBeth’s “Preparing to be away” blog post? Well, this post describes how to make one for your own Out of Office message! Here is an example mini calendar for the dates when I’ll be home for the holidays:

image

Mini calendars are helpful and provide a visual reminder of how long you will be gone. I like to use them to emphasize when I’ll be back to answer e-mail. Instead of trying to deal with messy spacing and fonts to make your own mini calendar you can use Outlook’s built-in Send via E-mail feature for calendars. This way you can just copy and paste a preformatted mini calendar right into your Out of Office message. To get you started here is how I made the mini calendar for my upcoming vacation.

Creating a Mini Calendar

1. Right-click the name of the calendar in the Navigation Pane. This should be the calendar you want a miniature version of. image
2. Click Send via E-mail…  

3. Use the “Send a Calendar via E-mail” dialog to specify the date range and the level of detail that is shown for your appointments.

For this example I selected the dates when I’ll be on vacation and “Availability only”.

 image
4. After clicking OK you get a nicely formatted e-mail with your calendar information. We want to put this into an Out of Office reply though, so we’re not done just yet. image

5. The easiest way to select the calendar so you can copy it into your Out of Office message is to hover your mouse over the calendar until you see an icon appear like the one in the red box below.

 image
6. Click the icon so the calendar is highlighted like the calendar in this screenshot. image
7. Select Copy in the Ribbon (or hit Ctrl+C on your keyboard) to copy the calendar.  
8. Create a new Out of Office message and select Paste (Ctrl+V) where you want the calendar to appear. image

And you’re done! Don’t worry, the gray lines won’t appear when someone receives your Out of Office reply.

Allie Bellew

Outlook Program Manager

Posted: Monday, December 15, 2008 6:20 PM by outblog
Filed under: ,

Comments

MikeBTexas said:

Is there an X- header that Outlook 2003 and 2007 in a default setup will recognize and if present move the inbound email into the Junk Mail Folder? I have done extensive research and have not found one but I thought perhaps the Outlook team would be the one to ask?

# December 15, 2008 9:22 PM

Philip Colmer said:

This is a really nice idea. The one slight drawback to it is that the dates when you are out of the office have hyperlinks on them that, in the original email that Outlook creates, link to information about those dates. Copying & pasting just the calendar into the OOF will cause those links to break.

Not a lot you can do about that, I suspect, unless the next version of Outlook has a new feature to create just the mini calendar for inclusion in OOF ;-).

# December 16, 2008 9:14 AM

Jim said:

Is Exchange server 2007 necessary to past into the Out of Office message?  I am on 03 and cannot past anything into the message.

# December 16, 2008 9:56 AM

Mike Kretzler said:

This is cool, but I can't quite get there, because my Out of Office Assistant doesn't have rich text capabilities, just text. Could this be the result of an incomplete 2003 to 2007 upgrade?

# December 16, 2008 11:12 AM

Rich Thomas said:

Nice...except my OOO Assistant (Outlook 2007) doesn't look like that; no formatting options are there.  Is this something that is dependent on the Exchange server version?

# December 17, 2008 12:57 PM

Jen said:

This seems like a cool trick, but is only for 2007?

# December 18, 2008 9:22 AM

Chris said:

I am curious, which version of Outlook is the example above done in?  I ask because I am using Outlook 2007 and my Out of Office Assistant doesn't look like the one shown above.  When I paste my mini calender in to the Out Of Office message, it loses all formatting and looks pretty bad.  

Thanks

-Chris

# December 18, 2008 10:13 AM

Jeff said:

My Out of Office Assistant is text-only, so this does not work.

Is that because I disable MS Word-as-editor in Outlook 2007?

# December 18, 2008 10:29 AM

pdennard said:

Where do I get the nifty Out of Office Assistant that allows you to specify a range and the tabs for Inside my organization and outside my organization???

# December 18, 2008 10:39 AM

Sandra said:

The inside/outside tabs show up if your company is running Exchange 2007.

# December 18, 2008 11:03 AM

Ken said:

What versions of Outlook can this be used for?

# December 18, 2008 11:45 AM

'dacker said:

I think you should mention this is for Outlook 2007; Outlook 2003 does not have a "Send via E-mail..." option.

# December 18, 2008 12:33 PM

cdj26x said:

This is something that is very useful, however I don't have the out of office dialog shown, I am running Outlook 2007, but it only allows me to enter a text version and doesn't allow for a date range, is there a setting that I need to set?

# December 18, 2008 12:44 PM

outblog said:

Thank you all for your comments.

This feature only exists in Outlook 2007. Exchange, however, is not required for this feature to work. You can use this feature with POP or IMAP.

Thank you!

Allie Bellew

Outlook Program Manager

# December 18, 2008 1:35 PM

Peter Morris said:

I had a go at this and the formatting got screwed. However on step 5 I had the calendar spanning over 2 months and tried to select each month individually. This is what caused the screwup. I then found another "Plus-arrow" icon further to the left which selected the WHOLE calendar. This went into the OOO message smoothly.

I suggest to those having issues with formatting that perhaps they're selecting the icon for the month and they should be selecting the icon for the calendar month area. HTH.

# December 18, 2008 2:46 PM

Craig said:

In the help for Outlook 2007, it explains the differences between Exchange 2003 and 2007. This feature is not possible with Exchange 2003.

# December 18, 2008 3:47 PM

Magnus said:

Re: Hyperlinks

You can right-click each date and select 'Remove Hyperlink'.

# December 18, 2008 9:30 PM

Paul R. Davis said:

To have this be effective and useful, does one create a New All Day Event, and also show as Out Of Office, and the length of time as 1 Day for all the days one is out of the office?  

# December 19, 2008 5:08 AM

Justin said:

This will not work if you do not have Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. But you can still do it in Outlook 2007 without Exchange 2007. Go to the Out of Office Assistant, and click "add rule", then click the box next to "reply with" and just copy the calender into the template.

# December 19, 2008 12:02 PM

Alistair Burns said:

Confirmed here that you definitely need Exchange Server 2007 to enable this functionality :

http://blogs.technet.com/steve_lamb/archive/2007/06/08/the-out-of-office-feature-is-so-much-better-in-microsoft-office-outlook-2007-than-previous-versions.aspx

# December 22, 2008 5:21 AM

outblog said:

While this feature only requires Outlook 2007 the Out of Office assistant requires Exchange 2007 to support rich text format, in/out of company Out of Office replies and a date range to send the automatic reply.

Thank you,

Allie Bellew

Outlook Program Manager

# December 22, 2008 12:58 PM

Nityeshwari said:

I am using this not just for out of office messages, also for bulk emails where the tiny calendar is a very graphic way to remind people of when the action is happening. I have highlighted the main dates in pink, the out of office dates in yellow, and birthdays in blue! Great concept, thanks much.

# December 22, 2008 8:16 PM
New Comments to this post are disabled
Page view tracker