How to Schedule a Meeting in Outlook (Ctrl+Shift+Q)

Ctrl+Shift+Q (Cmd+Shift+Q on Mac) opens a new meeting request window, Outlook's tool for scheduling a collaborative event with other attendees, distinct from a personal Appointment which has no attendee invitation mechanism at all. **Adding attendees and checking availability**: typing names or email addresses into the To field adds attendees, and the Scheduling Assistant tab (a sub-view within the meeting window) shows each invitee's free/busy status across the proposed time, color-coded to help you spot a time slot that actually works for everyone rather than guessing and hoping no one has a conflict. **Required versus optional attendees**: Outlook distinguishes between attendees whose presence is required and those who are optional, which affects how the Scheduling Assistant weighs their availability when suggesting good meeting times, and also sets expectations for invitees about whether their attendance is truly necessary. **Recurring meetings**: the Recurrence button within the meeting window (no single default keyboard shortcut, since the recurrence pattern options — daily, weekly, custom — require a dialog with several configurable fields) lets you set up a meeting that repeats on a defined schedule, generating all future instances from one initial setup rather than creating each occurrence manually. **Room and resource booking**: in organizations with configured meeting rooms or shared resources (projectors, equipment) in their Exchange directory, these can be added to the meeting like any other attendee, with their own availability shown in the Scheduling Assistant, letting you confirm a physical room is actually free at the proposed time alongside checking people's calendars. **Setting an appropriate meeting length**: Outlook defaults new meetings to a 30-minute or 1-hour block depending on organizational settings, but adjusting the End time deliberately for a genuinely shorter task (a quick 15-minute sync) rather than accepting the default is a small habit that, applied consistently across an organization, meaningfully reduces total calendar time spent in unnecessarily long meetings. **What happens when you send**: clicking Send (or using Ctrl+Enter / Cmd+Return) dispatches calendar invitations to every listed attendee, who can then Accept, Decline, or propose a new time — their response status becomes visible to you as the organizer in the meeting's tracking view, letting you see at a glance who's confirmed, and Outlook will typically flag a scheduling conflict if you attempt to send a meeting request that overlaps an attendee's existing commitment they've shared visibility into. **Related shortcuts**: Ctrl+Shift+A for a simpler personal Appointment with no attendee mechanism, Ctrl+Enter for sending the meeting invitation once details are configured, and Ctrl+2 for switching into the Calendar module directly if you're starting from Mail. **Time zone considerations for distributed teams**: when inviting attendees across different time zones, Outlook displays proposed times in each invitee's own local time zone once they open the invitation, but it's worth double-checking your own calendar's configured time zone before sending a meeting request to a mixed-location team, since a misconfigured local time zone setting is a surprisingly common cause of a meeting landing at an unintended hour for some recipients despite looking correct from the organizer's own screen.