Doing Multiple Calendar Work

Outlook's ability to display multiple Calendar pages at once, side-by-side or overlaid on each other gives you lots of options for organizing and displaying the many different sides of your life. But how do you actually work with these multiple Calendars?

The Basics of Working with Multiple Calendar Pages

By default, Outlook displays multiple Calendars side-by-side. That means all you need to do is select the Calendars you want to view in My Calendars. Each of the Calendars being displayed is shown with a different color trim to make it easier for you to tell them apart. Your main, or primary Calendar is always displayed on the left side of the Outlook window. The other Calendars (your secondary Calendars), are to the right of the primary one.

If you want to see your Calendars overlaid on each other, you begin the same was as for seeing Calendars side-by-side. You select the Calendars you want to see in My Calendars. They will appear side-by-side at first. You tell Outlook to overlay a secondary Calendar on the primary Calendar by clicking the left arrow that appears next to the secondary Calendar's name. Doing this tells Outlook to overlay the secondary Calendar on the primary one.

Overlaying Calendars always entails overlaying one or more secondary Calendars on the primary Calendar, but beyond that, you can have any combination of overlaid and side-by-side Calendars that you want. Clicking the right arrow next to the name of a secondary Calendarcauses it to switch from overlaid mode to side-by-side. Clicking the right arrow beside the name of the primary Calendar causes all the overlaid Calendars to go back to side-by-side mode.

Setting Calendar Options

Most of the time, the default Calendar options will serve you well. Still, a few of the options are particularly useful in making Outlook display Calendars in ways that match your personal schedule or your company's working hours.

For example, I often start writing at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning. Some night owls I know, on the other hand, prefer to start their workday at 10:00 in the morning or later. Outlook lets you easily adjust the Calendar view to accommodate these personal differences as well as many other individual schedule variations. Check it out:

Click Tools in the Outlook menu bar, then click Options. This opens the Options dialog box.
On the Preferences tabbed page of the Options dialog box, in the Calendar section, click Calendar Options. The Calendar Options dialog box appears.
Find the Calendar Work Week section of the Calendar Options dialog box. Specify your work week by checking the days you work. Set the First Day Of Week, First Week Of Year, Start Time, and End Time options if these are relevant to your personal situation.
Click OK to put the changes into effect.

At this point, you have everything you need to get your life more organized through the use of Outlook's multiple Calendars.

Note: To see a collection of tips and tricks for working with Calendars, click here.

To return to the first page of this multiple calendar discussion, click here.

Learning how to create and view multiple Calendars is just one of the things covered in the sixth lesson of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. In that lesson alone we cover all the major aspects of using Calendars in Outlook.

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