Sending Colored Appointments to Coworkers

When I color appointments in my Calendar and send them to my coworkers, I see the colors fine. However, my coworkers can't see them even though we all have the same labels for the same colors. Is there a way I can send the color with an appointment so that it looks the same on everyone's calendar without other users having to manually label it?

Outlook doesn't send color labels with meeting requests regardless of whether you send them as iCalendar messages or native Outlook meeting requests. I suspect that the reason for this limitation is that, because users can customize their calendar color labels, there's no way to ensure that colors mean the same thing to all users. For example, you can't be sure that red, the first choice on the list, always means Important or blue always means Business.

A workaround is to send a message with the appointment as an attachment. The message and attached appointment won't work as a meeting request or report attendee responses, but this approach might be useful if, for example, you want to send a list of company meetings for everyone to copy into their Calendar folders.

The easiest way to create a message with an appointment attachment is to right-click and drag the appointment from the Calendar folder to the Inbox or, in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, to the Mail navigation pane button. When you release the mouse button, choose Copy Here as Message with Attachment, then address and send the message as you typically would.

If you want to send multiple appointments in one message, you can start the drag from a table view, such as By Category, instead of the Day/Week/Month view. A table view lets you easily select multiple items. Alternatively, turn off Word as your email editor, create a new message, then choose Insert, Item and select the appointments you want to insert. Message recipients can add the attached appointments to their Calendar folder by dragging them from the open message to the folder or by opening each appointment, choosing File, Copy to Folder, and selecting the Calendar folder.