I am looking to see if anyone has identified a macro or a workaround for Outlook 2013 on a Windows 7 PC where I can set my Calendar Permissions to share only my scheduled appointments marked as "busy" (or "tentative" or "working elsewhere") but not show the one's marked as "free".  I'd also like to know if there is an easy way to view other people's shared calendars without their "free" category.

The reason is...

I have several reminders which are scheduled as "free" appointments (like people's birthdays or when to turn in time sheets) and I do not want them showing up for viewers that I have granted permissions to see my busy/free, subject, and location.  I don't want them showing up for default "busy/free" viewers either.  I know I could set them to private, but if you do that, they show up as a scheduled blocks of time and say 'private appointment'.  They are not a scheduled block of time or an appointment, as I am not "busy" during these reminder times, so I do not want them showing up like that.   Is there a way to just hide the things I have set as "free" so that I don't have to set them as private?  I would like to make it easier for my boss viewing my calendar, which is a lot easier if they only view times I am busy and not the times I am "free."  (Since Outlook does not actually show all the time that someone has a free [for example, it does not show 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. as free, when you have nothing on your calendar for that time, but will show 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. as "free" when you have a reminder scheduled for that time and set it as 'free'], it is distracting to show the "free" schedule blocks in a shared calendar.  People's calendars have tons of these "free reminders" and it is distracting when you are looking at their little iconed calendar, trying to find out when everyone is unavailable for the meeting you would like to schedule.  You really only need to view times when people are "busy" or "out of office" or have a "tentative" meetings scheduled.  I would prefer that only the times I am actually busy show up for people trying to view my calendar for scheduling purposes, not the appointments I have scheduled as "free").

With that in mind, I would also like to view other people's calendars without their "free" appointments.  If there is a workaround for granting permissions on my end, that doesn't mean I can get everyone in my office to apply it to their calendar.  So I will need a way to view it the way I want to, even if they still just have theirs set to "busy/free".  Is there a filter for that?

Hi,

Generally, if the shared folder permission level is set to Free/Busy time or Free/Busy time, subject, location for other users, when other user open this shared calendar, the items which is set to shown as Free would not be visible in the opened shared calendar.

Only when the folder permission level is set to Reviewer or higher permission, the free items would be read by other users. Please check your shared calendar folder permission. We can set it to AvailabilityOnly or LimitedDetails to only share free/busy information to other users:

Get-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity SharedMailbox:\Calendar | Set-MailboxFolderPermission -AccessRights AvailabilityOnly

Then remove and re-add the shared calendar to confirm whether the issue persists.

Regards,

David