How to Export Outlook Calendar Data – Company Wide Calendars, Availability, Reports, Time Tracking…

How to Export Outlook Calendar to See Company-Wide Views, Availability, Reports etc.

We are often asked how best to export Outlook calendar data to Excel to gain visibility of employee activity, office or team calendars,  time tracking, or for analytics and reporting.

1. In Outlook, go to the File Menu, and choose Open & Export.
2. In the “Open” panel, choose the Import / Export Wizard.
3. Choose “Export to a file”, then select the format you want to export events in: Comma Separated Values (csv file) or .pst.
4. The next step is to enter the file name and location for the export.
5. Now click the “Map Custom Fields …” button.
6. Once complete, click the export wizard Finish button.

So yes, there is an Outlook export calendar facility, but there are a few snags: exports are to file only, so there is a lot of work needed to make it useful, and the data is out of date the second it is exported.

A better way to export Outlook calendar data

Exporting and manually reworking Outlook calendar data for employee scheduling or team calendars is laborious, time consuming and is instantly out of data. Timewatch does all the heavy lifting for you, providing real time visibility of employee, team and group calendars. This provides:

• Instant visibility of current team / employee activity, availability, utilization and productivity
• More accurate scheduling – ensure sure there is no clashes or double booking
• Analytics and reporting – which is not available in Outlook
• Automated time tracking if needed

No need to export Outlook calendar data, Timewatch seamlessly consolidates outlook calendars for centralized visibility, management and analytics.

A Better way to use Outlook events for Timesheets / Time Tracking

Most if not all of the information in employee Outlook calendars can be used in time tracking. With Timewatch there’s no need to export data and manually manipulate it for timesheets, Timewatch can do all this for you and your users automatically!

Timewatch uses employee Outlook calendar data to automate timesheets, saving employees hours each week, making timesheets more accurate (as it is based on existing data), allows people to do everything from within Outlook, and best of all frees up time that can be better spent on productive / chargeable work.

The screenshots below show an Outlook calendar and how that calendar automatically appears in Timewatch’s timesheet.

The final screenshot is of Timewatch’s Outlook plugin. With the plugin employees can do everything from within Outlook. Appointments automatically turn into timesheets as soon as employees add a customer / project, and they can even add non appointment time. Timewatch makes Outlook a timesheet system – the best timesheet system possible for organizations that use Outlook.

What if you really need to export Outlook calendar data?

As we’ve shown, you can export from Outlook on a calendar-by-calendar basis, but what if you have 200 calendars to export and consolidate?

“We are often asked if there is a better way to get data out of Outlook,” says Timewatch Product Specialist Anthony Vaccaro. “I explain to potential customers that often you have to export each calendar one-by-one and then import it all and keep it up to date. With Timewatch the data is all online. There’s no export or import needed, our system provides full visibility of calendars, analysis, and time tracking. But even if you want to export Outlook data, our system can export everyone, or a group of people over a date range in one go, and in more formats including PDF, Excel, and Word. Best of all, we do all this out of the box.”

How Timewatch solves your Outlook calendar export needs

Outlook is a great calendar for individual employees. They can manage their own calendars and arrange meetings with others, but it doesn’t always work for management, project collaboration or in using information in other systems. Calendar data can’t be shared or exported to other formats like Excel. There’s no way to enter important company information such as customer, project, task, and type of work, and there is no reporting feature.

“Sure, information can be put into the calendar appointment body, but the data needs to be scraped out of Outlook for use in other systems, reporting or analytics,” explains Timewatch CEO Graeme Wright. “This is problematic, time consuming, costly, prone to error, and in the end, the data exported is out of date.”

How to use calendar event data in Resource Scheduling

Real time display of multiple Outlook calendars in Timewatch’s Whitespace system.

Times have changed

“In the past, businesses were very happy using Calendar software, office meetings, water cooler chats, to review what projects people were working on,” Wright says. “The Covid reset and the pivot to remote working required more online meetings and team calls.”

“Customers tell us they’ve looked at Excel, and project management systems and even resource scheduling systems but it’s either too little or too much. Companies almost have everything they need in Outlook. Everyone schedules and can see their own calendars – but there is nowhere to specify customer or project details and no way for managers to see a team, project or group view.”

Timewatch Whitespace makes company based scheduling accurate and valuable.

Export Outlook Calendar – How not to do it!

“We’ve heard horror stories where companies have paid small fortunes to have data scraped out of their Office 365 calendars so they could analyze it, only to find it unreliable, expensive, and required so much manual manipulation that it was faster to retype all the information!” says Vaccaro.

That’s not a sustainable approach and the customer celebrated discovering that Timewatch synced and provided reporting and analytics in real time. Additionally, Timewatch allows important additional fields such as customer and project work to be attached to appointments. Employees continue on using their calendar as they usually do, but have additional fields on appointments to capture the data needed.

“Timewatch’s Whitespace resource scheduling system does the job,” says Wright, “but it is overkill for companies that don’t need resource scheduling and  just want to gain visibility of their employee’s calendars. To answer this need we created Whitespace for Outlook, a simplified version which provides the Outlook calendar visibility companies are looking for, and there’s not one Excel spreadsheet involved!”

Simpler is easier

Timewatch now also offers a simplified edition of our Whitespace resource scheduling system  which supports self scheduling employees and delivers the visibility and analytics of employee calendars that businesses leaders need.

How does this work? This is a Timewatch product, so it’s really simple and easy:

• Employees use their Outlook calendar as they do normally. Easy.
• As a bonus Timewatch adds extended functionality to Outlook appointments allowing to add customer, project, types of work, and other information to their appointments.  Simple.
• To business leaders, a centralized group view of employee calendars provides visibility of all employee calendars.
• Views can be created to show any mix of employee calendars.
• Employee calendars can be grouped by team, office, skill, or any other definable attribute.
• The number of employee calendars on screen and the date range on display on one screen is configurable.
• You can search and sort employees by availability by date or date range.
• Reporting and analytics is built in. There are even dashboards and report writing features.

This powerful, intuitive, Outlook group calendar allows companies that use Outlook to enhance it with multi-employee views and reporting but – and this is important – also allows for future growth. Equally important? Using Excel and other spreadsheets for employee calendars, resource scheduling or time tracking are a thing of the past.