Creating & Viewing Multiple Calendars

Let's talk about Outlook's ability to display multiple calendars.

Is scheduling your life complicated? Do you have trouble keeping track of all the things you need to do? Do you have a need to track both personal and business activities in Outlook?

If you answered "Yes!" to any of those questions, Outlook's ability to handle multiple calendars simultaneously could be very useful to you. With more than one calendar, you can keep track of everything, avoid double-booking yourself, and still keep your personal and work life separated.

Creating a New Calendar

To create a new Calendar, follow these steps:

Make sure you are in Calendar view and click File, then, New, then Calendar. The Create New Folder dialog box appears.
Enter the new Calendar's name. Accept all the other default options. This creates the new Calendar in the current Calendar folder.
Click OK. The new Calendar will now appear in the My Calendars section of the Navigation Pane.

Tell Outlook Which Calendars to Display

Telling Outlook which Calendar or Calendars you want it to display is easy. Just set the checkbox next to the name of each Calendar you want Outlook to display, and clear the checkbox for those you don't want to see right now. If you select more than one Calendar, Outlook will display them all at once.

There are two unique ways Outlook can display multiple Calendars, and you can mix and match them to suit your needs. Outlook can display Calendars side-by-side or one overlaid on top of the other. The overlaid view was added with Outlook 2007 and can be quite helpful at times.

In the side-by-side view, the Calendars appear next to each other, as if you had two paper calendars you wanted to compare. In this view, it is easy to read each Calendar by itself, but comparing two or more Calendars is hard since you need to keep looking back and forth between them. This can lead to more mistakes.

In the overlaid view, it is if each Calendar was printed on a transparent sheet of plastic, and you've stacked the sheets on top of each other. They each show the same period of time in the same place, and you can see all the information from each 'layer' of Calendar. Because they are physically in the same place, when the Calendars have overlapping appointments it's easy to see. The stacking effect makes it easy to spot scheduling conflicts or open times in all the Calendars. At the same time, with all the information stacked up on top of itself, this view can be confusing, especially if your Calendars are busy, making for lots of stuff all crunched together.

And that's the basic information you need to know to create & view multiple Calendars.

Follow this link to learn more about working with Multiple Calendars.

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.

If strengthening your Microsoft Outlook 2007 skills in this time of uncertain job prospects makes sense to you, I strongly suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more about the course.