Microsoft Outlook

Schedule Meetings Faster with Outlook Time Suggestions

Chris Menard

04 Mar 2026 — 4 min read

Scheduling meetings in Outlook often means checking each person's calendar, guessing at available times, and sending back-and-forth emails. Outlook's new Time Suggestions feature eliminates that friction — it uses Exchange to scan everyone's calendar and automatically surface the next five times all attendees are free.

Watch the full tutorial:

Where Time Suggestions Works

Time Suggestions is available in Outlook on the web and the new Outlook desktop app. It does not work in Outlook Classic (the older desktop version). If you're not sure which version you have, the new Outlook has a simplified ribbon and a toggle switch at the top right to switch between versions.

How to Use Time Suggestions

Create a new event from your Outlook calendar
Add at least one attendee in the people field
Click on the date/time area — the Time Suggestions panel appears below
Outlook shows the next five available time slots where all attendees are free
Click any suggestion to select that time, then send the invite

Outlook new event form showing a test meeting with Carol Wilson as attendee, Copilot reschedule toggle, and Teams meeting option — Creating a new event in Outlook — add an attendee and click the date/time to reveal Time Suggestions.

The suggestions respect your calendar settings — they won't suggest times outside working hours or on weekends (unless that's the only availability). If you notice a suggestion skips certain days, it means one or more attendees are fully booked on those days.

Adding More Attendees Updates the Suggestions

As you add more people to the invite, the Time Suggestions list updates in real time. The more attendees you add, the fewer available slots there may be — but Outlook always tries to find the next five overlapping free windows. This makes it easy to find a common time without manually comparing multiple calendars.

Outlook Time Suggestions panel showing five available meeting slots for two internal attendees on Tuesday and Wednesday — Time Suggestions surfaces the next five free slots across all attendees' calendars — click any to select it.

The External Attendee Limitation

There's an important caveat: Time Suggestions only works with internal attendees (people in your same Microsoft 365 organization). When you add an external contact — a client, vendor, or anyone outside your org — Outlook shows their status as "Unknown" because it can't access their calendar.

The suggestions still appear, but they're only based on the internal attendees' availability. This can still be useful — you narrow down your team's availability first, then propose those times to the external person.

Microsoft Scheduling Poll for Mixed Groups

When you need to schedule across organizations — or with a large group where finding one common slot is difficult — consider using Microsoft Scheduling Poll instead. It sends a poll to all attendees (internal and external) with proposed times, and each person votes on what works for them. Check out Chris's Scheduling Poll tutorial for a walkthrough.

The Scheduler View

For a more visual approach, click the Scheduler button (next to the date/time in the event form). This opens a timeline view showing each attendee's calendar side by side — busy blocks appear as colored bars, and free time is white space. The Time Suggestions button also appears in this view, so you can toggle between the visual timeline and the suggested slots.

Outlook Scheduler view showing Chris Menard and Carol Wilson availability timelines with busy blocks and Time Suggestions button — The Scheduler view shows a visual timeline of each attendee's availability — with Time Suggestions accessible from here too.

The Scheduler view is especially useful when you want to understand why certain times aren't suggested — you can see exactly which attendee has a conflict and adjust accordingly. This is similar to the calendar features available in Outlook on the web that the classic desktop version lacks.