Outlook Low Vision: Create Appointments

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan and today we'll learn how to create appointments in our calendar in Microsoft Outlook. 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.

You know, Outlook is an application I rely on daily. I use it not only for emails, but also the calendar is like my own personal assistant. I rely on it to schedule appointments and remind me of upcoming events.

Today we'll cover the process of creating an appointment. I bet you'll also come to rely on this powerful tool. In another workshop in this series, we learned how to quickly navigate from our inbox to our calendar. Let's do that now by selecting the calendar in the navigation bar in the bottom left corner of our screen. If you're a shortcut kind of person like me, you can always use the keyboard shortcut of Control and the number two to switch from the inbox to calendar. As with many other actions we've learned about in this series, there's more than one method we can use to create an appointment. Let's have a look at both.

With the first method, we use our mouse pointer to select a tool in our ribbon. On the far left side, we see a category called New and no surprise, this is where we find our New Appointment tool. I can either select it with my mouse pointer or use the keyboard shortcut of Control + N for new. You know, one thing I love about all of the Microsoft Office products is that we can use the same shortcuts across most of their applications. A good example is Control + N to create something new whether it's an appointment in the calendar, an email in Outlook's email function, or a document in Word.

Let's use our keyboard shortcut to create a new appointment, Control + N. We've opened a new window and our cursor is in the subject edit field. This is where we type the name of our appointment or event. Let's say we have a doctor's appointment in a few months. We'll type Dr. Jones in this field. We can either click or use our Tab key to navigate to our next edit field, the location field. The location field is where we type the address, office number, room number, or any other type of location information. We'll use the mouse pointer to place our cursor there and type 123 Main Street. Now let's Tab to our next field, the start time.

Despite the name, we're not quite to the time yet, but hang with me, we'll get there. It actually asks us to set the date first, then we'll set the time. We see that today's date is selected which tells us it's ready to edit to whatever date we choose. We can type in the date or we can select the date from the calendar located at the far right of our edit field. Let's use our mouse pointer to select the calendar. We see the current month displayed, but what if our appointment is several months away? We use the right arrow in the top right of our calendar to move forward month by month. We'll use our mouse pointer to select July the 10th. We see the date is changed from today's date to our desired date.

Now let's use the mouse pointer to move to our start time edit field. We have an 11 a.m. appointment so let's select the down arrow here in our edit field. This opens our combo box and we can either use our mouse pointer or arrow keys to move up or down through the time choices. We'll select 11 a.m. While we're here, there's a nice calendar function I'd like to point out. To the right of our start time, we see a small checkbox labeled all day event. When we wish to schedule an event that takes place all day, for example a birthday, we select this box. We see our start and stop times are now grayed out. Because we've selected all day event, Outlook no longer needs that information. Since our doctor's appointment will not be an all day event, thank goodness, I'll unselect this checkbox by pressing by spacebar.

Let's move down to our next line to choose our ending date and time for our doctor's appointment. Since it will end the same day, we'll keep the date as July the 10th. Our next field asks for the ending time of our new appointment. Let's give ourselves plenty of time so we'll use our mouse pointer to select one p.m. We can also use our arrow keys to move through the various time choices and the Enter key to select our choice. One final step.

Let's navigate back to our ribbon where on the far left side we see the Save & Close tool. We use our mouse pointer to select it and we find ourselves back in our calendar view. We can also use the keyboard shortcut Alt and the letter S to save and close our new appointment. Congratulations, you've just created your first appointment in Outlook.

Today we learned how to create an appointment in our calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series of workshops called Microsoft Outlook.