Tame your computer - stop the traffic

In her regular series for Cambridge Network members - now in its 15th year - software training expert Karen Roem offers handy tips to help you 'Tame your computer'.  This week she describes how to stop receiving RSVPs from meeting requests (Microsoft Outlook).

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If you’ve ever organised a big happening using Outlook’s meeting request, you’ve probably had to wade through lots and lots of RSVPs. If you’re not bothered about whether people plan to attend or not, why not set the Response Options so that you will not receive any replies?

Here’s how:

  1. Prepare the meeting request, as normal.
  2. Click on the Response Options button in the Attendees group.
  3. Click on Request Response to unselect the default setting.

The recipient will still have the possibility to click on Accept, Tentative or Decline (or Yes, Maybe and No if they look at the invite in Gmail) so that the meeting goes in their calendar. But if they are really observant they might spot that they cannot edit the response, as normal, and that there is a message stating that “The organizer has not requested a response for this meeting.” (And yeah, I know organiser is spelled with an s, but this is the exact American English text they see ;)

With thanks to Clementine for this week’s tip inspiration. And for a future one, as I noticed that if you use the option described in this tip you won’t be able to benefit from Tracking, as described in tip 617. So I’ll write a tip about how to change the default setting so that all responses that don’t contain comments will be deleted automatically, but that you can still check the tracking information. (If you want a sneak preview … It’s under File > Options > Mail. Simply scroll down to the Tracking section.)

Related tips

Copy and summarise all meeting request responses

Respond to an e-mail message with a meeting request

Set a date using plain English

Jump to a specific date in your calendar

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19 October 2020

Karen Roem offers software training and support through her company Roem Ltd.  Contact her by email (Karen@roem.co.uk) or visit her website at www.roem.co.uk



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