Not all appointments are ‘one off’, many happen on a regular basis. Outlook lets you add these ‘recurring’ appointments just once and they’ll appear in your diary each time. There’s even allowance for exceptions when the regular event is cancelled or changed. Outlook’s recurring appointments can handle pretty much all repeating patterns you’ll need. They aren’t just for meetings but also regular ‘To Do’ items like taking medicines and special events. We’ll show you how to make a recurring appointment and suggest some ways it can be used that might not be immediately obvious. REPEATING YOURSELF 101 To make a recurring appointment: Create a new appointment – there’s various ways to do this.
Jul 13, 2016 - Repeating reminders are easy to set up on your Mac or iOS device, and we'll. 1) Launch the Reminders app on your Mac and create a new reminder. Bi-weekly, monthly, annually, or never, or you can pick a custom one.
One is to switch to Calendar view then click on the New Appointing button on the Home tab. Fill in a Subject label for the reminder and, if you wish, Location and Notes. Then look up on the toolbar and click on the large Recurring button – you’ll see a new dialog box appear to set the repeating options. Appointment Time: choose a Start and End time for the appointment or choose a Start time and Duration (the end time will change accordingly). Start / End / Duration. Choose the start time then either the end time or duration (the other will change to suit). For ‘To Do’ reminders, make the duration 0 minutes.
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Recurrence Pattern: Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly, the options on the right change to suit the pattern selected. For example, choosing Weekly lets you choose the day/s of the week and how many weeks between each appointments. Choose 1 week for weekly, 2 weeks for fortnightly/every second week etc. Range of Recurrence: you can choose from a never ending recurrence, ending after n appointments or ending on a certain date. ‘End after’ or ‘End by’ is handy for a series of classes or limited time medications. When you’ve finished click OK, on the calendar dialog you’ll see a summary of the settings you’ve chosen.
Check the reminder time. The usual 30 minute default might not be appropriate.
In this example a ‘0 minute’ reminder is better (ie remind at the appointment time, not before). Also check the ‘Busy’ status and perhaps change it to ‘Free’ or ‘Tentative’ so you don’t get meeting conflict warnings from Outlook.
Click ‘Save and Close’ as usual to save the entire appointment. On the calendar view the appointment will show up with a little twin circular arrow to indicate part of a series.
You can change the appointment by double-clicking on it, you get the choice of changing just that appointment or the whole series. Which brings us to changing one appointment in the series. EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE.
Having setup a recurring appointment, Murphy’s Law says there’ll be one-off changes. For example a regular appointment is cancelled or moved to another time. Thankfully Outlook can handle that, you can edit one or more appointments from a series. Double-click on the appointment you want to change, choose the ‘Just this one’ option to only change that event (not the entire series). You can then change the time, date or even delete that appointment entirely. In our example, you might want to delete a single ‘trash’ reminder because you’ll be away. Or change the ‘trash day’ because of a public holiday.
Once you choose ‘Just this one’, you can edit that single appointment in any way you like. Change the location, notes, start time or whatever. MEDICATION REMINDERS Outlook can be very useful to prompt you to take your medicine. That’s especially true these days when Outlook can be synchronized to other devices so your medication prompts follow you around. A simple, ‘one tablet a day’ regime is easy. Just create a daily recurring appointment, every 1 days with no end date or ending on a particular date as the case may be.
The Start time is when you need to take the medicine, change the duration to ‘0 minutes’ so the End time is the same as the Start. Make sure the reminder is set on and the reminder time is also ‘0 minutes’ (unless you want to be reminded before the due time).
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Twice a day or more can’t be done with a single appointment (there’s no provision for recurring events more frequently than daily). Instead create a daily recurring appointment for each time of day you have to medicate. For example, if you have to be reminded at 9am and 9pm create two daily recurring appointments – one for each time. PRIVACY If you have a shared calendar you probably don’t want your medical habits to appear to others. Even if your calendar isn’t shared you might not want to see those reminders cluttering up your daily view.
Any appointment can be flagged as ‘Private’ – there’s a ‘lock’ icon in the Appointment Series Tags block on the right. Then you can filter the Outlook view to not show Private appointments in the normal display. Editing your Outlook views is a topic for another time but in short you Customize the current view, Filter, the Advanced filter is set to ‘Sensitivity’ not equal to ‘Private’. And before you ask no we don’t understand Microsoft’s thinking here. They’ve had a ‘Private’ calendar option for many years but haven’t made it easier to filter with that flag.
There’s nothing for ‘Private’ on the Appointments and Meetings’ dialog and instead users have to dig around in the Advanced options – go figure. BIRTHDAYS, ANNIVERSARIES You can use recurring appointments on an annual basis to remind you of anniversaries etc. Birthdays and Anniversaries can be stored in one of two ways. Each Contact has a special field to record Birthday and Anniversary for a person – when you set those dates Outlook will automatically create All Day recurring annual events in the Calendar. Naturally you can create annual reminders for people not in the Contacts list or for other anniversaries. You may wish to be reminded of the anniversary of the passing of a friend or relative.
The more romantically inclined may want to record the date they first met that special someone or celebrate the day a divorce was finalized. Sadly the automatically created events have the same default reminder time as any other appointment.
So the default is that you get 15 minutes warning of a birthday, hardly enough time to get a gift or send a (non-virtual) birthday card. If you want to extend the reminder time, open the automatically created appointment, choose to edit the entire series then change the reminder time and save. There’s a lot more about repeating appointments including more examples in.