INSTRUCTOR: Hi, this is Drew Embury with P&L Technology. And today's video tip of the week is how to use the Scheduling Assistant in Microsoft Outlook. So we all probably use the Meeting Planning features in Microsoft Outlook where we can schedule meetings with coworkers. And we have a lot of clients also that have done things put their conference rooms into Microsoft Outlook. 

So conference rooms are great, but they're always in use, and it's sometimes difficult to try to find a time to use the conference room. So here, for example, you see our conference room and our company here under my calendars in Microsoft Outlook. And I can click on that. And it'll pull up the conference room, and it'll let me see who's using it and when times are available. 

So here we see Matt's got the conference room from 8:30 until 9:30. We see Corey's got the conference room this afternoon, and Michelle has the conference room at 2:30. So we have a lot of clients then that then will just go into the conference room and kind of put an entry on the calendar here. But there is an easier way to do that. 

To make it easier, I'm going to use what we call a resource. So I'll show you how to do that right now. So say, for example, I'd like to book an appointment with Melanie, and I can go to 10:30 here. And we'll open up our New Appointment wizard. And I'll type the subject of the message. 

I'll go to Invite Attendees. And I'll put Melanie in there. And I'm clicking the To button here. Down here you see Resources. So here's where I'll select the conference room. 

By clicking the Scheduling Assistant button here, what it's going to do is automatically check my calendar, Melanie's calendar, and the conference room to see what's going on. So here I can see that I'm available, Melanie is available, but the conference room is not available. So that's probably not a very good fit. 

So I can use the slider here to choose a better time that works. So let's see. Let's make it 11:15. And there you see for my slider that the conference room is available, Melanie is available, and I'm available. 

By clicking back now to the appointment, I can click Send. So you'll notice now it sent a meeting request to Melanie. It's automatically put it on my calendar. And after a couple of seconds now, it'll automatically put it on the conference room calendar. So this is preferable to booking the calendar directly because it allows me to then search for availability. 

And now if I move that meeting, I don't have to remember to go to the conference room calendar and move it there as well. I can just reschedule my meeting and it'll automatically keep my conference room up to date. The power of this can be expanded further. If you have got multiple conference rooms, you can put as many conference rooms as you have into the system. 

I also have clients that put things like company vehicles or IT equipment, like projectors that people share into the system, and then they can book, reserve, and check those out by using a resource as well. So that's our video tip this week, and I hope you find this helpful.