Outlook: Never forget Meeting Reminders

In some cases in Microsoft Outlook, you might miss a meeting because no reminder was set. This can be quite annoying e.g. for a customer meeting.

Cases where you can miss a reminder

You are the organizer and forgot to set one.

You are not the Organizer and the Organizer forgot to set one

You got the meeting forwarded from a Google Invitation (somehow the reminders seem to get lost in this case between Google and Outlook)

You've organized a follow-up of a past meeting (which reminder was gone) - by copy/paste and forgot to add the reminder. 

Preventive Setting: Default reminder

Ensure you have set a default reminder in the Outlook Calendar Options. My Default is set to 15min.

Preventive Check with Macro (VBA)

You shall copy this code in your ThisOutlookSession module: Code is also available in outlook-vba repository in Github more precisely in ThisOutlookSession.cls

This will catch up when a item is added in your calendar and check:

• if it is a AllDay Event, if you want to remove the reminder
• if it is a Meeting with Start date in the future and it does not have a reminder yet, it will prompt you if you want to add one.

This is especially useful if you copy/ paste a meeting to organize a follow-up. To get the macro fired, you shall paste it in the future target day.

Manual Visual Check

You can establish a daily routine to check for your day if all reminders are set.

To make this check easier consider the following Option in the Outlook Client: This will display a bell icon on the bottom right of each event with a reminder in your Calendar view.

Calendar Option: Show Bell icon

• Open Outlook Options (File->Options)
• Select "Calendar"
• Check: Show bell icon on the calendar for appointments and meetings with reminders

Check and Fix with a Macro (VBA)

You can check and repair with a VBA script that the reminders are set for today.

See CheckReminder.bas. Import this module to setup.

I like to assign the macro CheckCurrentDayReminders to a button in the QAT. It will check if all meeting for the current/ selected day have reminders set and if not set them.

You will be prompted for each meeting, if you want to set the reminder.

Code is available in gist also.

See also

How to Auto Set Different Reminder Time for Outlook Meetings in Different Color Categories - Data Recovery Blog (datanumen.com)

How to Remove Reminders on All Day Events (slipstick.com)

How to Quickly Send Your Today’s Appointments to Someone via Outlook VBA - Data Recovery Blog (datanumen.com)