Outlook Calendar Shortcut

Outlook Calendar Shortcut is a Windows taskbar application that works as a shortcut to Outlook's calendar view. It notifies you of today's remaining event count by an overlay badge. Clicking the taskbar icon leads you to the calendar view in Outlook.

Features

• Notifies today's remaining event count
• Customizable icons and badge colors
• Quick access to the Day, Week and Month views with Thumb buttons

Requirements

• Tested on Windows 10/11 and Powershell 5.1
• Outlook desktop app needs to be installed

Installation

1. Download and extract the zip or clone this repository anywhere you like
2. Copy and edit settings.ps1 (See Settings)
3. Run tools/create_shortcut.bat and save the shortcut
4. Run the shortcut

Settings

You can customize the behavior by a settings file. A sample settings file is placed at sample/settings.ps1.

Outlook settings

outlook = @{
    folderPath = "\\your-email-address@sample.com\calendar-folder-name"
}

folderPath is a path of the outlook calendar folder that the app monitors. You can list all of your calendar folder paths by running tools/list_outlook_calendar_folders.bat.

Icon image

iconPath = ".\icon.png"

An icon file used for the title bar. The image is converted to .ico file during the shortcut creation and also used as a shortcut icon. .bmp, .png, .tif, .gif and .jpg with single resolution are supported.

Overlay icon

overlayIcon = @{
    enable = $true
    size = 20.0
    lineWidth = 1.0  
    backgroundColor = "DeepPink"
    textColor = "White"
}

You can turn on/off the overlay badge feature by setting enable to $true/$false. You can also change the badge color. Available WPF color names are listed here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.windows.media.colors?view=net-5.0

Today's items summary

todaysRemainingItemsSummary = @{
    enable = $true
    maxItemCount = 6
    maxItemCharacterCount = 32
}

The summary of today's remaining events is displayed on top of the thumbnail window.

Progress indicator

progressIndicator = @{
    enable = $true
    showProgressMinutesBefore = 30
}

When the next event is close, it is indicated by a progress indicator. The icon starts showing the progress indicator the minitues before the next event that is specified by showProgressMinutesBefore. When you are in the event, the bar is displayed in yellow.

Click action

clickAction = @("FocusOnCalendar")

When the taskbar icon is clicked, the action you specify here is executed. The following actions are available:

Action Name	Description
FocusOnCalendar	Opens the calendar view in Outlook keeping the previous view mode.
FocusOnToday	Opens the calendar view in Outlook and sets the view mode to Day.
FocusOnThisWeek	Opens the calendar view in Outlook and sets the view mode to Week.
FocusOnThisWorkWeek	Opens the calendar view in Outlook and sets the view mode to WorkWeek.
FocusOnThisMonth	Opens the calendar view in Outlook and sets the view mode to Month.
FocusOnNextNDays	Opens the calendar view in Outlook and sets the range to the number of days specified by the second argument. The number can be set to a value between 2 and 14.
OpenTodaysNextItem	Opens today's next item.
CreateNewAppointment	Opens a dialog to create a new appointment.
CreateNewMeeting	Opens a dialog to create a new meeting.

Thumb buttons

thumbButtons = @(
    ,@{
            description = "Month"
            iconPath = "..\icons\month.png"
            clickAction = @("FocusOnThisMonth")
    }
)

You can add maximum 7 thumb buttons and assign actions performed when they are clicked. The formats of iconPath and clickAction are the same as the ones in the global settings.

Tools

tools/list_outlook_calendar_folders.bat

Lists all the Outlook calendar folder paths that the app can monitor. Copy one of the folder paths and paste it in your settings file.

tools/create_shortcut.bat

This tool takes a settings file and creates a shortcut to run the app. If you want to create another app that monitors another Outlook calendar, you just need to create a settings file and run this tool again.

tools/convert_image_to_ico.bat

Converts an image to .ico file. When you want to update the icon of the shortcut, run this tool.

Sample Icons

The icons except icon.png were downloaded from Google Material Icons which are distributed under Apache License, Version 2.0.