Outlook: Duplicate event, Organize Meeting Follow-up

It is a common use case to want to duplicate an existing meeting/ appointment especially for example if you want to organize a meeting follow-up.

Contrary to Google Calendar, for example, the Outlook client does not offer this option in a very intuitive way e.g. directly from a calendar item context menu or the item ribbon.

Such a menu is available in Outlook Web access/ in the browser (https://outlook.office.com/calendar/ ).

I present in this post how to duplicate an event in the Outlook client.

Outlook Client

There are 2 ways to duplicate a meeting/ appointment in the Outlook client by copy/ paste or by dragging while holding the Ctrl key pressed.

If the event is a recurring event/ serie and you want to copy the whole serie, then you shall use Ctrl+C/ Ctrl+V.

If you don't select another time slot between Copy and Paste, the new copied item will keep the same time information as the original one. In general, the new copied item is added to the RIGHT.

Copy only an instance of a serie

If you want to copy only one occurrence of a meeting serie then use Drag and Drop while keeping the Ctrl key pressed. The newly created by dragging item can then be opened with ENTER without confusion possible which one was the copied one.

Note: in the browser, the Duplicate event functionality will always duplicate the whole serie.

This trick allows to reuse a Teams meeting link/ dial-in accross multiple meetings while keeping the meetings as real Teams meeting (means you can join from them directly without clicking on the link)

Copying only the Teams meeting information part won't make the event a real online Teams meeting.

TL;DR: This is my recipe to organize a (Teams) meeting follow-up in my Outlook client:

• Copy the original meeting by selecting it in the Calendar view and pressing Ctrl+C
• Select with the mouse in the calendar the destination date and time where to create the follow-up meeting
• Paste the copied meeting by pressing Ctrl+V (the copied meeting hasn't been sent yet)
• Open the copied meeting by double-clicking it or pressing ENTER
• Edit the meeting : Adjust the time, description e.g. prepend "Follow-up" in the Meeting title
• SEND the meeting

Using VBA

I have tried to write a VBA macro to quickly duplicate a calendar item and stumbled upon following pitfalls:

After copying an appointment and displaying it (to make it easier for the user that he shall edit/ send it) if the user pressed Delete, it will close the item window but NOT delete the item.

It is not possible to copy a whole serie with a macro (the recurrence pattern of an item can not be set)

See draft code below:

Sub Duplicate()

    Dim Item As Object

    

    Set Item = GetCurrentItem()

    If Item Is Nothing Then

        MsgBox "No Item selected"

        Exit Sub

    End If

    If Not TypeOf Item Is Outlook.AppointmentItem Then

        Exit Sub

    End If

    

    Dim myCopiedItem As Outlook.AppointmentItem

    Set myCopiedItem = Item.Copy

    

    If Item.IsRecurring Then

        Dim RecPat As RecurrencePattern

        Set RecPat = myCopiedItem.GetRecurrencePattern

        Set srcRecPat = Item.GetRecurrencePattern

        Set RecPat = srcRecPat

    End If

    

    myCopiedItem.Display

    

End Sub

See also

UserVoice: 37056532-copy-an-existing-meeting-into-a-new-meeting