One of the reasons many of us use Outlook is for the Calendar. We can keep our own Calendar, share appointments with others, or invite people to meetings. While many of the features work best for Exchange server users, all Outlook users can reap the benefits of the Calendar. One feature often overlooked by standalone and home users is Meeting Requests. Surprisingly, they can be used by anyone; the only requirement is the people you invite need to use Outlook and you need to send it using RTF format.

Do you need to share your appointments with another person who also uses Outlook? Create your appointment as a meeting request and invite the other person. On the Actions menu of the Meeting Request form, uncheck Request Responses. When they receive the meeting request, they accept it, and it's added to their Calendar.

To insure the meeting request arrives as a meeting request, you'll need to check the Send using Internet format setting for the address and enable it for Rich Text Format. Do this by double clicking on the address in the To field to open the email properties dialog. If the person's Contact form opens, double click on the email address in the Contact form to open the email properties dialog.

Do you create appointments to remind you of Web-based chats or to remind you to check a Web site or open a file at a specific time? You can use meeting requests to do this for you.

Open a meeting request form and enter your own address in the To field. Complete the time and date fields, check the box to indicate it's an online meeting, and select "Using Windows Media Services." Enter the URL or file path and check the box to start media player automatically when the reminder fires.

When the reminder fires, a dialog opens asking if you want to open or save the file. Choose open and the Web page or document opens, ready for you to work. It works equally well for documents, templates, and URLs. It's less useful for programs (*.exe) since you need to save the program and then run it--and it's already saved locally.

You can use this little trick not only to remind you to send a message at a certain time, but also to open the message or email template. It's not appropriate to use to send messages unattended, since you need to OK the dialog to open the file or uncheck the option to always ask before opening. I don't recommend unchecking the option for most file types, since it could allow a virus infected file to run and damage your system.