Outlook (new) has some more ads appearing in it as well as a handy way to add calendar events from an email.
An incoming email to Outlook (new) can have a “Show on Calendar” option at the top when the software detects an event like a flight booking.
Look for the “Show on Calendar” slider. Turn that on and the event/flight details are added to your calendar.
A cute trick but, as usual, it has traps for the unwary.
No editing
The automatically added calendar entries can’t be edited in Outlook (new). It’s hard to understand the thinking behind this decision by Microsoft. Do they live in a fantasy world where flights never change or their automatic reading of emails is 100% correct?
Any auto-added event needs careful checking to ensure it’s right.
Are the time zones set correctly? Is the ‘notice before departure’ appropriate for the type of flight and airport (in our experience it’s often either too much or too little)? I usually change the title and location lines to ensure important details are visible (e.g. flight number, terminal number and booking code) even on a small screen.
The workaround for this curious (perhaps arrogant) decision is to open the event and choose Event | Actions | Duplicate Event. That creates an editable copy of the event. You can delete the auto-added calendar item.
Not all emails
Outlook’s system can read some event emails (like the Qatar Airways example above) but not others that have all the flight details in the message.
There’s no way to ask Outlook to ‘read’ a message and try to extract calendar details from it. You have to accept whatever Microsoft offers, or doesn’t, as the company decides.
Then there are the airlines that don’t include ANY booking details in their message, expecting the customer to open a PDF attachment. Grrr.
Hopefully ‘Show in Calendar’ will be expanded to include other event emails. Microsoft could help things along by publishing a guide to formatting an email so their system will accurately detect it.
Bonus ‘ad’ for Bing
At the bottom of this automatic summary are some ‘ads’ for Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Rent a car and Book Hotel go to the Bing Travel site.
“Things to do” is another Bing page.
Microsoft is still desperate to get people using Bing so they add links to their search service whenever they can. Despite Bing’s enormous advantage being the default in Windows and the Edge browser, over 85% of people use Google instead.
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