Purdue University College of Liberal Arts

Information Technology

Configuring Outlook for 10-minute Appointments

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This is a trick in Microsoft Outlook that might be especially helpful to the Advising office.

During these rush periods, my understanding was that they are on 10-minute appointments rather than the usual 30-minute. By default, Outlook shows calendars in 30-minute increments ... but with a few steps done once, a user can forevermore quickly change between the normal 30-minute view and a 10-minute view. This might be especially useful to the receptionists so that they can quickly create 10-minute appointments on the various advisors' calendars.

This is the one-time procedure to do in Outlook:

  1. Pull down the View menu to "Current View" and choose "Define Views" from the submenu.
  2. At the upper-right of the dialog, click the "New..." button.
  3. In the 'Create a New View' dialog that appears, at the top, type "Day/Week/Month 10-Minute".
  4. In the same dialog near the middle, select "Day/Week/Month" as the type of view.
  5. In the same dialog near the bottom, select "All Appointment folders".
  6. Click "OK".
  7. In the "View Settings for 'Day/Week/Month 10-minute'" dialog that appears, click the "Other Settings..." button.
  8. From the 'Time scale' pop-up menu near the upper-right, select "10 minutes".
  9. Click "OK".
  10. Again, click "OK".
  11. Finally, near the bottom-center of the remaining dialog, click "Close".

With the above done, the following step can be done as needed to change the view of a calendar:

  1. Pull down the View menu to "Current View" and choose "Day/Week/Month 10-Minute" from the submenu. (To change back to the 30-minute view, choose the plain "Day/Week/Month" item from the submenu. Note that this applies only to the active calendar window, not to every open calendar window. The receptionists will have to repeat this one step on each advisor's window, but even so this may be worthwhile.)

    Why would this be a potential time-saver? In a 10-minute view, each hour is divided into six fields rather than the usual two. Creating a 10-minute appointment now requires only two steps:

    1. Click on the calendar field that represents the desired timeslot. (8:10-8:20a would be the second of the six boxes between 8:00 and 9:00.)
    2. Type the relevant info (student name, etc.). (What you type appears in the field you clicked.)

    Done.

Creating a 10-minute appointment in the regular 30-minute view requires the receptionist to manually edit the start-time and end-time values in a separate, somewhat complicated dialog box -- doable, but many more steps.



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