Office 2013 For Dummies
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You can be as fickle as you want with Outlook 2013. In fact, to change the time of a scheduled item, just drag the appointment from where it is to where you want it to be. Or back again . . . maybe . . . if you feel like it. . . .

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To change an appointment, follow these steps:

  1. Click the appointment in the Calendar view.

    A dark border appears around the edge of the appointment.

  2. Make sure you’re in Week view or Month view.

  3. Drag the appointment to the time or date you want it to be.

    If you want to copy an appointment for another time, hold down Ctrl while you use the mouse to drag the appointment to another time or date. For example, if you’re scheduling a summer intern orientation from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and again from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., you can create the 9:00 a.m. appointment and then copy it to 1:00 p.m. by holding Ctrl and dragging the appointment.

    Then you have two appointments with the same subject, location, and date, but with different start times.

    If you copy an appointment to a different date by dragging the appointment to a date on the Date Navigator, you keep the hour of the appointment but change the date.

You can change an appointment to a date you can’t see on the calendar by following these steps:

  1. Double-click the appointment.

    The Appointment dialog box opens.

  2. Click the Calendar icon in the leftmost Start Time box to see the selected month’s calendar.

    A drop-down calendar appears.

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  3. Pick the month by clicking one of the triangles beside the month’s name.

    Clicking the left triangle moves you one month earlier; clicking the right triangle moves you one month later.

  4. Click the day of the month you want.

  5. Click in the rightmost Start Time text box and enter the appointment’s new time, if needed.

    You can also use the scroll-down button to the right of the time to select a new start time.

  6. Make any other changes you need in the appointment.

    Click the information you want to change and type the revised information over it.

  7. Click the Save & Close button.

Imagine that your dentist calls to tell you that you won’t need a root canal after all, but you’ll still need a routine checkup. To change the length of an appointment, follow these steps:

  1. Click the appointment in Day or Week view.

    This process doesn’t work in Month view because you can’t see the time without opening the appointment.

  2. Move the mouse pointer over the handles at the top or bottom of the appointment.

    When the pointer is in the right place, it turns into a two-headed arrow.

  3. Drag the bottom line down to make the appointment time longer; drag the bottom line up to make the appointment shorter.

    You can change an appointment’s length by dragging.

You also can shorten an appointment to fewer than 30 minutes. Follow these steps:

  1. Double-click the appointment.

  2. Click the End Time box.

  3. Type the ending time.

  4. Click the Save & Close button.

You can enter times in Outlook without adding colons and often without using a.m. or p.m. Outlook translates 443 as 4:43 p.m. If you plan lots of appointments at 4:43 a.m., just type 443A. (Just don’t call me at that hour, okay?) You can enter time in 24-hour format as well — 1443 would be 4:43 p.m. — but Outlook likes normal time better, so the time will display as 4:43.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Wallace Wang is the bestselling author of several dozen computer books including Office For Dummies and Beginning Programming For Dummies. Besides writing computer books, Wallace also enjoys performing stand-up comedy just to do something creative that involves human beings as opposed to machines.

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