Microsoft is making its first significant change to the Outlook calendar view in years. A new view of the Outlook calendar table is coming soon in Outlook for the web and works much like Trello. It is a new dynamic view that allows you to organize meetings together with tasks, notes, objectives, links, files and more.
It works like Trello, where you can add new info cards to help you organize your calendar and meetings. Files can be next to this view or even simple notes and goals to help with the organization. It is essentially a constantly expanding framework that tries to centralize everything that is needed to keep your calendar clean and up to date.
“On average, people use 6 tools to track all the things that need to be done,” says Gabriel Valdez, product marketing manager for the Outlook team at Microsoft. “It’s a lot of context switching, back and forth, and maybe even double tracking.” This new visualization of the calendar table is designed to help people avoid the need to switch between tools and applications to manage their time.
Microsoft is making this new preview of the whiteboard calendar available in Outlook for the Web first and will also be available to business and educational users soon. However, it is not clear how this new view will appear in Outlook for Windows or in mobile versions of Outlook in the future.
Microsoft is also improving Outlook for iOS and Android for scheduling meetings. At the end of this month, meeting times will be suggested for all business and educational users, making it easier to avoid conflicts when scheduling meetings with multiple participants.