Have you ever been so busy that you didn’t realize until Friday that you would have Monday off? Or has Mother’s Day arrived sooner than you thought it would, leaving you scrambling to find a decent gift in time?
It’s happened to me that I wouldn’t realize a Monday holiday was on the way until my Friday weekly planning session. Unfortunately, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day have also sneaked up on me a few times over the years.
At least when you have holidays added into to Outlook (or any other software you use instead of Outlook), it’s easier to not have these holidays sneak up on you. Sometimes corporate IT groups handle this for the organization, sometimes not. If yours is not automatically handled for you, it is a simple matter to add them into Outlook.
Just open the Options Menu in Outlook and select Calendar options:
When you click on the Holidays tab, it will give you a list of possible holidays to add (holidays of several countries and several religions). Pick the set(s) of holidays you want to add, and it adds them in automatically, up to the end of the current year. Then, of course, you can sync these new entries into your PDA.
What if you use Google Calendar instead of Outlook? I’m not sure, as I have experimented with Google Calendar but do not use it regularly (yet, anyway). Hopefully, those of you who do use it can give the rest of us a tip on how to add holidays to it. From my poking around in it earlier today, I did not see an option for adding holidays, but it could well be that overlooked it.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
a comment about your holiday tip, and a question too!
you can also add your own custom holidays to the Outlook set-up, although it does involve editing the .hol file which contains all the holiday packs you mentioned. I added a football (soccer) scheulde that someone had put in the appropriate format. Its a nice way to add a lot of events at once. the format is pretty simple, and only requires a header ( [header] ) and one or more lines of data. see the existing file for samples. I just placed my list below the final entries (Yemeni holidays as I recall!)
the question is regarding the synching. I now have all this data in Outlook, and have my PC Synch software setup to import holidays as well (to an Axim X50v), so any ideas why it wont import the new holiday set?
~ karembeu
karembeu – I am at a loss as to why the holiday data is not syncing to your x50v. I have an x51v (and have had an x50v) and the holidays sync fine for me (and also did when I had the x50v).
The only thing that comes to mind is that it could be worthwhile to open one of the holiday entries up in Outlook and click on the “Recurrence” tab to see what the settings are. These holidays are typically set up as All Day Events, with a start time of 12:00am, and end time of 12:00am, and a duration of 1 day. I have had some odd things happen when the duration was set incorrectly, so that might be worth checking. You might even want to change the holidays to 7:00am to 7:00pm, instead of using the All Day settings to see if that helps.
Otherwise, I am at a loss as to what it could be. Let me know what you find out when you check the settings. Also, one more thing: you could check to see that they are set to the right year : I know that sounds silly, but it could be that they are set to the previous year, and your Axim isn’t syncing them because it might not be set to sync All calendar entries (only the past month plus all future events is the default setting).
I even tried changing the setting to “all events” instead of the default “past month …”, will try it tonight, useful ideas to try – will let you know.
Thanks for letting me know it all worked out okay. Can be frustrating, though, to solve a problem without really understanding how you did it, which happens to me from time to time.
Thanks for the additional info on the hol files.