Fixed: Syncing and Missing Appointments in Day/Week/Month View

A hotfix for Exchange 2003 was released earlier this week that fixes a bug I first reported on in July, where events created on a PDA device were visible in a table view but not Day/Week/Month view. If you try to open the events, you'll receive the following error message: "Can't open this item. Cannot locate recurrence information for this appointment."

See "Some recurring calendar items disappear from the "Day/Week/Month" view in Outlook when a user uses Exchange ActiveSync on a mobile device to modify a recurring meeting in an Exchange 2003 environment" for more information and to request the hotfix.

This hotfix is for the Exchange server. If you aren't the Exchange administrator and are affected by the bug, you'll need to ask your administrator to install the hotfix.

Originally reported in EMO's July 17's issue:
iPhone and the Case of the Disappearing Appointments 

Commenting in E-mail

A very popular request is for the ability to add notes to incoming messages. There are several ways you can do this in Outlook, although none are perfect. Users I've spoken to want to add a sticky note type note that is easy to see and automatically excluded when the message is replied to, but until we get something like that, one of these methods will have to do.

1. Use the For Follow up field. This method is easy, just type over "Follow Up" when you set the reminder and the note displays in the Infobar, but you're limited to 100 characters. You'll need to remove your text from the For follow up field when replying or it will be sent with the message. This works in all versions of Outlook and all message formats.

2. Go into Edit mode and add a note at the top of the message. (From an open message, go to Edit, Edit message or in Outlook 2007, Other Actions, Edit message to go into Edit mode.) This works in all versions of Outlook and all message formats.

3. If you use Outlook 2007 you can insert comments into the message (also works in the Note field of any Outlook item). These are the same comments found in Word and display in a tooltip when you hover over the comment in the reading pane. To use comments, go to Other Actions, Edit message, then press Ctrl+Alt+M to add comments to any HTML or RTF formatted message. Save and close the message when finished. The comment is hard to miss and easy to delete before replying but it doesn't work with plain text messages.

4. Use OutNote add-in to attach a sticky note to a message.

Outlook Quick Tip: Calendar Date Formats

I get quite a few questions from users who want to display the day name along on the calendar. This is controlled by the long date format in Windows. If the date format you want does not exist is not listed, type it in.

ddd, MMM dd, yyyy displays as Thu, Nov 20, 2008
dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy displays as Thursday, November 20, 2008

The month, day and year can be reordered if desired and you can use other separators (or none) if desired. Note that any change here is system wide - any other programs that use the long date format will use this format.

Display All Six Weeks

Another calendar question comes every time a month is spread over six calendar weeks.

"How do I change the monthly calendar view to start with the current week and show the 5 weeks in the future? The default monthly calendar always starts at the beginning of the month. Towards the end of the month it gets annoying as most of the calendar is in the past."

Outlook works like a traditional monthly calendar and you see the entire month on one page. The weeks are static, with the end of the month at the bottom of the page. Except that every "page" in Outlook covers five weeks and some months cover six calendar weeks. Using compressed weekends helps some months, by putting the entire month within five weeks, but adds confusion other months when the month begins with the last week of the previous month and/or it doesn't display the last days of the month on the screen.

The problem that lead to this question is that November starts on Saturday and ends on Sunday, stretching over six weeks using the traditional Sunday - Saturday layout while Outlook only displays five. As a result, the last six days of October fill the first week and last day of November is not visible on the screen, unless compressed weekends is enabled. (To enable or disable compressed weekends, right click on the calendar and choose Other Settings. )

Outlook 2007 handles this much better. Each month is 4 -6 weeks, as needed, so the entire month is visible. It doesn't place "today" at the top of the screen as some users would like, but it looks like a traditional printed calendar every month.