Why can't I delete all future instances of a recurring appointment

[Neil Kane]

Often I use the calendar appointment to save meetings notes, etc. about a
meeting. But it is often the case that a recurring meeting gets cancelled
earlier than anticipated. Unless I delete all future instances by hand, I
lose all of the customization I've made to the historical appointments. Among
other things, I try to use OL as a historical record of how I've spent my
time...and this screws that up. And heaven forbid if a recurring appointment
was set up with no end date, then its on my calendar forever unless I choose
to blow away all the historical appointments too.

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

Often I use the calendar appointment to save meetings notes, etc. about a
meeting. But it is often the case that a recurring meeting gets cancelled
earlier than anticipated. Unless I delete all future instances by hand, I
lose all of the customization I've made to the historical appointments.
Among
other things, I try to use OL as a historical record of how I've spent my
time...and this screws that up. And heaven forbid if a recurring appointment
was set up with no end date, then its on my calendar forever unless I choose
to blow away all the historical appointments too.

Recurring events are not multiple calendar entries, they are one single event
for which Outlook calculates the recurrences based on the starting date and
the recurrence pattern. When you manipulate individual recurrences you are
building an exception list that Outlook uses to modify the recurrences on the
fly for specific views in the Day/Week/Month classes. Some changes to the
series, such as end date modification, cause Outlook to regenerate the
exception list, wiping out the previous exception list.

In order to preserve you history, create a new calendar folder and move the
recurring event to that folder. Then, export that folder to a comma-separated
values file. Outlook will ask you for a date range. Specify the event's
start date and new end date. This will save each recurrence, complete with
recurrence-specific information, as an individual item. You can then import
that csv file back into your main calendar.

 

[Neil Kane]

Brian,

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your reply, but this suggestion is not
helpful because I'm never going to go to this trouble. Its modestl helpful to
know that there's a workaround (I wasn't aware that there was one), but
mostly I wanted the MS developers to know that this was a problem. Perhaps
they haven't had people complain about it loudly enough, but my suspicion is
that there are many, many people who are irritated by this feature. MS needs
to automate the workaround that you've described. What I want is a button in
the appintment that says "collapse recurrence" so that the recurring
appointments are collapsed into individual objects and the future (i.e.,
instances that haven't happened yet) can be deleted.