Love it or hate it, Microsoft Outlook remains the most widely used desktop email client in organizations around the world. That means it may well be the most used platform for scheduling meetings and appointments.
Now, when there is an appointment, there must be a date and time associated with it. The thing that annoys me with this field is, not all appointments require schedules on absolute dates. Sometimes we have to work with reference dates. For example, a week from today or something like the 2nd Tuesday in August.
What do you do in such situations? Maybe, you navigate through the calendar, figure out the exact date and then make a choice. Don’t you think that’s a lot of effort? I believe so and therefore I will show you easier and better ways.
The trick here is that Outlook can take natural language as input for all date fields. This tool understands your queries and intelligently converts them to dates. And not many Outlook users know about this.
example 1
I would like to schedule a meeting a week from today, on today, April 23, 2014. Check out my input and the results when hitting Enter.
example 2
When I want a 2nd Tuesday in August, that’s exactly what I’ll write. Note that you can write second instead of 2nd. You can also use day and month abbreviations like Mon, Tue, Wed… and Jan, Feb, Mar…
example 3
Outlook also understands holidays that fall on the same day each year. And the cool thing is that you can use them as references. I want to schedule a meeting 1 week before Christmas and this is what I will do.
Some key words to remember
The above three are just examples. There is no end to the natural language queries you can build. However, here are some keywords to make learning easier:
- today tomorrow Yesterday
- the day after tomorrow
- May day week
- before, after, from
- now, next, finally
I hope the keywords are self explanatory. If not, I suggest you try them instead of memorizing them by heart.
Combine queries
The queries you write are not atomic in nature. That means you can import multiple things at once. Like 2 weeks 3 days from today.
Save more time
Writing a date in natural language seems easy, doesn’t it? However, you can save more time by knowing these keyboard shortcuts:-
- y in the year
- month
- week
- d of the day
Furthermore, you can use the + symbol to add dates. So 3 days after Christmas can be written as 12/25 +3d. Or you can simply write 12/25 3d. Try something like below:-
Note: You cannot use the minus sign (- ) for the same sign, just like you used the + sign. You will always have to use before instead of.
Conclusion
I wish I could also use subject lines from my current appointments as a reference point. I tried a few queries and came up with different approaches. It doesn’t seem to be working. However, research will continue. If you happen to find a solution for that, please share it. At GT, we want to learn as much as possible, while sharing what we learn.
Top image credit: Andreanna
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
