Most of us employ archiving to some degree in our Outlook experience. Even with archiving, sometimes you may find that you don’t feel the need to keep old calendar events from many years ago… and believe it or not, they are taking up space in your Exchange account. If you are in this boat, you may decide to delete old calendar events in batch. Here is a handy way to accomplish this in Outlook.

By the way, shout out to Aaron for having this quandary and inspiring this Byte!

Using Advanced Search

There are probably several ways to accomplish this task, and some of it depends on your version of Outlook. We are going to use Advanced Search for this Byte. And you can follow along up until the last three steps if you are uncertain if you want to delete but just want to explore the feature.

1. Navigate to the calendar in the navigation (lower left).  In the upper right click into the search field.

2. This activates your search tab. In this tab, select Search Tools and Advanced Find.

3. Go to the Advanced Tab in the popup.

4. In the Field dropdown, select Date/Time fields and End.

5. For Condition, select On or Before.

6. For Value, list the date that you want to cut off.

7. Select Add to List and Find Now.

8. Click into the body of results. Press Ctrl + A to select all

9. Right click, and Delete.

10. Don’t forget to empty your deleted items folder to free up space!

The same process could theoretically apply to mail, though I have found that people tend to archive mail and/or want to be more cautious about deleting them in batch (understandably)… whereas fewer people care about what meetings and lunches they attended in 2014.

Bonus Tip: Emojis

How about a bonus Outlook tip at no extra charge? I have to thank Emily for this one, because I had no idea about this shortcut.

If you want to insert an emoji into an email, you can access a full list with the command:  Windows Key + ;

If you don’t see this appear, be sure you have clicked into the body of the email message.

By the way, you can access these emojis in other screens as well… try it out in your browsers!

Thoughts?

What do you think? Do you need to clear out any old events in your calendar to free up some space? Let me know how it goes!

Congratulations, Power Users!

Congratulations to our newest Power Users! For the full gallery, and more information about the WSU Microsoft Office Power User Program, please visit: wichita.edu/poweruser