Outlook provides some convenient methods for viewing your calendar, but they don't always serve your needs. Sometimes a day, weekly or monthly view just won't work. Learn some other quick tricks for pulling up multiples dates. (Includes Flash tutorial)

One of the uses of Outlook's calendar is for simply checking for available times for meetings or tasks. Although Outlook includes toolbar buttons that can present different views by day, week, month, etc, that doesn't always suit our needs.

Microsoft has provided some other means to navigate through the calendar that aren't as well documented. For example, from the calendar view, you can press your ALT key followed by any number 0-9. Outlook will display a view with the same number of days as the number key. For example, if you want to see the next four days on your calendar, press ALT+4. The exception is ALT+0 equals 10 days.

A similar approach can be taken using the mouse. You can drag your mouse over a range of dates on the small calendar. Outlook will then show the highlighted range of days in the view. For example if you highlight July 1-13, Outlook will display all these day on the main view. Or, you can click on July 1 and shift-click on July 13^th, if you can't get the highlighting just right.

The last example is for when you need to choose discontinuous dates. For example, a business associate says, Thursdays are best for me. Although you could glance at the smaller calendar to see if any Thursdays are bolded, a better approach is to pull up a series of Thursday.

Steps to see discontinuous dates,

1. Click the calendar icon.

2. Move to the smaller calendars

3. Using you mouse, click the first date you need

4. Pressing your CTRL key, click the next date.

5. Repeat Step 4 as needed

• Flash Demo on Comparing Dates