Outlook Low Vision: Check Appointments

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan, and today we'll learn how to work with existing appointments in Microsoft Outlook's calendar. This workshop is intended for users for low vision. If you use a screen reading program, be sure to check out our screen reading version of this workshop.

In previous workshops in this series, I've mentioned that I rely on Outlook's calendar function much like a personal assistant. It helps me arrange my schedule and it's always there to remind me of upcoming appointments.

Let's jump right into Outlook to learn how to work with existing appointments in your life. We learned in another workshop in this series that, when we initially open Outlook, we land in our inbox. Today, let's use our keyboard shortcut, Ctrl and the number two, to switch from our inbox to our calendar view. Here in the default view we see our entire month. By locating our highlighted day, we can quickly find out what's on tap for today.

Okay, we see that we have our monthly book club meeting scheduled for this evening at seven p.m. To review details of the appointment, we use our mouse pointer to hover over the appointment. We can check the time, location, and length of the appointment. We also see something called Reminder. Hang with me, we'll check out reminders later in the workshop.

Of course, checking today's calendar helps us plan our day, but we also need to know what's coming up for the rest of the week. Outlook gives us a couple of cool ways to view upcoming appointments. In the first method, we use our mouse pointer to select an appointment. I'll double click to open it. With our appointment open, we can add details in the notes section here. We can also edit our appointments in this window. Let's say my yoga class has been rescheduled from Wednesday to Thursday night. We can easily use the calendar thumbnail to select the new date.

Let's do that now. I'll open the calendar and select Thursday. The time hasn't changed so there's no need to change that detail. Since we've changed the date of our appointment, let's Save & Close, just like we did when we created the appointment. We can see that our appointment has now been moved to Thursday.

Let's check out our other method to move through our appointments. In addition to using the mouse pointer, we can also use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl and the period. By holding down the Ctrl key and pressing and releasing the period key, we move from one appointment to another. We see each day highlighted as we navigate through the days in which we have appointments. We can also move back through the days with appointments by using the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl and the comma.

Let's move back to today's appointment. There's one more feature I promised we'd discuss today, reminders. These are quick little messages that pop up in Outlook to tell us we have an upcoming appointment. Reminders can be set to alert us anywhere from five minutes to two weeks before our appointment. Let's open today's appointment to explore reminders. In our ribbon, we see that the focus is on the Appointment tab. In our Options group, we see the reminder drop down box. Let's open it by selecting the down arrow at the far right. From our list, we choose the time that works best for us. The default reminder is 15 minutes. I'll select four hours. This command instructs Outlook to send us a reminder four hours prior to our scheduled appointment. Now, let's Save & Close our appointment.

And we're back in our calendar. Imagine we moved forward in time and it's four hours before our appointment. Outlook has sent us a reminder. In addition to a bell icon in our taskbar, we hear an audible tone and see the reminder dialog box. When we select the reminder in our task bar, we open the reminder dialog box. We have several choices here. We can snooze our alarm for a set amount of time or we can dismiss it. Let's explore our snooze options. By selecting the down arrow in our Snooze window, we see a list of snooze times. The default snooze time is five minutes before the start of our appointment. If we don't need any other reminders, we select the Dismiss button. This closes the reminder window and here we are back in our calendar. Outlook has done its job, now it's up to us to make it to our appointment on time.

Today, we learned how to work with existing appointments in our Outlook calendar. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series of workshops called Microsoft Outlook.