How to show my Personal Google Calendar events as busy on my work Outlook Calendar

Question

How to show my Personal Google Calendar events as busy on my work Outlook Calendar

Abdul Siddiqui 20

Hello all,

I have a personal email address, which is a @gmail.com address, and I have shared the calendar of this account with my work profile, which is a MS 365 account and has an email address of PII removed.

The sharing of the calendar has worked as expected, and when I am on my work computer and looking at my calendar in the work Outlook website, I can see my personal calendar. I have overlaid them so that I can see appointments that are in my personal calendar as well as the work calendar.

So far, so good.

"The Problem" is that when I am at work and booking an appointment, the appointments that are in my personal calendar (@outlook.com) do not show up in the Scheduling assistant view. To be clear, I can see them in the Outlook client calendar, however, they become "not visible" when I go to book an appointment. It is also true that other people in the work company can not see my "busy" times from my personal calendar. So this leaves open the possibility of people booking time with me when I have something booked in my personal calendar.

"The Ask". Is there a way that I can have my personal shared calendar's busy times show up as busy when I, or other people at my employer, are booking an appointment with me?

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Answer 1

Hi @Abdul Siddiqui,

Thank you for posting your question in the Microsoft Q&A forum.

The behavior you’re seeing is expected and by design. When you share your personal calendar (such as a Gmail or Outlook.com calendar) with your work account, you can view it and overlay it with your work calendar in Outlook. However, the busy/free information from that personal calendar is not visible to other people in your organization.

This means:

Your personal appointments are visible to you on your work Outlook calendar.
They do not block time in the Scheduling Assistant when booking meetings.
Other people may schedule meetings during times that appear free in your work calendar, even if your personal calendar has appointments.

This happens because your personal calendar exists outside your company’s Microsoft 365 environment, and Exchange cannot read free/busy information from external calendars.

To work around this, you can manually mark personal appointments as busy on your work calendar. This will ensure that others in the organization, can see unavailable times when using Scheduling Assistant.

I hope this information is helpful. As other users will also search for information in this community, if you find my answer helpful, feel free to upvote it so other members can more easily connect with the right team and get quicker assistance.

Thank you so much for your time and cooperation in resolving this issue. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out at your convenience.

Wishing you a great day ahead.

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Abdul Siddiqui 20 Reputation points

2025-09-30T20:16:35.89+00:00

Your answer is correct but it is pretty bad that Outlook Calendar doesn't have this simple feature.
Jay Tr 5,870 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-09-30T20:39:58.5866667+00:00

Hi @Abdul Siddiqui,

Thank you for your prompt response. I understand that it would indeed be very convenient if Outlook Calendar could automatically block time from external personal calendars.

Currently, this limitation exists because Outlook and Microsoft 365 can only read free/busy information from calendars within the same tenant or organization. Personal accounts like Gmail or Outlook.com exist outside of this environment, so their busy times cannot be automatically reflected in your work calendar.

The suggested workaround to manually marking personal appointments as “Busy” on your work calendar or using a calendar sync tool, are the best options available at the moment.

I completely understand that the workaround may not be ideal for your workflow. As community moderators, please understand for us that we do not influence product design decisions and have limited access to internal development details. Our role is to guide users to the right resources and support channels.

This is precisely where your feedback becomes so important. The best and most effective way to make your voice heard on this is through our official feedback channel. The product team relies on customer insights like yours to identify what needs to be improved and to prioritize future changes.

You can submit feedback to our product team on your behalf to request an increase in the participant limit for Teams group chats in future updates.

Go to: Microsoft 365 Feedback Hub →Send Feedback→ Describe your proposal in detail

Sharing your experience through this channel is the most impactful way to advocate for a change that would benefit you and other users.

Thank you again for your patience and for bringing this to our attention. While I can't change the product's design, please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions about its current functionality.

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