Many of us have wives or husbands working in another company, and need to do work planning as well as planning our family life. What do you say if someone proposes a meeting next Wednesday at 8 in the morning? You had planned to take your kids to school, but the meeting is important as well.
If you had access to your spouses calendar, you could check immediately if maybe she could follow the kids, or if she has a meeting as well. Or you would like to work late next Tuesday, but you immediately see that your spouse has an arrangement in the evening, so that would not work.
Here is what I did for my wife and me to see each others Outlook calendars.
Inviting your spouse to see your Outlook calendar
Go to your Outlook calendar, chose Publish Online, and Publish to Office.com
- Chose how much detail to publish, and the time period.
- Send sharing invitation when prompted for it.
The person you are sharing with has to have a Hotmail/Windows Live mail address, and you have to send the invitation to that address. The calendar information will be automatically updated on Office.com, and will only be visible for your spouse.
Receiving an invite to see your spouses calendar in your Outlook
Check your Hotmail for the invite. When you receive your invitation from your spouse, follow the instructions in the mail, and the calendar will be added to your outlook.
The calendar will automatically be added to your Outlook, where you can show it or hide it.
You are now connected! This is a one time operation, and all updates will be done automatically when connected to a network.
This works with both Office 2010 (showed in screenshots), and in Office 2007 (may look a bit different).
Office 2013 update: Unfortunately Microsoft have removed the support for publishing calendars to Office.com in Outlook 2013. It is replaced by a publish to WebDAV Server. If you have a service provider who offers this, you should be able to get the correct address to use when publishing from them. Also see Outlook 2013 help online by searching for “share calendar”. I have also found a way to share calendars on SkyDrive, but is is a fairly complicated procedure. If you want to try, please contact me, and I will send the instructions.
Nice! Do you know how to make the color categories show up for both you and your wife?
Color categories in Outlook are personal, so you cannot share them with others. You can of course agree on a shared coloring system, but you still have to categorize manually.