Respond to a meeting invitation

- [Instructor] Sooner or later, you're also going to be invited to other people's meetings. There's a few ways that you can respond to them. In my calendar, I can see I have a meeting invitation because this entry is light and it's tentative. It's tentative, meaning it has stripes on the left hand side. And because it's not a permanent meeting in my calendar. If anybody else tried to book something with me at this time, they'd be able to because I haven't accepted it yet. I could double click on it or single click on it. From the ribbon tool bar, I could choose to accept it, tentatively accept it or decline it.

I'll tell you what those things mean in a few moments because the most common way that you'll be accepting or rejecting meetings is in your e-mail file. You'll be getting these invitations in your inbox like an e-mail. So let's click mail on the bottom left hand corner and head back to the inbox. This is what it's going to look like. Here's my meeting request from Sharon. I can tell it's a meeting request because there's a calendar picture right in the e-mail. Sharon hasn't put any additional text in here.

If she did, it would appear below here, but I can see who's been invited to the meeting. Right now, it's just me. And I can see when it is. There's a few things I can do. The first thing I'd like to do is look at my calendar to see what I have that day. On the right hand side, I can click the calendar icon. It's going to pop up a mini version of my calendar. I can click to expand it and see what I have going on for the day. When I'm done with this, I'll just close out of it and I'm brought back to the meeting request.

Here's where I decide what I'd like to do for this meeting. I can choose to accept it, by clicking the green triangle. I can choose to edit the response before I send it. Meaning, I can accept it with a note to Sharon. I can send the response immediately without a note or I can choose not to send a response at all. The question mark icon is to mark it as tentative. This means I'll accept the meeting request, however my free time on my calendar will still be shown as available.

So somebody else can still schedule me for other things. I have the same three choices here with tentative. And finally, I can choose to decline the meeting. There's one more choice. If I can make the meeting, but I'd rather it was a different time, I can choose this icon. I can either mark myself as tentative and propose a new time or if I can't make the meeting at all, I could choose decline and propose new time. In this case, I'll choose tentative, as I know I'm available, but it's going to bring up a schedule picker to allow me to propose a new time that may be more convenient for the both of us.

I'll choose 2 o'clock and I'll click propose time. It brings up a new email to Sharon. I can include some text here to tell her why I'm proposing a new time. I'll click send. And now, it's been sent back to Sharon and it's completely up to her whether she wants to accept my new time. Let's go back to our calendar and check that date again. Now that I tentatively accepted the meeting, it's shown up as a much darker, permanent color on my calendar because it's a real meeting.

However, the bar tot he left of it is still striped. That means my time is still considered free, meaning other people can still schedule me for things because I marked it as tentative. If Sharon accepts the new time, it will be removed from my calendar here and brought back to the later time.