Recurring meetings in Outlook for Mac

I made the switch to OS X in 2009, after years on Windows. 3 months ago, I made a slight boomerang back and dropped Mail.app for Outlook for Mac, because I was sick of the lack of formatting and a few other nuances that made it difficult to work in an Exchange-based company. Today was the first time I needed to create a recurring event in the new Outlook. Here’s a little recap of my experience.

First, I created an event, opened up the Recurrence menu, and chose the “Custom…” option.

Customrecur

This presented me with 4 options: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly.

Recuroptions

I chose daily (which turned out to be the wrong choice).

Dailyrecur

And of course the meeting went out including Saturday and Sunday. I went to owa to fix it and then went back in to Outlook to see how it looked there… 

Weeklyrecur

So that’s the trick. If you want to make weekday-only recurring meetings in Outlook for Mac, choose Weekly recurrence, and select multiple days. Maybe this is second nature to folks that have been on Macs for a while, but it wasn’t intuitive to me and google didn’t return anything of value so I figured I’d throw up a post to help the next person.

23 comments

  1. Clive says:

    Thanks that’s perfect

  2. Murray says:

    Doesn’t work if you want a recurring appt each month, ideally falling on a working day. When you select monthly, you don’t get the option of selecting days.

  3. ke says:

    great tips, daily recurring include Sat. and Sun.

  4. nick says:

    Worked perfectly. Thanks for posting!

  5. Thanks, that’s a great tip!

  6. matt says:

    hugely helpful to me. I’ve been on Macs for years, but just started having to use outlook. I would never have thought of selecting “weekly” when I meant “daily but only on weekdays”.

  7. Tim Cares says:

    Thanks, this was driving me crazy.

  8. Tim Wilcox says:

    Great – just what I was looking for. Thanks.

  9. Don says:

    Great help to me. Thanks

  10. Samatha says:

    Thanks a ton! I used to spam everyone’s inbox on weekends before 🙂

  11. Scott says:

    Its because of you that I continue to use the internet for solutions to problems. Thank you for your posting of this. Made short work of a frustrated Mac Outlook user.

  12. Brent says:

    Exactly what I was looking for. Worked like a charm. Thanks!

  13. Mellie Mel says:

    This is exactly what I was looking for as I was setting up my first recurring meeting on Mac Outlook and saying to myself “wtf? why is there no weekday option?” Thanks!

  14. Andrew says:

    Thank you!! I don’t know why this had to be so difficult.

  15. JJ says:

    Very helpful, thanks!

  16. Limor says:

    Thank you! I started getting worried there is no way to not include weekends. A small fail for Outlook for a Mac I would say. Not intuitive at all.

  17. PP says:

    I couldn’t figure that out either. Thanks a ton!

  18. Michael Stack says:

    Exactly what I needed – thanks for posting this valuable information.

  19. Jeremy says:

    Five years later, its still not an obvious or hinted choice. Thanks for the tip.

  20. Kumar Kandgule says:

    Awesome. I just switched from Windows to MAC and this issue was driving me crazy. Thanks a bunch.

  21. CBS says:

    This was the answer I needed! You are a prince of the Internet to put this up there just to help others – thank you. Six years later it is still the best answer.

  22. Will Dowling says:

    Still valuable advice, thanks! WTF is wrong with Microsoft that they would A) handle this differently on Outlook/Mac vs. Outlook/Windows and B) think using “weekly” in Outlook/Mac is an intuitive way to say “daily, with a choice of days, which BTW is the only way to get weekdays”?

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