I would lable myself a bit of a Microsoft Office nerd. I really like finding news ways to overcomplicate the way I use Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

Today, I found a post by the product managers for Outlook on how to incorporate a visual indication of when you'll be out of office in your auto out of office response.

This blog is often a rant, sometimes a reflection, and occasionally a way for me to remember cool things so I can search my own blog rather than redoing the searches I've done in the past.

I'm going to outline the process for including a mini calendar in out of office messages because I find myself overcomplicating the message I use each time I got out of the office. Should it be "returning on Monday, December 29th" or "I'll be out until the Friday, December 26th and assume they know I'll be back on Monday"

So here's what I'm going to do when I go out of the office for my trip to Cancun over New Years.

1. Act as though I'm sending my calendar in an email by right clicking on my calendar title and selecting "Send via Email..."
   
2. Select the date range for which I'll be out of the office. This way the dates will be highlighted in the HTML calendar created.
   
3. Copy the calendar created in the body of the email
4. Past this calendar into my out of office message