Do you want most of your new appointments to use Free (or Tentative or Out of Office) as the default for the "Show as time" instead of Busy?
Outlook doesn't have an option to set the "Show time as" default but you can create a custom appointment form with "Show time as" set to Free, Tentative, or Out of Office, then publish it and set it as the default appointment form.
How to create and publish a "Free Time" custom form
First, go to File, Options, Customize Ribbon and add a check to Developer ribbon on the right.
Step 1: Go to the Calendar folder
Open the calendar folder you want to publish the form in. This makes it easier to publish the form because it gets published to the folder you are "working" in.
Step 2: Create custom appointment form
Open a new appointment form and change Show as time as desired.
Step 3: Publish the form
Publish the form using the Publish form command on the Developer ribbon
The default location should be calendar so you just need to enter a name for your form.
Step 4: Set the new form as default for new appointments
Right click on the calendar folder, choose Properties and select the form from the dropdown to set it as default.
Now when you create a new appointment, the Free/Busy time will default to your desired setting, Free in this example.
Video Tutorial
Multiple Calendar folders
The form is published to a Calendar folder and the default applies only to that Calendar. If you use multiple calendars you need to set the form as default for each calendar.
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Last reviewed on Apr 13, 2012
Hi Diane, Thanks for the article, quite helpful!
However for my purposes I need the custom form applied on an Exchange level on a Room Mailbox, basically I want all appointments in the Room Mailbox to be shown as Free. I’ve tried logging on as the mailbox and following your instructions, it works great when creating appointments directly in Outlook. However, when I invite the Room to an users appointment, or directly create the appointment from a users Outlook in the Room calendar, it still says busy. Even if I create a custom form for the shared room calendar in a users Outlook, it doesnt make any difference.
Can you think of another way I could do it?
I’ll see what i can find out – but I think the organizer would need to use the same form.
BTW, if you are doing this so the calendar will accept conflicting meetings, you can set it to allow conflicts with the Set-CalendarProcessing cmdlet:
Set-CalendarProcessing “Room Name” AllowConflicts $true