How To Mark Vacation In Outlook
In the modern world it is important that each and every person knows how to polish his or her skills. For example, a person like you should know how to mark vacation in Outlook, because this way you will be able to leave a mark at Outlook by your own. Microsoft Outlook is a well-known program which can help you to track upcoming up-coming events. This program is widely used by the people who work for the government or those who have some public job at hand.
The Mark as Vacation option is a feature in Outlook that enables the user to officially mark a calendar item as a holiday. An Outlook vacation calendar is one of the most important tools for planning holidays, especially if an organization’s email system is not available and large numbers of employees cannot access their appointments.
How To Mark Vacation In Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a popular email application for Mac and Windows that includes calendar and contact functionality. Millions of people everywhere take advantage of Microsoft Outlook’s ability to sync with Google Calendar and Apple iCal, when syncing the applications with Gmail. People can also sync their contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail, but there is no way to input ad-hoc vacations into Outlook. Instead of having to click into a different calendar or application whenever you need to add a vacation day, it’s best to simply set up Outlook so your vacation time appears in your calendar directly.
Have you ever wondered if there was a way to notify others that you are on vacation while using Outlook? I know I have. Although many choose to just turn off their Outlook email, sometimes that’s not an option (or our boss will use software that is deeply integrated with Outlook). If you’re in a similar situation, then try out the following trick from a Microsoft MVP.
In this post, we’ll show you how to add annual leave to your Microsoft Outlook calendar.
There are actually two ways of getting this done. The not-so-simple way, and the simple way:
- The not-so-simple way is to just use Outlook. We know, you’d think just using Outlook would be the simple way. But sadly, your Outlook Calendar wasn’t made to be a time off tracker. As you’ll see below, there are several steps you need to take to add annual leave to your Outlook Calendar.
- The simple way is using an annual leave app like Timetastic. It can manage all of your leave management needs (from booking holidays to doing absence tracking), and it automatically syncs with Outlook to share holidays, sick leave, and other types of leave across your organisation. This removes all the double work.
Let’s start with the not-so-simple way:
Adding your own leave to your Outlook calendar (using only Outlook)
If your manager hasn’t set up and shared a separate “annual leave calendar” in Outlook (more about this later), you’ll have to jump through quite a few hoops to share your holiday plans with your colleagues using Outlook.
Step 1: Go to your own calendar and create a new meeting appointment.
This meeting time will be your time off. You can type in a description in the subject box, such as whether you’re on holiday or out sick, or you can leave it blank. You’ll need to pick the start time and end time for this “meeting”.
Step 2: Click “Request responses”
Then you’ll want to click the “Response options” drop-down menu and click “Request responses.” This way, your team can acknowledge that they got your time off notification.
Step 3: Mark your Time Off as “Free”
Then you want to mark this appointment to show as “free.” This is a critical step because this lets your team add your time off to their calendar without having it visually block up their entire day.
FYI: If you’re putting in an all-day event, Microsoft Office defaults to “free.”
After you’ve done that, you will add who you want this notice to go to. It then pops up in their Outlook calendar and they get a notification in their inbox.
But there’s still a bit left to do.
Step 4: Do it all again for your own calendar (yes, really!)
Because you marked that time away as “free,” that means it’s marked as “free” on your own personal calendar, too. That’s a problem, because you’re not free, you’re out of office on holiday.
To get around this, you need to create an additional appointment for yourself on your calendar. But this time, set yourself as “Away” and don’t invite any attendees.
Now, if someone on your team looks up your calendar, they’ll see that you’re on holiday.
How to create a shared calendar for time off requests only
If you’re managing a really small team, you might be able to get away with having everyone just add time off to their calendars (and sharing it with whoever is necessary).
But if you’re managing a larger team — or if you’re also trying to track your staff’s leave balances in Outlook — then you’re going to need to create a completely new calendar in Outlook that’s just for time off requests.
Unfortunately, this is pretty complicated if you’re just sticking with Outlook calendar. In other words, if you’re not using a leave management app — like Timetastic.
You can find a full breakdown of the process from The Microsoft Outlook Ideas Book.
While this is a good resource if you want to set up a shared Outlook calendar for annual leave requests, if you click the link, you’ll see it’s still not an easy task if you’re not a developer.
And once you’ve gone through the dozen or so steps to create your shared calendar, you’re facing the same problem: You’ll still need to add everyone’s individual time off to the calendar (using the process we explained above).
Now, let’s look at the simple method for adding annual leave to Outlook.
How to automatically update your Outlook calendar with Timetastic
Timetastic simplifies the whole time off process — everything from booking time off to keeping your team’s calendar updated.
When your team wants to book time off, they do it in Timetastic. They select the dates, pick the type of leave they’re taking (holiday, sick leave, etc.), and book their request.
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Approved requests show up in your company’s Wallchart, which can have different departments to reflect your company’s organisational structure.
Everyone can access the Wallchart, quickly seeing who is off now or has a holiday coming up soon.
And you can set up your Timetastic Wallchart to share this information automatically with your Outlook calendar via our calendar subscriptions. This syncs everything in real-time.
Simply take the iCal URL you need to add the bookings you want to your Outlook calendar.
Here are a couple of useful Help Centre links to help with implementing this:
It’s that simple. No double work is needed and you and your team will always have up-to-date and accurate information.
Extra benefits of using Timetastic to manage your team’s leave
Timetastic is a complete time off management tool (in fact, it’s simple enough to use from your smartphone). As well as syncing with your Outlook calendar, Timetastic also comes with several other benefits, including:
- Easier approval of leave requests.
- Automatic approval of leave requests (if you prefer).
- An updated record of everyone’s annual leave.
- Absence insights, so you can track patterns and trends.
- Absence summaries, which are sent directly to your inbox.
Easier approval of leave requests
With Timetastic, it’s really easy to respond to someone’s time off request.
After a staff member submits their holiday request via the Timetastic smartphone or web app, you can choose to receive it in your email inbox or as a direct message via Slack or MS Teams.
Once you get the request, you can approve or decline their request from there without having to log into Timetastic.
You can also set up Timetastic to automatically approve time off requests, while still keeping control over how many people you have in the office.
- First, you set your maximum absent levels. This is how many people your company can afford to have off on any given day.
- Then you lock your key dates. A locked date is when your team can’t take a holiday, whether that’s a particularly busy time or when you have certain deadlines.