A series of recurring past appointments should not be changed just because I change the end date or the number of appointments.
Calendar is always full of recurring appointments. Often my clients need to change a single appointment to another day or to cancel it completely. They nearly always have a set amount of weeks in which their training lasts. Therefore, if a lesson is cancelled in advance, the total amount of appointments must remain the same but only the end date changes. Whenever I try to change the end date, the whole series must be reset and then past changes (such as changing a single appointment from a Tuesday to a Thursday) will be lost. Also, if I need to change a regular series from a Monday to a Wednesday I have to end that series with a new end date and lose and past changes in order to create a whole new series on a different day. I've seen other calendars handle this problem sufficiently by giving the user a summary of the existing series and changes made to it and the user can then select check boxes on the ones which now should be different.
I really think the developers at MS Outlook (for windows) have not really considered this as a useful and viable feature but I'm sure there are literally millions out there using it just like me and have the exact same problem.
Adam White
shared this idea
13 comments
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Gary Smith
commented
Now we can set up a recurring task for any day of the week or for a specific numbered day of each month, but there is no way to set up a recurring task for the last day of each month. This is a major omission by all software not just Outlook, so adding it would give you a leg up on the competition.
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Suzanne Hubbard
commented
This feature should have been added long ago ... what's the delay?
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MarkB
commented
Yes please. I often want to refer to my past Calendar to see what happened a particular day. Having recurring past appt. change when updating the master, is annoying.
Also when the organizer sends a cancellation of the remainder of recurring meetings (instead of them changing the end-date) allow me to select to delete future events but retain past events.
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Bill Pennock
commented
This is a HUGE problem. It shows a total lack of respect for users data. That sounds harsh but it is exactly true. Many of us keep history in our calendar for obvious reasons. There is no excuse for changing all that history in order to change the future meetings. It certainly is not that it's impossible or even all that difficult to code.
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BobC
commented
Allow editing of recurring appointment details such as date/time without having to remove the recurrence. At the least, retain prior entries if recurrence is removed to allow edits instead of resetting all entries to the default.
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Anonymous
commented
I also think that the changes made to past events after updating a series, is unnecessary, plus it leaves an inaccurate picture of the calendar archive.
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Robert Paulsen
commented
I believe recurring appointments is part the icalendar standard and might be difficult to change. Another way to handle this is to have a "Save as individual appointments" button in addition to the regular save button. Instead of one meeting the reoccurs 10 times, this button would create 10 individual appointments. And then, just as email has a "Find related" search, appointments should have the same. This would be an easy way to pull up all these related (but not recurring) appointments.
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Jim Lewis
commented
Didn't notice default frequency for a new recurring appointment was going to be weekly. After already having picked the End Date, I went to change the frequency from Weekly to Daily but found for some stupid reason desktop Outlook in Office 365 had changed the End Date. Is this productivity? Want to change one thing but other stuff changes willy-nilly? Make stuff work cleanly and straightforwardly with no random, careless side effects or you'll be screwing business productivity world-wide.
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Bruce Morris
commented
As usual for Outlook, this can be done in many other calendar programs, but not Outlook. Why is MS always so far behind?
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Anonymous
commented
please sort so that past changes are not reverted when you end an recurrence - so annoying
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Kenny Lee Karpinski
commented
This is truly annoying and invasive behavior. Please do fix this!
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Anonymous
commented
Holy God this is annoying. All planned series of meetings are subject to changes. Past history should NOT be destroyed based on future plans. Some of us use our calendar as a historical document. This becomes even more important if you're using it as a time-and-billing record. The only alternative is to avoid recurring meetings altogether and make each meeting independently.
Related: When people delete an entire series instead of terminating the series, we invitees lose EVERYTHING. So incredibly frustrating.
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Udo Behm
commented
Would like to be able to pause recurring items in the calendar in relevance to other calendar entries (e. g. for holidays). let Outlook check for other events on that date and let me define what entries in whats calendars Outlook should pause the recurring items (after the holidays the items should be shown again or after a certain event that I want to define in the settings for the recurring appointment)
