Make deleted Outlook events stay on the calendar

Sometimes I want to decline meeting invitations I receive in Outlook 2007 but keep the meetings on my calendar. That way, I have a reminder of when people who are attending won't be free. However, whenever I click "Decline," the meetings and invites disappear.

I'm aware of the Delete meeting request from Inbox when responding option, but I don't want the invites to stay in my Inbox; I only want the calendar events.

I'm also aware of two workarounds, but neither one is very good. Using "Tentative" instead of "Decline" could be confusing for other attendees, and creating a dummy event on my local calendar could be annoying if there are lots of changes to the event time.

Ideally, these events would be marked as Free on my schedule, but since this is for my own reference, that's not a requirement. How can I set this up?

Here's how you do this in Outlook 2010:

1. Decline the meeting so the person knows you aren't attending
2. Go to the deleted items folder and open the invite
3. Click "Tentative" and then "Do not send a response"
4. Open the appointment and then change your time to "Free"

These are the same steps that Microsoft says in Show a declined meeting on my calendar.

These steps only work when you just received the meeting invite. It will be difficult to find the meeting invite for declining one occurrence of a weekly meeting that has been running for a while.

Here's what I do:

1) Respond to the invitation by Accepting as Tentative, using the EDIT response option.
2) In your EDIT comment, paste or type in some text saying "I will not be attending this meeting, but in order to keep it on my calendar, I'm responding as tentative but will show this slot as free."
3) Send your response.
4) After the appointment appears on your calendar, open it and change the "show as" to "FREE", indicating to you and to others that this time slot is open.

The appointment will remain on your calendar, but the time will show as free.

OPTIONAL - Select a color in your pallet for meetings that you've tentatively accepted, but do not plan to attend ... perhaps black. Change the color to help remind yourself that this is a meeting you know about but won't be attending.

Truth be told, MS should include a "Decline but keep on calendar option" ... but we all know that. :)