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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:
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
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”.
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.
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
Comments: (22) Collapse
In the help for Outlook 2007, it explains the differences between Exchange 2003 and 2007. This feature is not possible with Exchange 2003.
Re: Hyperlinks You can right-click each date and select 'Remove Hyperlink'.
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?
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.
Confirmed here that you definitely need Exchange Server 2007 to enable this functionality : blogs.technet.com/.../the-out-of-office-feature-is-so-much-better-in-microsoft-office-outlook-2007-than-previous-versions.aspx
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
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.
Comments: (loading) Collapse