Calendar transfer woes (Outlook.pst > Live.com)
Hi all.
To put my question as briefly as possible, I need to transfer my calendar, which has been an 'offline' calendar in my Outlook PST file for many years, to Live.com so that I can start syncing it with my new Windows Phone. However this apparently simple process appears to be fraught with difficulty.
For many years I used Outlook to manage my appointments, I'm self employed and so responsible for the administration of my own business, but I've been using it to keep personal appointments as well, I'm pretty forgetful so I'd be lost if I didn't have some record of where I need to be when. A lot of people think that having a calendar is a sign of me being freakishly organised when in fact the reverse is true, having a calendar makes up for how ad-hoc and disorganised I am when it comes to work and allows me to present some semblance of being a normal person who can be relied upon in a professional capacity.
I've been a Blackberry user for a good 6 years, and initially this worked brilliantly for me. My calendar was in Outlook and was synced to my Blackberry via USB so I knew what my diary looked like when I was out and about (which I am a lot, mine is not a primarily desk-based profession). However since my last phone-upgrade I have discovered that Blackberry are no longer the workhorse of industry they once were, and their devices have lost their level-headed usefulness in pursuit of those for whom a phone is primarily a device for playing Candy Crush. Subsequently, for the past 24 months I have had to get by without a mobile version of my calendar, as Blackberry initially didn't see fit to include any sync facility and then when they did it was so riddled with bugs that the version of the calendar you saw on your device bore scant resemblance to the original and you'd daren't sync it a second time for fear of throwing the whole shebang into uncertainty.
So today my upgrade was due and faced with a choice between the Windows phone and Android (I have an iPad and therefore know better than to trust Apple with anything of any importance, an iPhone would probably reschedule my appointments for more hipster-approved venues in an attempt to make me more 'Apple', if indeed it doesn't shut down altogether deciding that anyone square enough to use a calendar isn't someone Apple wants to associate themselves with.) I went for Windows, seeing as a quick search on syncing with Outlook brought up one 'how to' page for Windows and several forums of people debating what tricks you could employ to do it for Android... which makes sense, Microsoft you'd expect to be good at linking it's devices to each other, and I also have always had this nagging respect for Microsoft as being a company that actually make things that do what their users want to do rather than what they want their users to do.
So far the phone seems brilliant, I feel I can finally have a usable personal organiser on had wherever I go again. Now I was aware that I would need to switch calendars in order to make this work, going from the calendar I currently use which is part of my default PST file, to a calendar attached to my Microsoft account, and once I'd done that it should all work swimmingly. It's just getting to that point that I'm finding tricky.
I have established that I have Hotmail connector installed for Outlook (2010 by the way), it was already installed, as I remember installing it for an ultimately futile attempt via a 3rd party app to get my Blackberry to sync. I have added my Microsoft account to Outlook and can now see it in my navigation pane, along with its calendar. For further reassurance, the inbox for that account shows the 'welcome to Outlook.com' message that I can also see in my inbox when I log into Outlook.com via a web browser.
So all my appointments are still in the default account and I need to get them into the Microsoft account. I tried following the instructions here:
[link removed]
However that didn't work for me as it automatically creates a calendar with the same name as the default calendar (so called 'calendar') in the Microsoft account folder... however the Microsoft account already has a calendar in it, called 'Will's calendar' so I end up with two calendars, and after a bit of fudging around, decided that I needed to copy the contents of the original calendar into the calendar that was already there (Will's calendar). The only way to do this was to open the calendar in list view and select and then copy all the items to clipboard, and then paste them into 'Will's calendar', but I managed this just fine and my Microsoft account as it appears in Outlook now only has one calendar in it, and this calendar is identical to the one I've been using up to this point and has all my upcoming appointments in it.
However when I try and sync my phone with Live.com, I don't get anything and when I try to view the calendar on Live.com in my browser it is completely empty. I have, I think synced it within Outlook by clicking send/receive and it shows me sending and receiving data in the Microsoft account, but the calendar just isn't going over.
My second 'woe' is to do with categories. Many of the items in my calendar have categories applied to them, and these categories have colours, which I've used for years and become accustomed to. This is not so much a problem when I come to copy it to my phone, I know the items should still have their categories intact, even if the colours assigned to each category don't carry over, and I don't mind setting the colours up again on my phone, but I should expect there is a way to use the original colour-codes for my new calendar within Outlook, but there doesn't appear to be such a thing. The categories are still there, this much I know, but the colour assignments are not, nor does the advice in the following article work for me so far:
[link removed]
Any help would be hugely appreciated.
