Overlaying and Comparing Calendars in Outlook
There are many reasons you might have multiple calendars in Outlook. Perhaps you want a calendar of your favorite sports team’s schedule, but don’t need that information on your work calendar. Or maybe you keep track of schedules for several people or rooms.
These multiple calendars might not be used for scheduling. Unless you’re a die-hard fan, you probably aren’t going to take off work to watch your favorite team in a Tuesday afternoon game. And if you keep calendars for other people, they won’t always attend the same meetings. Despite this, it might be helpful to overlay the calendars to get a quick visual representation of events.
Creating Additonal Calendars
To create a new calendar in Outlook, in the Manage Calendars group, click 
, click “Create New Blank Calendar…” The Create New Folder dialog box opens. We can give our calendar a meaningful name.
Overlaying Multiple Calendars
For this example, we have created three calendars. Each calendar shows the schedule for an individual class (CS231, CS250, and CS275). The calendars do not show the instructor or number of students, they simply show us when and where each section is taught.
NOTE: To select or deselect a calendar, click the check box next to the calendar’s name in the Navigation Pane.
As the person who creates and manages these schedules, we need to make sure there is ample opportunity for students to take the classes they need. Can the students who are only on campus on Tuesday and Thursday (or only in the mornings, afternoons, or evenings) fulfill their requirements? Is the department relying too heavily on twice or thrice weekly classes? We know the schedule won’t be perfect for everyone, but have we created a nice mix of times and days?
We can overlay the calendars and create one large calendar which will give us a quick, visual answer to these questions.
Outlook will overlay two calendars at a time. The selected calendar will be overlaid with the calendar opened first. Select the CS231 calendar by clicking somewhere on the calendar. Now we can begin overlaying the calendars. We need to move to the View tab on the Ribbon. In the Arrangement group, click 
. The CS231 calendar is now overlaid with the CS250 calendar.
To add the third calendar (CS275), we need to first select it by clicking somewhere on the calendar. In the Arrangement group, click . Now all three calendars are overlaid and we now have a quick visual of our class schedules.
When we have gathered all of the information we need from this overlaid calendar, we can remove the overlay. To do this, in the Arrangement group, click as many times as necessary to separate all of the calendars.
