The Scenario
You're scheduling a panel interview. Twelve interviewers. Three time zones. The interview needs to happen in the next two weeks. You have an Excel workbook with all 12 email addresses. Your job is to find a window that works across the panel and present it to the hiring manager by end of day.
You open Outlook, try to load the Scheduling Assistant with all 12, and get a grid so dense it's unreadable on a laptop screen.
The bad version:
- Copy each interviewer's email into the Scheduling Assistant manually, trying to read a 12-person grid while also accounting for timezone offsets in your head
- Screenshot the grid, paste it into a slide, try to annotate it
- Send the screenshot to the hiring manager, who asks for it in a different format
The data you need is in Outlook. The format you need is in a workbook. There's no built-in bridge between the two.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the email addresses from your Excel workbook, queries each person's Outlook availability, and fills the grid directly into your workbook.
Get the Outlook free/busy schedule for all 12 email addresses in column A for next Monday through Friday 9am–6pm and fill a grid in this table showing each person's busy slots by hour
What You Get
- A grid written into your workbook with interviewers as rows and hourly time slots as columns
- Each cell marked "Busy" or "Free" based on Outlook calendar data
- Timezone of your Outlook account used for the slot labels, with a note in the sidebar if attendees span other zones
- The grid starts at the first empty row so it doesn't overwrite existing data
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The interviewers span multiple timezones and you need slots labeled in each person's local time
Get the Outlook free/busy schedule for all 12 email addresses in column A for next Monday through Friday 9am–6pm — label all slots in Eastern time, but note each interviewer's local timezone in column B next to their name
You want to highlight rows where a slot is free for all 12 people
Get the Outlook free/busy schedule for all 12 email addresses in column A for next Monday through Friday 9am–6pm, fill the grid with Busy/Free, then add a summary row at the top flagging any column where all 12 are free simultaneously
You want the grid to cover a specific date range, not just next week
Retrieve availability from Outlook for all team members in column A for the date range in cells B1 and B2, then mark busy blocks with 'Busy' and free slots with 'Free' in the grid starting at row 4
Build the full availability grid, highlight universal free windows, and draft a scheduling note
Get Outlook free/busy for all 12 emails in column A for next Monday–Friday 9am–5pm, fill the grid, highlight columns where all 12 are free, then write a two-sentence note in cell A20 naming the top two fully-open windows for the hiring manager
Grid, analysis, and output draft in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open an Excel workbook with your interviewer list, then ask SheetXAI to build the availability grid from Outlook. See also: Find optimal meeting times from Outlook and the Outlook hub overview.