New Outlook’s calendar meeting with default signature

One of many wrongs, fuckups and things that are missing in Microsoft Outlook is the fact that you can’t set default signature for every new calendar meeting invitation, as you’d do for any new email message.

Things gets even worse as you dig through the problem and realize that Outlook developers were stupid enough to force you to design a whole new meeting template instead of just giving you an option to enable or disable this feature (as — again — it works in case of emails).

This guide is a redesigned version of this Stack Overflow answer (or actually this comment).

See, if you have the Developer tab on the ribbon? If not then go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon and check the checkbox next to Developer to enable it.

Here are the steps:

  1. Switch Outlook to calendar. Go to Developer tab. Click on Design a Form.
  2. Select Meeting Request <Hidden> item in opened window and hit Open.
  3. Customize new template. Set some values. Paste signature. Etc.
  4. Instead of sending this template, publish it — hit Publish button from Form section and select Publish Form item.
  5. Give template’s name, like “Invitation with signature” (fill both Display name and Form name fields).
  6. Hit Publish button.

You’re done. You can close template editor ignoring request to save changes (your template is published).

Now you can start a new meeting invitation with your signature. Instead of pressing Ctrl+N as usual, make use of New Items > Custom Forms > <template name>.

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