Office 365 is Microsoft’s flagship productivity software. It comes with several applications, this article focuses on Microsoft Calendar and its functionality. See our article for the full list of Office 365 applications and their uses.
In this guide find out:
What does Microsoft Calendar do in Office 365?
How to create 'New event'
What is the schedule assistant tool
How to sync Microsoft Calendar with your CRM
Links with MyAnalytics
Viewing Calendar options
How Microsoft Calendar in Office 365 helps your business?
Sharing and permissions options
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Like all calendars, this application will display events and activities you have planned. It’s easy to view your schedule; meetings, focussed time or even social occasions - whatever reminders you need. It also links with Teams so any planned video calls are saved in your MS Calendar too.
It's very easy to create an event in Microsoft Calendar. Simply click the 'New Event' button in your calendar and fill out the details. Add an event title, invite attendees, the date, time and location. You can also add a description, which can be handy if, for example, you want to write or attach an agenda to a meeting or attach directions.
You can create and invite others to your event, no matter what email provider your guests use - automatically sending the attendee an invitation to RSVP for the event once you press save.
The schedule assistant tool is particularly helpful to see when other team members are free. To access this, first create a new event and add the attendees. Then press 'schedule assistant'. If there are quite a few people invited to the event and they have busy diaries, it will clearly display gaps when everyone is available.
You can also categorise the event using a colour code system. So green might mean '1 to 1 with a team member' and yellow might mean 'attending Webinar'.
It can be particularly useful to synchronise your Microsoft Calendar and Outlook with your CRM, to log any meaningful contact or engagement. This can also enable you to easily filter and remove contacts that haven't had contact with in the past two years and therefore should be deleted from your CRM in order to comply with GDPR.
How you go about syncing your MS Calendar will differ from one CRM to another. However, the popular CRMs can generally all be linked to MS Calendar and Outlook, however, you may need to download a plugin or work closely with your CRM providers.
Your activity links with MyAnalytics to analyse how you spend your time. Weekly or monthly reports can then be automatically sent to your inbox and provide feedback on the time you have spent collaborating with colleagues compared to focused time. It will also let you know if you have regularly late to meetings!
There are different options on how to display your calendars such as day, work week, 7 day week, month or schedule views.
The Calendar app allows you to set custom reminders for how often you want to get reminded of a particular event or not at all. You can also create recurring events such as every second Tuesday of the month. Multiple calendars separated by different colours can help tell events apart easily. Events will carry across to all devices you have the calendar enabled on such as mobiles and tablets.
The application allows you to create various calendar themes with other people. It can work well having a departmental calendar or staff holiday calendar, although there is some great HR software out that can replace this method nowadays.
You can easily share your calendar with colleagues and set how much they can see, share or edit; from being able to fully edit someone else's diary, to just seeing blocks, to view the times when your colleague is either free or not free.
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