Send meeting reminders to non-responders
I've sent out a meeting invitation but not everybody has responded yet.
Is there any way to send them a reminder to respond?
Preferably they should be able to directly respond from that message as they might have "misplaced" their original invitation.
Sending people a reminder about still needing to respond to a meeting invitation is unfortunately not a direct feature within Outlook or Teams.
However, you can still achieve this in a half-automatic way. The only thing you’d have to do is filter which people you want to send the reminder to.
Quick method: Forward the meeting to original invitees
When you forward the meeting from your Calendar, you will create a new email with the calendar details directly under the message header.
Any recipients of this email will receive it as a meeting request item, which they can accept/decline, instead of a regular email.
- Select the meeting that you want to send a reminder for in your Calendar.
- Forward the meeting.
- Keyboard shortcut; CTRL+F
- Ribbon
You can find the Forward button on the Meeting tab in the Actions group. - Context Menu
Right click the meeting in your Calendar and choose: Forward. - Important!
Do NOT choose Forward as iCalendar.
- To quickly address this message, copy and paste the To string from the quoted message body. Since they are separated by a semicolon ( ; ) already, they should resolve directly to the correct addresses if you only see names there.
- Pro Tip!
If you open the original meeting, you can also copy and paste the invitees from the Required and/or Optional line from there to guarantee that the addresses will be resolved correctly.
- Pro Tip!
- Remove the addresses of the people that you do not wish to send a reminder to and then type your reminder text.
- Pro Tip!
If there are a lot of invitees and you want to filter out who has responded already, see below how you can use Excel to filter those.
- Pro Tip!
Copy the addresses from the original invite to quickly readdress the reminder email.
Note: To see who has and who hasn’t responded to a meeting request yet, open the meeting from your Calendar by double clicking on it and select the Tracking tab.
Optional: Filter invitees using the Tracking results and Excel
If you’ve invited a lot people to your meeting, manually filtering is probably not the way to go. Luckily, you can quickly filter the responses via Excel as well.
- Open the meeting from your Calendar.
- Select the Tracking tab.
- Click: Copy Status to Clipboard.
- Paste the results into Excel.
- Enable the Filter function within Excel;
Home-> Sort & Filter-> Filter - Filter the Response column as desired;
- Show only “None”.
- Show “None” and “Tentative”.
- Copy the names from the filtered Name column.
- Important!
Do NOT include the column header itself.
- Important!
- Paste the names into the To line of the email reminder. The names will resolve automatically or otherwise click “Check Names” or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+K to resolve the names to addresses via your Address Book.
Filtering Meeting Tracking responses in Excel.
Note: For very large meetings, the Tracking overview may be unreliable.