Notes Tips #20: Repeat Meetings Randomly

We’ve all been there: You want to create a repeating meeting, but realise that one of the dates within the repeating interval collides with another meeting. Notes and Domino is the only system that can deal elegantly with this. Read on to learn how!

Let’s say you have a weekly meeting every Monday morning between 9 and 10. The way to go is to create one meeting between 9 and 10, and then set it to repeat weekly every Monday.  But then you realise that on Monday three weeks from now you can’t hold that meeting, since you are away on other business. And maybe you realise this about another Monday as well. What to do?

In Outlook and Google Calendar you have to send out the invitation with all repeating meetings. And then you have to cancel the dates that you can’t make it. Which means that people will get an invitation first for all meetings, and then cancellations for all the Monday’s you can’t make it.

In HCL Notes, you don’t have to do it like this. You can simply set any date you want for the repeating meetings. Here’s how  you do it:

1. Create a new meeting
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2. Click on Repeat:
   
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3. The window for creating repeating meetings will appear:
   
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4. Click on the pull down menu where it says Daily and choose Custom:
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5. You will now see these options:
   
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6. You can now choose any date you want this meeting to be repeated on. Click on the date, then click on the button Add selected date and it will be added to the list to the right.You can navigate between months by clicking on the arrows to the left and right of the month name and year.
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7. In our example you now click on every Monday you can attend, and then skip the ones you can’t attend. Everybody will now only get invitations to the selected dates. There’s no need for you to cancel anything now.Here we’ve chosen all the Mondays we can attend. And in the weeks we can’t meet on a Monday, we’ve added a day we actually can meet that week:

Easy peasy! You are not locked to a specific interval like weekly, daily or monthly.

PS! I’ve been told that some Outlook users will only get an invitation for the first date you selected, and the meeting will not be added to their calendar in Outlook as a repeating meeting. I don’t know if this has been a problem for Google Calendar users. But for Notes users, this should work just fine.

Read all Notes tips here!