Beginner's Outlook Calendar Summary with OpenAI

A step-by-step demo that shows **how to pull your Outlook calendar events for the week and ask GPT-4o to write a short summary**. Along the way, you'll practice basic data-transform nodes (Code, Filter, Aggregate) and see where to attach the required API credentials. --- ## 1. Manual Trigger - *Run Workflow* | Why | Lets you click “Execute” in the n8n editor so you can test each change. | | --- | --- | --- ## 2. Get Outlook Events - *Get many events* 1. **Node type:** `Microsoft Outlook – Event – Get All` 2. **Fields selected:** `subject`, `start` 3. **API setup (inside this node):** - Click **Credentials – Microsoft Outlook OAuth2 API** - If you haven't connected before: 1. Choose **“Microsoft Outlook OAuth2 API” – “Create New”**. 2. Sign in and grant the **Calendars.Read** permission. 3. Save the credential (e.g., **“Microsoft Outlook account”**). 4. **Output:** A list of events with the raw ISO start time. > **Teaching moment:** Outlook returns a full `datetime` string. We'll normalize it next so it's easy to filter. --- ## 3. Normalize Dates - *Convert to Date Format* ```js // Code node contents return $input.all().map(item => { const startDatetime = new Date(item.json.start.datetime); const formattedDate = startDatetime.toISOString().split('T')[0]; // YYYY-MM-DD return { json: { ...item.json, startDateFormatted: formattedDate } }; }); ``` ### 4. Filter the Events Down to This Week After we've normalized the `start` date-time into a simple `YYYY-MM-DD` string, we drop in a **Filter** node. Add one rule for every day you want to keep—for example `2025-08-07` **or** `2025-08-08`. Rows that match any of those dates will continue through the workflow; everything else is quietly discarded. *Why we're doing this:* we only want to summarize tomorrow's and the following day's meetings, not the entire calendar. --- ### 5. Roll All Subjects Into a Single Item Next comes an **Aggregate** node. Tell it to aggregate the `subject` field and choose the option *“Only aggregated fields.”* The result is one clean item whose `subject` property is now a tidy list of every meeting title. It's far easier (and cheaper) to pass one prompt to GP than dozens of small ones. --- ### 6. Turn That List Into Plain Text Insert a small **Code** node right after the aggregation: ```js return [{ json: { text: items .map(item => JSON.stringify(item.json)) .join('\n') } }]; ``` Need a Hand? I'm always happy to chat about automation, n8n, or Outlook API quirks. Robert Breen - Automation Consultant & n8n Instructor - robert@ynteractive.com | LinkedIn