Calendar Reporting Part 5

When you push the Export Times button, you should get a window like this.

From ForBlog

You’ll note that the dates I picked begin on Monday, 5 October 2009, and end on Friday, 9 October 2009. A note on this: It remembers that last dates you used, so you have to re-set the dates to the current week every Friday. Also, make sure you pick “Recurring Events” and “non-times-tagged items”!

Once you hit export, you should get an Excel window like this. Check out the diagram tab, if you selected “Create Excel Diagram” in the Export Popup!

From ForBlog

Calendar Reporting Part 4

Then, I assigned each recurring appointment a category. This will change its color in Outlook. So, let’s say I have a Monday of a week that looks like this (with some content changed to protect the guilty!):

Calendar Reporting Part 3

Next, I defined some custom categories in Outlook. Because I sync Outlook with my Treo smartphone, this part was easy. Along with defining the categories, I assigned each custom category a color. Now my category list looks like the following.

Calendar Reporting Part 2

First, I grabbed a copy of Outlook Times Addin 1.1 from here: http://outlook-times-addin.wang-sweden-ab.qarchive.org/



All I had to was shut down Outlook, install the product, and then restart Outlook.



I then had a new toolbar in my calendar that looked like this:

Calendar reporting

I use my calendar heavily to track both my personal and my work life. Since I use a Treo, I have no problem recording events realtime as they happen in my calendar, and assigning the tasks a category. However, it seems to take a lot of time to build my status report at the end of the week each Friday.

What I wanted was a tool that would convert my Outlook appointment info into a useable format, so I could quickly remove any unneccessary tasks, like a meeting I didn’t attend, and then just send it on.

Here’s a sample of one week. I’m sure many people have calendars that are much more crowded than this!

Outlook Calendaring

So, I'm just happily emailing along the other day, and I need to arrange a conference call.

Now, usually, this is a simple matter of popping open Outlooks calendar, entering the name of the person I want to meet with, and clicking the Scheduling Assistant button up at the top.

In this case, however, no one I tried to enter would come back with free/busy information. I live in my calendar, and use it for time and billing tracking, so having inaccurrate information in there drives me to distraction.

A quick search on Google later, and I found this link:

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.exchange.admin/browse_thread/thread/bbf7ac547e6e60dd?pli=1

In short, this is what it says:

This is a known "feature" by Outlook 2007 clients. To make a long story short, you can re-enable it via modifying the following registry tweak: under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options \Calendar add a the dword "UseLegacyFB" with the value 1


One quick registry edit, and I was back in business!

Introductions

My name is Brad McKuhen.

I am currently a Microsoft SQL Server Database Adminsitrator, DBA, & SQL Developer.

In past lives I have worked with SQL, SQL Server 7.0/2000/2005, T-SQL, Oracle's PL/SQL, Crystal Reports 8, 8.5, 9, VB 6, VBA, VBScript, & JScript.

I am CompTia A+ Certified and a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP)