How to send your availability from Outlook (without retyping it)

"Can you send me a few times that work?" is one of the most common requests in business email, and Outlook has never had a clean answer for it. The calendar knows exactly when you are free; getting that knowledge into an email has always meant retyping it.

The manual way

Open your calendar in week view, scan each day for gaps, and type them out one by one — converting to the recipient's timezone in your head if they are elsewhere. For one meeting this takes two or three minutes. For anyone who schedules all day (recruiters, assistants, agencies), it adds up to hours per week, and timezone mistakes are common.

The scheduling-link way

Booking-link tools flip the interaction: instead of sending times, you send a page where the other person picks one. That works for inbound scheduling, but many people find receiving a booking link impersonal, and it doesn't work when etiquette calls for offering times in the email itself — client communication, candidate outreach, or anything upward in a hierarchy.

The paste-ready-list way

OpenSlot reads your Outlook free/busy directly and produces the list you would have typed, in seconds:

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

Pick a timezone and a window — up to 60 days on Pro, seven on the free plan — then click once, copy, paste. It also merges multiple calendars, so "times that work for both of us" is the same one click. Inside Outlook itself, the OpenSlot add-in inserts the list at your cursor while you compose.

What the list is actually made of

Nothing in that output comes from your meeting titles. It is built from free/busy — one status per time interval, with no subject, no attendees and no location attached. Microsoft Graph returns it as a single string with one character per slot, and OpenSlot asks for it in 30-minute intervals (15 when your shortest slot is under 30), and 30 is also Graph's own default.

Everything then follows from how each character is read. Free is free. Out of office is always busy. Tentative is busy unless you turn that off, because a half-committed interviewer who later declines costs you a whole round-trip. And any character the app does not recognise is treated as busy — the engine is built so that an unexpected response can only ever cost you a slot you might have offered, never produce one that was never free.

The rule that surprises people

A slot has to end inside your working hours, not merely start inside them. With a 9:00–17:00 day and a 60-minute minimum, 16:30 is not offered: the meeting would run to 17:30. This is the most common reason someone counts a gap on their calendar that the list does not show. Shorten the minimum slot length, or move your work-end, and it appears.

Two other rules work the same quiet way. A slot never straddles local midnight, so an overnight window in a far-off timezone breaks cleanly at the date boundary rather than producing an 11:00 PM – 2:00 AM line nobody will accept. And a slot that has already started is never offered, so a list generated at 2:10 PM will not suggest 2:00 PM.

How far ahead, and how many people

The free plan reads two calendars — you and one other person — across seven days. Pro reads up to 40 calendars across 60 days, which is what makes "when are all four of us free next month?" a single click rather than an afternoon. Behind the scenes those calendars are fetched in batches of 20, the ceiling Graph puts on one getSchedule call, and the results are merged before you see them.

Common questions