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About this lesson
Use the Recurring Appointments feature to save you from the redundancy of scheduling multiple occurrences manually.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
2016, 2019/365.
Quick reference
Recurring Appointments
Repeated appointments are called “Recurring Appts” and Outlook can automate the recurrence pattern to save you the redundancy of scheduling multiple occurrences.
When to use
Anytime you have a regularly scheduled meeting, (daily, weekly, monthly, or annually,) use the Recurrence button to set up the automation of that pattern.
Instructions
- Double-click an existing appointment or meeting.
- Click the Recurrence button on the ribbon.
- Select the Recurrence pattern.
- Note: If you are applying recurrence to a meeting (which means other attendees have been invited), you will be pushing this recurrence pattern to their calendar as well. It is good practice to not recur more than 6 weeks when it affects other people’s calendars. The reason is because if a change to the pattern is made, it will retroactively update the appointments regardless if that person has deleted them. So keep the recurrence pattern as low as possible for meetings.
- A recurring appointment or meeting is identified by the small spinning arrows in the right corner.
- When you open a Recurring appointment or meeting, it will ask you to choose “Just this one” or “The entire series”.
- To cancel a Recurrence, you have the option to delete just one occurrence or the entire series.
- Right-click the appointment or meeting and choose Delete, then choose which option to delete.
- 00:04 Okay, I want to revisit recurring appointments because it's worthy
- 00:08 of spending a little more time on.
- 00:11 So in this particular case every Friday we have
- 00:14 a marketing meeting sort of a brainstorm session, everyone's back from traveling.
- 00:18 Everyone gets together, let's hash out what happened this week.
- 00:21 What we can do next week before we go off to our weekend, okay?
- 00:25 So while it's all fresh in our mind, Friday afternoon is the day.
- 00:28 So, I need this to happen every single week.
- 00:31 So I'm going to double click to open up that particular appointment,
- 00:34 and right above I have a recurrence button.
- 00:38 So when I click the recurrence, now I can tell this,
- 00:40 do I want this every single day, or just on every weekday?
- 00:44 Do I want this every single week?
- 00:46 If I want it every week, how many days of that week should it fall on?
- 00:50 So this time just on a Friday.
- 00:53 Do I want it monthly?
- 00:54 So for monthly, I could say the eighth day of every single month, or
- 00:57 every second month, or every third month.
- 01:00 I could say at the second Friday of every first month, second month, or third month.
- 01:04 If I want this yearly, do I want this on the same date every year or on the second
- 01:09 Friday of every year, or maybe every two years, or every five years.
- 01:14 So in this particular case, we're going to stick with weekly.
- 01:17 I want this every week on Friday.
- 01:19 At this particular date and time up above, and
- 01:24 I'm going to, let's see, I can tell it, let's end this after 52 occurrences,
- 01:29 so it's going to be every week for an entire year.
- 01:32 And then maybe we can redo that later.
- 01:34 Alright, let's go ahead and click OK.
- 01:37 When I clicked OK, this changed to appointment series.
- 01:41 It was an appointment a moment ago, now it's an appointment series.
- 01:44 If I'd like to categorize this, now would be a great time.
- 01:48 We're going to go ahead and
- 01:49 categorize this into red and I'm going to hit save and close.
- 01:52 Now what you see on my screen is one single appointment, but it's got an extra
- 01:55 symbol on the right hand corner, if you can see it, that is a recurrence symbol.
- 02:02 Now I can go ahead and click ahead and I can see, that yes this meeting is showing
- 02:06 up on every Friday, or if I would like to just see the entire month.
- 02:11 There we go.
- 02:11 Now I can click ahead to the months to see that it is showing up on every month.
- 02:17 Now why are these drop down arrows?
- 02:18 That drop down arrow simply means there's more to see.
- 02:21 Okay? So the drop down arrow simply means
- 02:23 there's more in here.
- 02:24 So there we go, I can see that this worked.
- 02:26 Well, there might be a particular month I just can't make it a particular Friday.
- 02:31 So let's go ahead and say on this particular Friday, I've got to be gone.
- 02:35 I know I'm going to be gone that week, I want to activate that day,
- 02:38 simply click on that day.
- 02:39 I'm going to click on work week and it should stay on that particular week for
- 02:43 me, and I'm going to delete this off my calendar.
- 02:46 Can't make it that day.
- 02:47 So I have two options, I can right click, and tell it delete and
- 02:52 choose occurence or series, but generally I always forget that's even there.
- 02:57 When I need to cancel one of these I just hit the delete on my keyboard.
- 03:01 Tap, delete and now it asks me, just this occurence or the entire series?
- 03:06 Since I scheduled the series I don't want to delete the whole thing.
- 03:09 I'm just going to delete this occurence.
- 03:11 Click OK.
- 03:12 And it's gone off of that week on my calendar.
- 03:15 I'm going to go ahead and
- 03:16 click the month view, should stay in the main month which it did.
- 03:20 And as you can see it is not on that particular day.
- 03:23 So the beauty about the recurring appointment is you have total control.
- 03:27 You can color code these, you can reccur these, you can play with their recurrence.
- 03:31 Sometimes it takes two levels of recurrence to make something work.
- 03:34 But go ahead and work with those.
- 03:35 It's kind of great to just get your calendar all scheduled up for
- 03:40 the next couple months.
- 03:41 Thank you.
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