Tip o’ the Week #20: Outlook date cleverness

Here’s a quick Outlook tip that some long term users may know but might have forgotten. Ever since the first very of Outlook was released more than 14 years ago, it’s had a surprising capability to handle dates using natural language descriptions.

Whenever Outlook prompts you to enter a date (and allows you to type a date in rather than have to choose from a calendar), you can give it dates that are relative to today, eg “yesterday”, “tomorrow”, “Friday” etc.

Eg – for a date field in a new calendar invite or a “do not send email before” field, you could simply put “tomorrow” and it will figure out the literal date for you. There are plenty of others too, eg:

… (which would change the reminder in the above dialog from the coming Friday to the next one after that).

There are hosts of others – “in 3 days”, “6 months”, “third Wednesday”, “Chrismas eve” etc etc.
See how many you can spot…

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