Deleting future ocurrences of recurring appointments

[MAB]

Hi there!

Is it possible to delete ONLY future events of a recurring appointment,
without changing past ocurrences?

MAB.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Is it possible to delete ONLY future events of a recurring
appointment, without changing past ocurrences?

You can put an end date on the recurrence, but if you've need storing things
in the notes pane of the item, you could lose it if you do.

 

[MAB]

Tks Brian for your reply!

It does not work!

When one changes the end date of an ocurrence Outlook simply diregards all
changes in past ocurrences. So, besides the notes as you correctly pointed
out below also any execptions in previous ocurrences will be lost!

MAB.

 

[Brian Tillman]

It does not work!

It does work.

When one changes the end date of an ocurrence Outlook simply
diregards all changes in past ocurrences.

Like I said.

 

[Wendy2006]

Am I the only person who thinks that this behavior (removing all exceptions
to recurring appointments when you make a change) renders the recurring
appointment functionality virtually useless?

Nothing lasts forever. You set up a weekly team meeting with no planned end
date. Every so often you need to reschedule or cancel that meeting. Then
after a year, when it's time to end those weekly meetings, you change "no end
date" to a specific date, and Outlook decides to re-make history and put that
weekly meeting back on your calendar at teh same time every week, with no
exceptions noted.

Why bother to use the recurring meeting functionality?

 

[Brian Tillman]

Am I the only person who thinks that this behavior (removing all
exceptions to recurring appointments when you make a change) renders
the recurring appointment functionality virtually useless?

Nothing lasts forever. You set up a weekly team meeting with no
planned end date. Every so often you need to reschedule or cancel
that meeting. Then after a year, when it's time to end those weekly
meetings, you change "no end date" to a specific date, and Outlook
decides to re-make history and put that weekly meeting back on your
calendar at teh same time every week, with no exceptions noted.

Why bother to use the recurring meeting functionality?

Recurrences are not separate items. A recurring item, no matter how many
you seem to have it on the calendar and how many of them have been modified
for a single occurrence, is only one item in the calendar. By changing the
series, putting in an end date, for example, you're asking Outlook to
rewrite that single item. It does, recalulating all of the individual dates
based on that new one item. Outlook didn't decide to "re-make history", you
did by changing the original item. In the process, the exceptions you may
have created along the way are lost because everything gets recalculated.
If you don't want that to happen, don't make exceptions to a recurring item.
Create a new item reflecting the unique values you need.

The functionality of a recurring item is in the fact that a single entry can
show up many times on the calendar so you don't have to enter all the dates
individually, not that you can store exceptions in it.

 

[Brian Tillman]

This begs the question, why don't Microsoft make a recurring
appointment a series of seperate entries, you could then change any
one of the individual appointments, this would help PA's trying to
enter meeting for say year, they could then write the one entry over
the year recurring, the change a single entry or all future entries
with no problems.

You didn't quote any of the message to which you were replying so there is
no context, but I believe I recall the conversation.

I can speculate as to why Microsoft made recurrences computed items instead
of real items, but I have no inside knowledge. I suspect that the space
saving in the calendar is subtantial and that it would have been difficult
to program the calendar to find all the recurrences if they were separate
items. Moreover, changing a recurrence would have consumed significant
computer time to locate, delete, and regenerate all the recurrence items
were they actually separate items in the calendar.

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Also the design called for compatibility with Schedule+ recurrences, so they
couldn't change things and break compatibility. That's why they can't make
changes now, they'd break all the old code.