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    Airtable Sync integration: Outlook Calendar
    • 28 Mar 2024
    • 3 Minutes to read
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    Airtable Sync integration: Outlook Calendar

    • Updated on 28 Mar 2024
    • 3 Minutes to read
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    Article Summary

    Plan availability

    All paid plan types

    Permissions

    Owners/Creators - In order to create or update synced tables, you'll need to have creator permissions in the base where you are setting up the sync.

    Platform(s)

    Web/Browser, Mac app, and Windows app

    Related reading

    • Sync - Basic setup - If you haven’t set up a sync before, we recommend first reading this article to become familiarized with how the Airtable Sync feature generally works.

    • Airtable Sync FAQs - Answers to common questions that might help unblock you if you are encountering issues.

    Setting up Outlook Calendar to sync with Airtable

    Learn how to use the Airtable Sync integration feature to bring information from external applications into a single, centralized table within Airtable. This article covers how to sync with an external Outlook Calendar to bring detailed information from events in an Outlook Calendar into Airtable.

    Step 1: Add a new synced table

    You can find the option to sync with Outlook Calendar by pressing the “+” button next to the table furthest to the right in your base.

    4405309062807addOutlookSync4Fields.png

    Step 2: Select Outlook Calendar account

    Next up, if this is the first time you are connecting your Airtable account with Outlook Calendar, then you will need to press the “+ Connect new account” button.

    4405309073303connectNewAccountOutlookCalendar.png

    This will bring up a new window where you will enter your Microsoft credentials. In some cases, you may need to try other “Sign-in options” in order to connect your Outlook Calendar account with Airtable. Jump down to the section below for more information on security and OAuth scopes.

    Step 3: Select Calendar and date range

    After successfully connecting to your Outlook Calendar account you should see a list of all of the Calendars you have under that Microsoft login.

    4405313858839outlookSelectCalendar.jpeg

    After choosing your preferred Calendar, you will need to select a start and end date range.

    4405309116951outlookDateRange.jpeg

    Note

    Due to limitations within Microsoft’s API, the maximum date range that you set cannot be longer than 5 years. You will see an error message after clicking “Next” if you attempt to set a date range longer than 5 years.
    4405313901463outlook5YearLimit.jpeg

    Step 4: Select fields to sync

    After clicking next, you’ll be presented with two sync options; you can sync:

    1. All fields from the Outlook Calendar source, including any fields added by Outlook in the future.

    2. Specific fields from the Outlook Calendar source.

    sync_fields_to_sync_09192022

    If you choose to sync specific fields you’ll be shown a menu where you can toggle each individual field that you want to sync from your Outlook Calendar. 14 fixed fields will sync from Outlook Calendar if the “All fields in the source view and fields added in the future” option is chosen.

    1. Title

    6. Importance

    11. Updated

    2. Start

    7. Location

    12. Event Link

    3. End

    8. Description

    13. Meeting Link

    4. All Day

    9. Attendees

    14. Event ID

    5. Creator

    10. Created

    Step 5: Create a synced table

    Before creating your synced table, there are some “Settings” options that allow you choose how often you want to sync, and how to handle records deleted or hidden in the Outlook Calendar source.

    • The frequency of syncing. Right now, the options are manual syncing and automatic syncing which happens around every 5 minutes.

    • Whether or not deleted Outlook Calendar events should be removed from the Airtable table. By default, deleted events will be removed.

    4405309226135syncSettingsGeneral.jpeg

    Once you’ve selected your desired settings, click the “Create table” button. This will cause a new table to be created in your base.
    4405314282775outlookCalendarCreateTable.gif

    Security and OAuth scopes

    Authentication

    We request the minimum read/write scopes necessary to make the Airtable Sync integration work. The OAuth consent screen will look like this:

    4405309100439outlookSignInOutlookCalendarSync.png

    The access approval screen will appear next. Clicking "Yes" means that you will allow us to access the necessary scopes to allow the automation to work.

    4408095197207OutlookCalendarScopeAccess.svg

    Outlook scopes

    Scope name

    Scope purpose

    offline_access

    For refresh token

    profile

    For user metadata

    openid

    For sign-in

    Mail.ReadWrite

    For reading/writing emails 1

    Mail.Send

    For sending mail 1

    Calendars.ReadWrite


    For reading/writing calendar events 2


    MailboxSettings.Read


    For reading mailbox settings related to calendar events 2


    1 Only for Outlook Email automations

    2 Only for Outlook Calendar automations

    We use delegated permissions for all of our Outlook integrations and tokens are transmitted between Airtable and Microsoft’s servers securely via HTTPS. On Airtable’s side, the tokens are stored in databases that are encrypted at rest.

    For more information on Outlook scopes, check out Microsoft's documentation here.

    FAQs

    Can you sync multiple Outlook calendars?

    Depending on your Outlook calendar and Airtable sync settings, this may be possible utilizing our multi-source sync feature. However, multi-source syncing is only available on Business and Enterprise Scale plans and the results will be more experimental than expected.

    The best practice would be to create merged calendars in Outlook and sync that single calendar with Airtable instead.

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