When you create a new appointment in your calendar in Outlook 2003, by default 'All day' events show your time as 'free' and all other appointments show your time as 'busy.' Some employees at the company where I work wanted this behavior changed. Specifically, they wanted the 'All day' appointments to default to 'busy' because they schedule many meetings and other appointments that last all day and often forget to set the appointment as 'Busy' manually. This creates confusion when other employees go looking for them and they aren't in their office! I scowered Google, as I usually do when faced with tasks such as this, and could not find a nice short easy solution. Most sources (even some Outlook/Office MVPs) said there was NO way to do this (which is just not true). Others had you create custom forms, which is the answer. However, I couldn't find a custom form answer that wasn't unnecessarily LONG and difficult to implement.

So I toyed around and came up with a simple custom form that changes the behavior. Here's how you do it!

First, create your custom form, using the IPM.Appointment built-in form. If you don't know how to create a custom form, there are bazillions of good walk-throughs out there.  Google for it.

Second, add the following code in the Script Editor...

Sub Item_PropertyChange(ByVal Name)
    Select Case Name
        Case "AllDayEvent"
            BusyStatus = 2
    End Select
End Sub

THAT'S IT. Nothing more is required in the custom form! Publish the new form, then set the default calendar appointment form to the new one and voila!