The Scenario
You're coordinating a cross-functional project kickoff. Eight stakeholders. Calendars across three departments. Your manager wants a 1-hour kickoff slot next week that works for all of them, and she wants three options to choose from. The email addresses are already in a sheet. You have no idea who's free when.
The bad version:
- Open each calendar in Outlook one at a time (you can only view two side by side without it becoming unreadable)
- Try to mentally overlay eight schedules while switching between Outlook windows
- Email all eight people asking for their availability, wait two days for responses, discover two of them gave you different formats
Nobody at your level should be manually reconciling eight calendars. That's a solved problem — it just hasn't been connected to the sheet yet.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the email addresses from your sheet, queries Outlook free/busy data for each, and writes the open slots back into the sheet.
Find the 3 best available 1-hour meeting slots next week for all attendee emails listed in column A and write the suggested times into column B
What You Get
- Three suggested meeting slots written into column B, one per row in the results area
- Each slot validated as free for all attendees in column A
- Times returned in the timezone of your Outlook account
- If fewer than 3 fully open slots exist, the best partial options are noted with which attendees are busy
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need slots within business hours only, not across the full day
Find the 3 best available 1-hour meeting slots next Monday through Friday between 9am and 5pm Eastern for all email addresses in column A and write the suggested times into column B
One attendee is external and you only have approximate availability from them
Find the 3 best available 1-hour meeting slots next week for the Outlook email addresses in column A rows 1–7 — treat row 8 as unavailable before 10am and after 3pm daily — and write the results into column B
You want to show each person's busy blocks, not just the open slots
Check free/busy availability in Outlook for the 8 email addresses in column A for next Monday through Friday 9am–5pm and write each person's busy windows into the adjacent columns, one column per person
Find open slots, write them to the sheet, and draft a scheduling email in one go
Find the 3 best available 1-hour meeting slots next week for all emails in column A, write the options into column B, then draft an Outlook email to all attendees in column A presenting the three options and asking them to confirm their preference — write the draft to column C
One prompt finds the slots and drafts the outreach.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a sheet with your attendee email addresses, then ask SheetXAI to find open meeting windows in Outlook for the group. See also: Populate an availability matrix from Outlook free/busy data and the Outlook hub overview.