Showing Calendars in your OOF Messages
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
The Outlook team has a tradition of putting calendar diagrams in their OOF messages to try and help clarify the date ranges. In a recent mail to an Outlook-heavy DL, about 50% of the OOF messages I got back contained these mini OOF calendars, so they must find them helpful.
I asked if it was a new-fangled feature in O14, but in fact they do it by hand! (I wonder if they book vacation time for hand-crafting the OOF message.)
If you’re interested in doing the same thing (but a little less painfully,) you can use a PowerShell script: Show-Calendar.ps1.
By the way, I’ll be OOF December 6th through December 7th, returning December 8th.
[C:\Users\leeholm]
PS:1 > Show-Calendar -HighlightDay (6..7) -HighlightDate 12/8/2008
December 2008
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
— — — — — — —
30 1 2 3 4 5 [ 6]
[ 7] * 8* 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 1 2 3
Subscribe to this blog.
No. 1 — December 4th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Thats a really cool function. Also a good way to get powershell rolled out around the company as people say "hey – how did you do that – I want one too"
Now I just need some time off so I can deploy it on my desktop ;-)
No. 2 — December 27th, 2008 at 4:43 am
I don’t think they do it completely by hand: I think they use the Include Calendar function (Alt-H OC) to get the calendar, then they copy that into their message and bold or highlight the relevant dates. It’s still more tedious than what you did but it’s not completely by hand, either.