A decade ago, you had to call someone to schedule a meeting. And both of you had to pencil the meeting in a diary book. Nowadays, technology has eased that burden. Instead of opening up a diary every day and looking at your schedule, you can glance at your phone and immediately know what you have planned for the day. Or set reminders on your phone, which will pop-up on your home screen.
Using your phone as a diary is relatively easier than an actual physical diary, as phones are almost always glued to our hands.
Most importantly, you can invite others to scheduled meetings via applications such as Outlook. For example, you can invite John Smith to a meeting on 2nd February 2021; the other participant has the option to accept or decline the invitation.
There are many features in Outlook that may seem complicated or confusing at first, but once you get the hang of them, they are extremely useful.
To use a calendar invite feature, you need to have the other person added to your contacts or manually input their email address.
Send someone a calendar invite on Outlook
- Open Outlook on your browser.
- Move the cursor to the ‘Calendar’ option on the bottom left corner. It will be the second last icon. Click on it.
- Move the cursor to ‘New Items’ on the top left corner. Click on it.
- A drop-down menu will appear. Click on the ‘Meetings’ option.
- A new window will appear, which will require you to input information in the empty fields.
- Give the Meeting a title.
- Move the cursor to the ‘Required’ field. Click on it. Your contact list will appear. Choose a contact from the list who you want to invite for the meeting. The other option is to manually input the email address in the field next to Required.
- Next, add the date of the meeting. You can click on the tiny calendar and choose the date.
- Add the start and end timings of the meeting. If your meeting continues all day, tick the small box next to the
- Add the location of the meeting.
- Lastly, on the left side, you will see a ‘Send option.’ Move the cursor over there and click on it. Your meeting invitation will be sent to the person(s) it was meant for.
Sending a calendar invite on your Android mobile device will be a little different.
Send a calendar invite from your Android mobile device
- Open the Outlook application on your phone.
- Tap on the calendar icon on the bottom right of the screen.
- There will be a big blue plus sign on the calendar page. Tap on it.
- A New Event page will appear. Fill in the appropriate details for the meeting, including date, timings (tap the ‘All day’ option if the meeting is all day, location, people to invite).
- If you have multiple email addresses signed into Outlook, tap on the calendar near the top of the screen. A drop-down menu will appear, giving you an option to choose. Tap on the email address you want to send the invite from.
- Tap the tick icon on the top right corner when finished filling in the details.
On an iPhone, the only difference is that instead of a big blue plus sign to add a new event, the plus sign will appear on the top right of the screen.