How To Reduce Outlook Calendar Folder Size
Microsoft Outlook is essential for any professional working out there. And so does the Outlook Calendar as it houses all the meeting requests, reminders and appointments. But most of the organizations put data storage limit in their user Outlook usage. So mostly people will get around 100 MB of storage (and even less if you’re just developer or junior employee). Continuous inflow of mails and meeting requests/appointments will soon choke up the storage limit of Outlook. To free up the space you can move mails to personal folders, delete meeting requests/appointments from Calendar which are expired. But wait, that’s the tricky part. Cleaning up mails is easy but not the Calendar. If you’re facing problem in reducing the size of your Outlook Calendar, keep reading.
To reduce Outlook folder size, you first need to check which item is taking the most space. To check this, right click on “Mailbox-Your Name”. Then “Properties for “Mailbox-Your Name”…->Folder Size“. There you’ll see total size for each Inbox, Sent Items, Calendar, Deleted Items etc. Now If your Calendar is consuming lot of space(which is highly possible if you’re working in management position or some other communication intensive job). You should delete unwanted items from Calendar to free up the space.
When you go to Calendar in Outlook, by default the view is “Day, Week, Month“. Deleting items from this view can be cumbersome if you’ve 100s of entries in there or recurring items with times spanning over centuries! Even large sized attachments in meeting requests will add up hefty size to Calendar. So “Day, Week, Month” view is not suitable to clean up the Calendar. This prompts to change the view. Go to “View->Current View->By Category“. This will arrange all the Calendar items in list style format with essential fields like Subject, Location, Start, End, Size, Recurrence etc.
Day-Week-Month view in Outlook Calendar
Select "By Category" in View tab
First to free up space you should delete large attachments from the items. To do this, sort list by attachment. This will show all the items with attachments. You can open items one by one and delete just attachment (not the item itself) and save. This will noticeably reduce the size of Outlook Calendar.
Sort Calendar items by attachments
Second, you can delete the items which are old and have occurred in the past. To do this you’ll need to sort the Calendar items by “End” date. You can ideally delete any items older than one week. So this will leave only items which either occurred in last week or will occur in future. Thus reducing size of your Outlook Calendar to mere KBs.
Sort by End date of appointments
If you’ve problem using these methods to reduce Outlook Calendar folder size, comment below. I’ll try my best to reply asap.
