Building data sets inside of Outlook

- [Instructor] There is a software that, no matter what job I'm doing or where I have worked, it has been with me since it was created, and that's Outlook. Outlook has data not unlike any other software, but most people just think about Outlook, they think about email, they don't really think about data. Let me tell you, it is so full of data and data tools that it's crazy. That's not the key to my survival though. My key has been knowing that I can create data sets in and out of Outlook, and most specifically, the calendar. That's because you can import and export. So this upcoming project, they want to create a training schedule to roll out some of their new software. There's lots of moving parts, lots of people needed, and the idea was to create a tentative set of dates just to see how it would look before committing to the real dates for training. They want to have a few set-up meetings. They want to have training meetings. They occur at different times on different days. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to actually try to accommodate all of their requests by creating appointments in an Outlook calendar and setting up the recurrence to get their set-up meetings, their training meetings, and their weekly recaps. So let's get started first by creating a calendar. I'm not going to use my actual calendar. I'm going to right click calendar here and I'm going to choose new calendar. Okay, and I'm going to go ahead and call this schedule data. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and click okay here. Now, it's really important that you right click down here to get your calendar, 'cause if you right click on my calendars, you don't just get to add a new calendar, okay? So again, it's right click, new calendar here. You can also, on the top, do add calendar and do a new blank calendar. All right, so now I'm going to check my schedule data and uncheck my actual calendar. So now I'm just viewing the schedule. All right, so they want to have set-up meetings. These set-up meetings are going to occur every Monday for two hours for about eight weeks. Okay, so we're going to kick off on September 30th. Okay, so I'm going to do a new appointment, and again, I'm going to do appointment here because I'm just planning, I'm not actually setting the official schedule yet. So this'll be set-up meetings and I'm going to type last day of September. Perfect. That's Monday. I'll go to the recurrence here. Now, it says 8:00 to 8:30, but my rules say that this needs to be for about two hours, so they want to start at 9:00. We're going to go to 11:00. It's going to occur every Monday, and it's going to end after eight occurrences. All right, perfect, and again, we've called them set-up meetings. I'll go ahead and give this a category of events here. You may hit categories and see nothing listed here, okay? All right, let me go ahead and save and close this. And then if you look in my calendar, I now have those meetings. Okay, all right. No big deal. Everybody knows how to set up a recurrence at this point. All right, now let me go ahead and set up a Wednesday and Friday from 10:00 to 12:00, and that's for 12 weeks. So again, I'm going to do a new appointment. I'm going to go to the recurrence. The rules for this are 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM, so I'll go ahead and do 10:00 AM, choose 12:00 PM. All right, let me set these up for Wednesday and Friday. I don't need a Monday there. Now, this is supposed to happen for 12 weeks, but it's 12 Wednesdays and 12 Fridays, so it's really going to be 24 occurrences. All right, go ahead and call this, this is the training meetups. All right, then I'll go ahead and save and close that. Okay, so now I'm starting to see like, hey, this is a pretty heavy, intense calendar. And look, I started it on the wrong day, so let me go correct it here. I'm going to do this on the entire series. It's another benefit of doing it like this for your data. I'll go edit my recurrence. I really need to start that. Here we go, on the 30th. All right, and so it's going to go a little past my set-ups, but that was by design. Okay, let's see. One, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. Perfect. Okay, so I have that set. And then now, I'm ready to do my last meeting, which are recap meetings. These happen at 3:00 PM on Thursdays each week after 9:30, this is the plan, so I'll go ahead and do this again. These are weekly recaps. Again, they're going to start last day of September. And again, these are 3:00 PM, so we'll do 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM, and then we can set our recurrence. Again, these happen every Thursday starting on the 30th, and we're going to end after 12 occurrences. And since it's just one day, 12 is appropriate here. All right, I'll click okay here, save and close. So do you see how the set-up meetings, that category kind of distinguishes it? And then you've got these training meetups, and now, the weekly recaps. So I'm going to right click the weekly recaps and go ahead and categorize it, and I'm going to do this as a vendor partner. And then I'm going to right click here, and you just pick whatever categories, like you can just color code for now. Again, the idea is to show you that you can distinguish them. It doesn't matter what actual category you're applying there. Okay, so it looks like now I've got a pretty good visual, and if this was an active calendar, I could actually merge that with my real calendar. That way I could kind of see, like, is it possible for me to do this? Okay, I love Outlook. It's fantastic. All right, so now the truth is I've got this ready to look at it as visualized. It's created, it has everything. I actually want to export it out so that we can talk about it, make corrections, and change it in our next meeting. So I'm going to go to file, I'll choose open and export, I'll choose import and export, I'm going to export this data to a file. It's going to be a CSV, comma-separated values. And then notice, I'm choosing to schedule data, okay? So I'll go ahead and choose next. Okay, I'm going to browse to where I'm going to put this. Okay, so I'm going to place this in a folder called schedule data. Okay, and you can put yours anywhere. If you're following along with me, you can put this in your documents, in your downloads, you can create a schedule data folder, but I'm going to go ahead and call it schedule data planning only. And then I'm going to save that, then I'll choose next. It's asking me do I want to export the appointments? I do. It's asking me if I want to map those custom fields. Going to leave everything alone 'cause I'm not taking it to somewhere different right now. And then I'll choose finish. Now, it's asking me what is the date range. So for this one, we know we're not starting until after 9-30, so I'll type 9-30-2024, and we're going to go, let's just go ahead and say to the end of the year. Choose okay, and now it's exporting out my file with all of my details. All right, let me go grab this file and show you what it looks like. So now I've opened up my schedule data. Take a look at this. It is giving me every single record of every one of those events. Weekly recaps. This is perfect. Now, this produced 45 records. Now, that's not a big sample, but if you didn't generate this out of Outlook, that meant you curated 45 records. I hope that that makes sense. I look at software through the eyes of what I put into it. Can I get out of it? While others would've typed this out and then tried to visualize it, I didn't type a thing, and I can export it to be loaded to any software any time.