Calendar Not Displaying Annual Events (birthdays, holidays)

[vanishersprinteruser]

I just noticed that the calendar on my Nokia 521 does not display/sync holidays or birthdays from my Gmail calendar. After about an hour of troubleshooting and hair pulling trying to figure things out, I have come to the conclusion that the problem seems to be the phone calendar won't display an item if it's on an annual recurrence with a yearly start date in the past.

I created the following in Gmail calendar to test:

Test Recurring Weekly Event with start date of 10/14/13
Test Recurring Monthly Event with start date of 10/14/13
Test Recurring Yearly Event with start date of 10/14/13

All three events synced to my phone and showed up and working as indicated. I then changed the start dates from these events to the following:

Test Recurring Weekly Event changed start date to 10/07/13
Test Recurring Monthly Event changed start date to 09/14/13
Test Recurring Yearly Event changed start date to 10/14/12 (note 2012)

Only the Weekly and Monthly events continue to sync. The Yearly event no longer shows up if I change the start date to 2012 (and/or older). I have tried creating a yearly event in the phone's calendar with a past year as start date and it won't show up.

Is this just me? Is it a setting somewhere that I'm missing? Is it a bug? Can somebody confirm or deny? Would prefer to not pull anymore hair out today. :|

Edit: Actually, I think I might have found the answer. From Microsoft http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/how-to/wp8/people/use-calendars:

Syncing Google accounts
To see the calendar for a Google account on your phone, just set up the account. The calendars will automatically show up along with your contacts and email, and your phone will sync the following appointments (these settings can't be changed):


Two weeks of past single-instance (non-recurring) appointments.
6 months of future single-instance appointments.
All recurring appointments that have occurrences within the last two weeks or anytime in the future.

The above seems to exclude annual events so... sounds like it's a limitation of the syncing. Which doesn't make it anymore ridiculous as this would seem like a fundamental function of a calendar. Ugh.

 

[luk3ja]

switch to outlook.com

 

[Eric J F]

I agree.

The easiest way I found to manage a calendar was to create two outlook.com calendars. One is my regular calendar with appointments and most recurring events, but I didn't use any holiday add-ins. The second 'holiday' calendar I created by putting in only those recurring holidays I actually care about; I really don't care about Flag Day or some of the others in standard lists. I can also add things like daylight savings dates and birthdays and our anniversary to this one.

The only reason to maintain two is it's easier to make changes to the holiday events without having to go through all the other appointments.

I sync my outlook.com calendar to Chronos Calendar and it all works well.

 

[vanishersprinteruser]

Thanks for your replies. I went ahead and created a new Hotmail calendar. I then synced that to my phone and holidays and birthdays show up. :|

It's a workaround (I need to sync two calendars to get all the info I want) but I guess it works.

 

[vanishersprinteruser]

Just discovered another solution. If you set up your Gmail account as an Exchange ActiveSync account, everything from the calendar will sync intact. No need to go through hoops of syncing two calendars from two different services and whatnot.

 

[ChBaecker]

Hello I have the same problem.

If you set up your Gmail account as an Exchange ActiveSync account, everything from the calendar will sync intact. No need to go through hoops of syncing two calendars from two different services and whatnot.

How is this done?

Christian

 

[kurtd]

Same problem here with gdr2 and now gdr3. Birthdays are not syncing. I have a grandfathered free google apps account so I don't really want to switch to outlook.