Regards,
Will
Hi all.
To put my question as briefly as possible, I need to transfer my calendar, which has been an 'offline' calendar in my Outlook PST file for many years, to Live.com so that I can start syncing it with my new Windows Phone. However this apparently simple process appears to be fraught with difficulty.
For many years I used Outlook to manage my appointments, I'm self employed and so responsible for the administration of my own business, but I've been using it to keep personal appointments as well, I'm pretty forgetful so I'd be lost if I didn't have some record of where I need to be when. A lot of people think that having a calendar is a sign of me being freakishly organised when in fact the reverse is true, having a calendar makes up for how ad-hoc and disorganised I am when it comes to work and allows me to present some semblance of being a normal person who can be relied upon in a professional capacity.
I've been a Blackberry user for a good 6 years, and initially this worked brilliantly for me. My calendar was in Outlook and was synced to my Blackberry via USB so I knew what my diary looked like when I was out and about (which I am a lot, mine is not a primarily desk-based profession). However since my last phone-upgrade I have discovered that Blackberry are no longer the workhorse of industry they once were, and their devices have lost their level-headed usefulness in pursuit of those for whom a phone is primarily a device for playing Candy Crush. Subsequently, for the past 24 months I have had to get by without a mobile version of my calendar, as Blackberry initially didn't see fit to include any sync facility and then when they did it was so riddled with bugs that the version of the calendar you saw on your device bore scant resemblance to the original and you'd daren't sync it a second time for fear of throwing the whole shebang into uncertainty.
So today my upgrade was due and faced with a choice between the Windows phone and Android (I have an iPad and therefore know better than to trust Apple with anything of any importance, an iPhone would probably reschedule my appointments for more hipster-approved venues in an attempt to make me more 'Apple', if indeed it doesn't shut down altogether deciding that anyone square enough to use a calendar isn't someone Apple wants to associate themselves with.) I went for Windows, seeing as a quick search on syncing with Outlook brought up one 'how to' page for Windows and several forums of people debating what tricks you could employ to do it for Android... which makes sense, Microsoft you'd expect to be good at linking it's devices to each other, and I also have always had this nagging respect for Microsoft as being a company that actually make things that do what their users want to do rather than what they want their users to do.
So far the phone seems brilliant, I feel I can finally have a usable personal organiser on had wherever I go again. Now I was aware that I would need to switch calendars in order to make this work, going from the calendar I currently use which is part of my default PST file, to a calendar attached to my Microsoft account, and once I'd done that it should all work swimmingly. It's just getting to that point that I'm finding tricky.
I have established that I have Hotmail connector installed for Outlook (2010 by the way), it was already installed, as I remember installing it for an ultimately futile attempt via a 3rd party app to get my Blackberry to sync. I have added my Microsoft account to Outlook and can now see it in my navigation pane, along with its calendar. For further reassurance, the inbox for that account shows the 'welcome to Outlook.com' message that I can also see in my inbox when I log into Outlook.com via a web browser.
So all my appointments are still in the default account and I need to get them into the Microsoft account. I tried following the instructions here:
[link removed]
However that didn't work for me as it automatically creates a calendar with the same name as the default calendar (so called 'calendar') in the Microsoft account folder... however the Microsoft account already has a calendar in it, called 'Will's calendar' so I end up with two calendars, and after a bit of fudging around, decided that I needed to copy the contents of the original calendar into the calendar that was already there (Will's calendar). The only way to do this was to open the calendar in list view and select and then copy all the items to clipboard, and then paste them into 'Will's calendar', but I managed this just fine and my Microsoft account as it appears in Outlook now only has one calendar in it, and this calendar is identical to the one I've been using up to this point and has all my upcoming appointments in it.
However when I try and sync my phone with Live.com, I don't get anything and when I try to view the calendar on Live.com in my browser it is completely empty. I have, I think synced it within Outlook by clicking send/receive and it shows me sending and receiving data in the Microsoft account, but the calendar just isn't going over.
My second 'woe' is to do with categories. Many of the items in my calendar have categories applied to them, and these categories have colours, which I've used for years and become accustomed to. This is not so much a problem when I come to copy it to my phone, I know the items should still have their categories intact, even if the colours assigned to each category don't carry over, and I don't mind setting the colours up again on my phone, but I should expect there is a way to use the original colour-codes for my new calendar within Outlook, but there doesn't appear to be such a thing. The categories are still there, this much I know, but the colour assignments are not, nor does the advice in the following article work for me so far:
[link removed]
Any help would be hugely appreciated.
Regards,
Will
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