If you are planning events in Outlook Calendar, you need to know the weather forecast if it is an outdoor event. Seeing the weather where contacts are is also a useful conversation starter.
Whether it is just for you and you want to see what the weather will be like this weekend, or whether you are planning an event with business clients, it is useful to be able to see the upcoming weather forecast for the next few days. You don’t want an outdoor meeting when it will be raining, or set off for a meeting when a storm is on its way.
If you are a Microsoft Office user or just an Outlook Calendar users, you can show the weather forecast for the next few days in the calendar itself. Not just for your location, but for multiple places anywhere in the world. It can be a useful way to start or end a conversation with people if you are using Calendar to schedule online meetings too.
Weather apps can show long range forecasts up to 10 days ahead, which might make Outlook Calendar’s five days seem poor, but the further ahead you look, the less accurate weather forecasts become. Beyond a few days, weather forecasts are mostly guesses and can be wildly inaccurate anyway.
Add the weather to Outlook Calendar and it is a fairly trivial thing, but it is useful and it makes looking at the days ahead more fun. Well, if nice weather is forecast, anyway. It isn’t so much fun when rain and storms are forecast.
Let’s take a look at how to add forecasts to Outlook and how to add local weather and more distant locations.
- Change Outlook theme, customize Outlook colors and more
- Create dashboards in Outlook Calendar to view, organize events
1 Add weather to Outlook Calendar
Go to the Outlook.com website in a browser on a PC or Mac and click the gear icon at the right side of the toolbar. Some quick settings appear in a panel on the right. Click View all Outlook settings at the bottom of this panel. We need to dig a little deeper into the settings.
Select Calendar in the first column. Select Weather in the second column and the settings appear in the third. Turn on the Show weather switch and choose either Fahrenheit or Celsius as you prefer. I will choose Celsius, but Fahrenheit is used in the US.
2 Add your location to Outlook weather
Where do you want to show the weather for? The current location is an obvious one and you want to know whether it will be rainy or sunny tomorrow or the day after. Click the location pin icon and your current location is detected. Click the Add button to add this location.
3 Search and add more locations
Type any major city into the search box and a list of matching locations is displayed. Click the place you want the weather forecast for and then click the Add button.
4 Add multiple locations for weather forecasts
Up to five locations can be included when you add weather to Outlook. If you change your mind, click the trash cans at the right to remove them.
Outlook shows the weather in the calendar for the first location in the list, so make the first your current location or whichever place you want to see by default. I found that Add another location added places to the top of the list, not the bottom as might be expected. Therefore you need to enter your current location last so that it appears first. This seems weird. Is it a bug?
5 See the weather in Outlook Calendar
In all calendar views, today and the next four days show a weather icon, like sun, clouds, rain and so on. This is the weather for the first location in the list you created in settings. Click the weather icon and a larger panel appears containing more information about the forecast, like the maximum and minimum temperatures, and the percentage chance of rain.
6 Browse weather forecast locations
Click the forward and back arrows in the top right corner of this weather forecast panel to see the weather at the other locations in the list.
Click the More details link at the bottom if you want to see a more detailed weather forecast for this location.
7 Weather forecast in detail
Click the More details link and a new browser tab opens with a very detailed weather forecast from MSN Weather. You can see an hourly summary, a daily forecast, wind speed, humidity, visibility, pressure and dew point. There is even a mini map.
It is great to add weather to Outlook Calendar. You can see weather elsewhere of course, but it is handy when planning your calendar events and you don’t need to keep a weather app or website open at the same time.
