Adding really important dates to your Outlook holiday file

I stumbled across this helpful explanation of how to customise the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 holiday file (Outlook.hol) to include dates that are important to you. This is really easy to do and a great way to make sure you (and possibly everyone else in your team) has the same key dates visible in their Outlook calendar. Personally I added a bunch of football (soccer) fixtures to my Outlook calendar so I never miss an important game! Here's one of the sections that resides in my Outlook.hol file:

[International Football fixtures] 7
USA vs England,2005/05/28
Columbia vs England,2005/05/31
Northern Ireland v Germany,2005/06/04
Denmark v England,2005/08/17
Wales v England,2005/09/03
Northern Ireland v England,2005/09/07
England v Austria,2005/10/08

You can use this in a multitude of ways to add important one-off dates to your Outlook calendar. For example you could create a section for key dates in your business planning cycle, the dates of your children's school terms or the meeting dates of your favourite social club. For regularly recurring appointments like birthdays and anniversaries it's easier to create a recurring all day meeting from inside your Outlook calendar so the appointments appear at the same frequency forever more without your having to repeatedly edit the Outlook.hol file.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 05, 2005
  How can one do this across a domain? I can't see 5% of staff being bothered to reimport holidays let alone be able to find the file.
• Anonymous
  May 13, 2005
  This tip is intended more for the end-user than the messaging admin. To apply across a domain you could add the date(s) to a Calendar folder inside a .pst file then use Exmerge to import the .pst data into the store.