Microsoft is making its first significant change to the Outlook calendar view in years. A new Outlook calendar board view is coming soon to Outlook for the web, and it works a lot like Trello. It’s a new dynamic view that will let you organize meetings alongside tasks, notes, goals, links, files, and more.
It works much like Trello, where you can add new cards of information to help you organize your calendar and meetings. Files can sit alongside this view or even simple notes and goals to help with organization. It’s essentially an ever-expanding board that tries to centralize everything that goes into keeping your calendar clean and up to date.
“On average, people use 6 tools to track all the things they need to get done,” says Gabriel Valdez, a product marketing manager for Microsoft’s Outlook team. “That is a lot of context switching, back and forth, and maybe even double tracking.” This new calendar board view is designed to help people cut down on having to switch between tools and apps to manage their time.
Microsoft is making this new board calendar view available in Outlook for the web first, and it will be available to commercial and education users soon, too. It’s not clear how this new view will appear in Outlook for Windows or the mobile versions of Outlook in the future, though.
Microsoft is also improving Outlook for iOS and Android for meeting scheduling. Later this month, suggested times for meetings will appear for all commercial and education users, making it easier to avoid conflicts when scheduling meetings with multiple participants.
