Outlook Calendar is a Mess After Changing Timezones

tom982

tom982

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Joined
May 31, 2012
Posts
4,351
Location
New York
Hi guys,

Hoping someone will be able to help here because I'm at my wit's end here.

My parents recently moved back to the UK and I had to handle the merging of the work/personal files etc. Everything went smoothly apart from merging the calendars, which is now a bit of a mess. They were out there for 3.5 years and, due to the timezone differences (1h), the time specific calendar events in this time are now one hour out. Now this alone would be easy enough to fix, but it's the all day events that are a problem: they've all gone -23h. I have absolutely no idea how this has happened but it's definitely true for all all-day events in this time period. This means that all day events now span two days.

MS has a timezone fix tool for Outlook, but due to some being +1 and some being -23, it's not going to do any good.

Has anyone run into this before? There's thousands, potentially tens of thousands, of events so a manual approach is out of the question. Coding something myself is a bit of a last resort, but I can't believe nobody else hasn't had this issue before.

Thanks!

Tom
 
I have seen this once or twice before, but not with 1000s of events. I note this is a known problem with Outlook but AFAIK, there are only workarounds - no simple fix. And the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Outlook is the most common option. I personally would still try that but I would export (backup) all the appointments first so you can roll back if the tool makes matters worse.

I have also heard where this has worked:

Make sure date and time are correct for current timezone.
Export all the events as a .csv file.
Delete all the events in Outlook.
Import all the events back into Outlook.​
 
Thanks for the quick reply, Bill. I'll try the tool as soon as possible (on a backup) but I'm not sure how it will go. I assume it would just fix the +1 events and change the -23 to -24, which will be a nightmare to fix, but it's definitely worth a try just in case.

The CSV import didn't work unfortunately. Strangely, when I came to export it on their computer it failed (with a MAPI error) and I had to export it to .ics, import it on my computer then export it as a CSV on mine.
 
Thanks, Corrine! I'm away from the computer for the next 5 weeks now but I'll try and remote in at some stage.
 

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