If you deal with lots of meetings and meeting invitations, you can end up spending a lot of time dealing with removing invitations, meeting responses, and cancellation notices from your Inbox. Luckily, you can set some preferences to keep these notices out of your Inbox, and have Notes deal with them automatically.
Here are some useful preferences that will save you time and keep your Inbox cleaner:
Automatically remove meeting invitations from your Inbox once you've responded to them
After you click Accept or Decline on a meeting invitation, the invitation will automatically be removed from your Inbox, so you don't have to remove it yourself. Don't worry, though, the meetings are not deleted, they're just moved to the All Documents folder. Deleting them would wipe them off your calendar.
To set this preference, follow these steps:
1. Click File > Preferences, and then click Calendar and To Do.
2. Click the Display tab (if it is not already open), and then click the Notices tab.
3. Select "Remove meeting notices from my Inbox after I process them."
Don't display meeting responses in your Inbox
When meeting invitees accept or declines meetings, you won't get the responses in your Inbox. (You'll still be able to see their responses in the meeting invitation, if you need to. Just open the meeting and click Invitee Status.)
To set this preference, follow these steps:
1. Click File > Preferences, and then click Calendar and To Do.
2. Click the Display tab (if it is not already open), and then click the Notices tab.
3. In the drop-down menu next to "Display the following meeting notices in my Inbox," select All except responses.
Automatically remove cancelled meetings from your calendar (or mark them as cancelled)
When a meeting gets cancelled, it will either be automatically removed from your calendar or automatically marked as cancelled (you decide which). The cancellation notice will not come to your Inbox. One really great perk of this is that it keeps your free time up-to-date, but you don't have to keep an eye on your Inbox for cancellations. People looking for your availability will see the newly freed-up time.
To set this preference, follow these steps:
1. Click File > Preferences, and then click Calendar and To Do.
2. Click the Display tab (if it is not already open), and then click the Views tab.
3. Select "Process cancelled meetings automatically," and then select whether to remove cancelled meetings from your calendar, or to show them as cancelled in the calendar
Dwight and I both prefer to "Show as cancelled in calendar." (Otherwise, you might drive yourself crazy thinking you had a meeting there that's no longer in your calendar.) But this way, cancelled meetings are automatically processed, keeping your availability up to date, but showing the cancelled meeting in red on your calendar. After you open the cancelled meeting, it is then taken off your calendar, leaving it less cluttered. This is so great!
Julia Brown | 24 July 2009 03:29:21 PM ET | | Comments (0)
