OpenSlot · Guides

How to find a time everyone is free in Outlook

Outlook's Scheduling Assistant will show you a grid of everyone's busy blocks, and it is genuinely useful — for booking one meeting right now. But it answers a different question than the one people usually have. The grid shows when people are busy. What you usually need is the opposite: a list of when everyone is free, that you can send to someone outside the meeting invite.

Reading the grid by hand

The manual process: open a new meeting, add all attendees, open Scheduling Assistant, and visually scan the columns for stretches where nobody has a block. Then close the fake meeting and type what you found into an email. With four or five attendees across a two-week window, this is slow and error-prone — a single missed tentative block means proposing a time that doesn't work.

Getting a merged list instead

OpenSlot does the intersection for you. Pick the people (it reads the same free/busy data Scheduling Assistant uses), a timezone, and a window, and it returns only the slots where every selected person is simultaneously free:

All times in US/Eastern
• Today 07/08
  03:30 PM - 04:00 PM
  05:00 PM - 05:30 PM
• Thursday 07/09
  09:30 AM - 10:30 AM
  12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
  02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Tentative blocks count as busy by default (toggleable), out-of-office always counts as busy, weekends are excluded unless you want them, and everything is converted to the timezone you choose. Copy the list into an email or Teams message and you're done — no fake meeting required.