Cancelling recurring appointments erases all my data!

[Alex]

Why is it that Microsoft has not fixed this obvious design flaw. If you end,
or change a recurring appontment, all past edits to that appointment time are
erased instead of only ones in the future. I switched from Palm software to
what I thought was a more versitile program, and it does not even give you
the option to change only future appointments. I found complaints going back
to 2005 on this issue, and they have still not fixed it. Does Microsoft not
listen to people who use their products?
This has caused me and many others a lot of problems. The only work around
for me is to cancal all recurring appointments and reset them each month.
Great! That is over 70 recurring appointments each month that I have to
delete and reset , which is very time consuming. Come on Microsoft fix this
please!!!

 

[Brian Tillman]

Why is it that Microsoft has not fixed this obvious design flaw. If
you end, or change a recurring appontment, all past edits to that
appointment time are erased instead of only ones in the future.

The way Microsoft has implemented recurring appointments is to make them
single entries in the calendar, with all the recurrences calculated from
that single item. They're not separate items. If they were, it would take
an infinite amount of storage to contain them, if any of them had no end
date. Creating exceptions (like adding notes or attachments or changing the
time) for single occurrences adds exception metadata to that item. When you
perform certain actions, Outlook needs to regenerate the item, which erases
all of the exception data.

If you wish to end a previously endless recurring appointment, create a new
calendar folder and copy that item to the new calendar (using a table view
of the source calendar). Then export the item to a CSV file. Outlook will
ask you for a date range for the appointment and you can specify the start
date and your desired end date. The export will preserve the exception data
and generate individual entries for each occurrence. You can then delete
the original item and import the CSV you've created into your default
calendar, giving you a finite list of occurrences containing all your
exception data. This will add to the calendar's size when compared to the
original single entry, but it shouldn't be exorbitant.

Does Microsoft not listen to people who use their products?

All the time. What makes you think, though, that this particular item is
such a problem that hoards of people have asked for it to be changed and,
given that, that Microsoft has ignored them? State your evidence.

 

[Alex]

Thanks for the information, however since I have over 70 recurring
appointments on a regular basis, and every month something changes with most
of them, having to change one at a time takes too long. I found posts going
back to 2005 that complain about this problem. Maybe not "hordes", but quite
a few that seem frustrated with the way the program works. If the software is
designed this way, I feel it is a flaw and should have been thought out
better. I originally used Palm's software and you have the option to only
change future appointments, and to leave anything in the past alone. If they
can figure out how to do this, surely Microsoft could. My schedule changes on
a daily basis and I need to be able to keep track of what changes I make.

 

[Diane Poremsky {MVP}]

if you are editing appointments often you really need to make individual
appointments or user shorter recurrences, especially if you edit the events
to add notes. Recurrences work best when you don't have a lot of exceptions.