How to duplicate meetings and events in your Outlook 2019 / 365 / 2016 calendar?

Here’s a question from Katie:

My new manager asked me to create short series of 2-3 meetings with his main reports. Seems to me that setting up a series of meeting would be somewhat of an overkill and waned to ask you whether there is a simple way to manually duplicate occurrences of Outlook meetings.

Copy or Duplicate Outlook meeting invites

To duplicate a meeting in Outlook 365 / 2019 proceed as following:

1. Open Outlook 365 / 2019
2. Navigate to the Calendar View
3. Locate your meeting or event in the calendar.
4. Click on the meeting occurrence, then hit Control +C (copy)
5. Now navigate to the date and time you would like to conduct your duplicated meeting.
6. Hit Control + V (paste).
7. Adjust the meeting subject, details, invitees, location, meeting room and Team invitation link as needed.

An alternative method to duplicate your meeting is to open your Calendar view and then press the Ctrl button, then while Ctrl is still pressed, drag your meeting to the preferred time slot.

Important tip: When using this at work on Microsoft Exchange server, you also might need to review the list of attendees and their availability, as people might not be available as they are tied in other meetings or appointments. Also, as applicable, go ahead and check the availability of a meeting room and any other equipment/resources for your meeting; as well as update any links to Teams meetings you might need to use.

Copying meetings to another calendar

Using the process we outlined above you can duplicate a meeting across multiple calendars that are defined in your Outlook client.

Let’s assume for example if you have a Work and a Personal calendar. You can define a recurrent lunch meeting with a colleague and using the process outlined above, copy the lunch series in both your calendars.

Duplicate entire calendars

Outlook allows you to copy an entire calendar including all appointments, meetings and events.

In order to copy an entire calendar, proceed as following:

1. Login to Outlook.
2. Navigate to the Calendar Tab.
3. In your left hand side tab, under My Calendars, find the calendar you wish to duplicate.
4. Right click the calendar and select Copy.
5. Select the target Outlook folder into which you would like to paste the calendar.
6. Hit OK.
7. Now, return to My Calendars section and check the new calendar so that it becomes visible in your Right hand side pane.

Copying the Outlook meeting list of attendees

Sometimes you don’t want to copy the entire meeting, but only the attendees list. If so, proceed as following:

1. In Outlook, open the Calendar tab.
2. Locate your meeting/event/appointment in the relevant Outlook calendar.
3. Open the meeting by double clicking it.
4. Copy the relevant names in the “To” field.
5. Close the meeting and navigate to the calendar view
6. Hover to the relevant date and time in the calendar and create a new Meeting Request.
7. Now copy the relevant invitees to the To window.
8. Enter your meeting subject and location.
9. Hit Send.
10. Voila 🙂

Converting your emails to appointments

A couple of readers asked whether there is a simple process for creating a meeting or appointment from an email they got into their inbox.  This is pretty helpful as it could be used to improve your follow up on important email.

Here’s is one quick trick to accomplish that:

• In your Outlook inbox locate the email you would like to turn into an appointment.
• Then left click it and drag it to the Calendar tab in the bottom of your screen.
• Outlook will immediately open an appointment, that will have the email text copied into the appointment details.
• Last, go ahead and set your subject, locations and invited people.

A second method is to use Outlook Quick Steps:

• From you Outlook Mail tab, click on Home.
• You will notice the Quick Steps section.
• Hit the Create  New icon.
• The Edit Quick Step dialog will appear.
• Then provide a meaningful name to your Quick Step automation.
• Then select Create an appointment with text option.
• Last hit on Finish.

• You’ll notice a new Quick step in your steps library located in the Home tab.
• From now on, whenever you would like to create a meeting from an email, just highlight the email in your inbox and hit your newly created quick step

Copying Outlook events on MAC OSX

Duplicating appointments and meetings within the same Outlook calendar is not supported in Microsoft Office for macOS..

In case of any additional questions, please leave us a comment.