How To Create A Shareable Calendar In Outlook

Last updated: October 2019

Sometimes you might be in need to create additional calendars in order to more easily manage your personal schedule separately from work or manage your project schedule. In today's post, we'll show you how you can create a birthday calendar in Outlook 2016 that will send you reminders about your friends and colleagues birthdays so you will never miss anyone's birthday again :-). You might use the same process to setup new calendars as needed for either your work or personal needs. Additionally, we'll show how to share a calendar with colleagues as well as copy, delete and recover Outlook calendars.

Note: Although the post was developed on Outlook 2016, the content is fully applicable to version 2019 ; We tested it both on Office 365 and standard desktop editions.

Create new calendar in Outlook

Follow the steps below to setup a blank Outlook calendar:

Open Outlook and hit the C alendar icon in the bottom-left navigation panel.

Roll down to My calendars and select the down arrow to expand it.
Now we can find there are set of separate calendars in it.

Right click on anyone of it and select New calendar or click on Folder in the ribbon and select New calendar.

In the dialog box, enter the name for your calendar.
Select where the folder has to be placed and make sure the folder contains are calendar items.

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That's it, your new calendar is created under the needed folder.

Setup a shareable calendar

Sharing a calendar could be quite useful for better team collaboration. You can share a custom created calendar or your own default personal calendar.

Setting up the sharing is simple:

In the Calendar tab, highlight the entry you might want to share.
Righ click, hit Share and then select Share Calendar.
Outlook will generate an invitation, which you then send to the relevant colleague/s.
In the invitation, use the check box below the Subject line to define whether the invitation recipient will be able to edit the specific calendar being shared.

Note: Another useful option for sharing is to send a calendar to a recipient by email. This is particularly useful in cases that you would like to collaborate with individuals who are not co-workers. The caveat being that the calendar is attached as an *.ics file, meaning that it will be an "offline" snapshot of the calendar, which won't be updated if your online calendar changes.

Copy, rename and delete a calendar

To move a calendar to another folder, right click on the calendar and click move calendar.
Then select which folder the calendar has to be moved.
To copy a calendar, again right click on the calendar and select Copy calendar.
And select where the copied calendar has to be pasted.
To rename a calendar, right click on the calendar and select rename calendar.
Enter the name for the calendar and press Enter key.
To delete calendar, right click on the calendar and hit delete calendar.

Recover a deleted calendar

The deleted calendar will be moved to the deleted items in your outlook.
To view the deleted calendar again and move it back to the original folder, click on the three dots in the bottom navigation panel and select Folders.

Now you can find the deleted calendar under deleted items.

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Deleting under the deleted items makes the calendar delete permanently.

Note that once setup, you are able to delegate access, set/remove permissions and sharing of your newly created calendar.

Adding Google Calendar to Outlook

If you are using Google Calendar in addition to Outlook, you might want to check out our tutorial on how to easily access your Google calendar in Outlook.

Using VBA

If you know Outlook Visual Basic for Applications Macros, you can use the following code to define an additional calendar in your calendar folder.

[code]

Sub Add_Cal()

Dim WCF as MapiFolder

Dim NCF as MapiFolder

'We'll add the new calendar under the default calendar folder

Set WCF = Application.Genamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(olFolderCalendar)

Set NCF = WCF.Folders.Add("New Calendar",olFolderCalendar)

End Sub

[/code]

Using Shortcuts

Couple of users asked whether there are keyboard shortcuts to speed up the creation of new calendar entries. The answer is that i am not aware of such a shortcut. Still recommended to use Ctrl+2 to get your calendar view with ease though.

Thanks for reading. 🙂