Outlook's Time Zone

A colleague of mine recently wanted to book another the time with someone from the London office (we're in Malaysia) for a meeting/conference call and she asked me how to do it. The Outlook calendar follows the local time, so we must always remember when it comes to diversity cases such as this, we need to check on the other person's time zone too to find the best time for both parties.

Outlook allows us to add a second time zone to our calendar. Alright, first click on Tools in the menu, and go right to the bottom of the list, and select Options.

Next, choose Calendar Options in the Calendar group.


In the 'Calendar Options' window, click on Time Zone... in the Advanced options below.

Here if you noticed, I have labeled my Current Windows time zone (local time zone) as 'Malaysia', then now to show an addtional time zone, check the box for that option and label it appropriately. After that, select the location from the Time Zone drop-down list. I have chosen London. Immediately after doing this, I see the checkbox for 'Adjust for daylight saving time' selected, so this option is only for relevant places which experience daylight saving.

Click OK to close all the subsequent windows, and now you have an extra time zone in your Day view of your calendar. Sweet!

Repeat the steps to get you back to Calendar Options window, in the 'Calendar Options' group, you will find a button there which says 'Add Holidays'. This is to have the public holidays for the selected nation to be incorporated in your outlook calendar.

I have selected 'Malaysia' of course, and also 'United States' to display more holidays. It appears like this in your calendar.

Outlook as your personal diary

In Outlook, we can put in tasks for ourselves, and here I have created an example - just fill up the dates, priority, the status and completion percentage :


It will appear in the Task List below your calendar.


Ok, now I have dragged the task to the time slot 2pm and extended it all the way to 5pm. When right-clicked, you can see that this slot has been set to 'Busy'.


Now I need to create an appointment so that I remember about the dinner with friends tonight:
I don't want my other colleagues who share my calendar to see personal appointments like these, that's why I have set this appointment as 'Private' by clicking on the padlock icon on top.




Here's a view of my shared calendar from my colleague Michelle's Outlook (notice my dinner appointment is displayed as 'Private Appointment') :


Outlook's calendar caters for appointments, tasks, and also make your private ones stay private :)

Outlook's 'lil helpers'

I have come across situations where I was at the verge of embarrassing myself, and trust me, at that time, I really thanked the Outlook team for adding in awesome helpful features. Have you ever sent an email to the wrong recipients? In my case, I pressed 'Send'; without noticing that I was sending the mail to the wrong group of recipients and this included a CC to my boss!!

Well fret no more, your email/message can be recalled. I have an example of an email which I have accidentally sent out and I intend to recall the message, that is if the recipient has not opened the mail yet.

Go to your Sent Items folder, and click to open the email. In the Message tab, under Actions grouping, click on 'Other Options'; and you will see the 'Recall this message'.

You can either delete the message or delete it then have a replacement for the mail, and there is a check box at the bottom to notify you of the status of the recalled message. I have selected to delete the message and also to be notified if it is successful or otherwise.


This is the notification I got because Leo has already opened the mail hence my mail recall is unsuccessful, therefore when you wrongly sent out mails, make sure you perform the recall ASAP as well!

Another feature that Outlook does is to enable voting in emails. I have composed an email to my team mates asking them about their transport to our offsite venue and have them notify me via voting, it looks like this:


In the Options tab, in Tracking group there is an option to 'Use Voting Buttons', and I have selected to customize my voting buttons :


I just need to type in the driver's names here so that the recipients can specify whose car they'll be following down:

This is how the mail looks like to the recipients.

Their replies/votes will come in like this :

To view the complete tracking of the votes, go to your Sent Items folder, and open the mail that you sent out. In the Message tab, click on Tracking and votes are shown in this summary form :

Aren't these features helpful, you would definitely need these 'lil helpers' someday :)