Outlook and Meeting Attendance

If I schedule a meeting in Microsoft Outlook, I can optionally get responses to that meeting request. The responses are just messages from each invitee with a subject indicating their attendance.

Someone might attend, so they’ll cause the Calendar to send a message with the subject “Accepted: FY2012 Budget Review”. Someone else might be tentative about attending, and send a subject of “Tentative: FY2012 Budget Review”. Or, they might decline: “Declined: FY2012 Budget Review”.

Let’s say I’ve booked a meeting for a very large audience. I invite 300 people; it might be most of a department, or even my whole company. I’d like to know if I should book the medium-sized conference room or the large-sized conference room. Will 150 people attend, or will it be closer to 300?

Remarkably, I can’t find a way in Outlook to count the number of attendees.

If I save all the messages I got in response, I could put them in a folder in my inbox and sort them by subject. But they don’t sort correctly by subject, and there’s no way to count them anyway unless I make a folder for each one, or each meeting. I’d need a folder for the FY2012 Budget Review Attendees separately from the FY2012 Budget Review Tentative Attendees. Then, when viewing on of the folders, Outlook displays a note in the status bar saying the folder has “64 items” in the folder, so I know there are 64 attendees. This isn’t very convenient, though.

If I click on the “Tracking” button in the invite, I see a list of people who were invited and their response. I could sort list by responses, but there’s no way to see a count of any of the groups.

If I use the scheduling assistant, I can get a look at the attendees to see if they’re attending or not, and even what the rest of each of their days looks like (though I don’t find that too useful). But no way to count attendees.

Am I missing a feature? How did Microsoft intend us to track meeting invites?


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