2006 Holidays?

G

Guest

You have several options:

1) Close Outlook. Go to Microsoft Downloads and download the holidays
update for Outlook 2000, which includes holidays through 2007. The file will
be named Outlook.txt, but the Holidays file in Outlook 2002 is called
Outlook.hol -- yet they both have the same file structure. Find the original
Outlook.hol file and rename it to OLDOutlook.hol. Now rename the Outlook.txt
file you just downloaded to Outlook.hol and move it to the folder where the
old file is. Once you've done that you can go back into Outlook and run the
Add Holidays function again. If you end up with duplicate holidays, go to
your Calendar folder, switch to the By Category view, select all items in the
Holiday category, delete them, and then run Add Holidays again.

2) Close Outlook. Open the Outlook.hol file already on your machine in a
text editor like Notepad. Scroll down to your country's holiday list and add
new dates yourself in the same format as the old dates. Then open Outlook
and run the Add Holidays function again (see item #1 if you end up with
duplicates).

3) Instead of using Add Holidays, manually go to each holiday and set it up
to recur for whatever pattern it needs to -- for example, Independence Day
(US) every July 4, or Thanksgiving Day (US) the fourth Thursday of every
year. Some holidays that don't have a simple recurrence pattern, like
Easter, would have to be added as separate entries for each year -- you'd
need to find the dates online. I like this method for myself, though,
because it means I never have to worry about downloading updates to my
Holidays file.

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***
 
D

Don Enderton

SNSSMIS, the link you offer leads to a "The page cannot be found" error.

Does that Microsoft link work for anyone now?

- Don
 
D

Don Enderton

As I wrote in another string, on a subsequent try, the link provided by
SNSSMIS worked for me.

- Don
 
D

Don Enderton

There are, however, a couple of bugs: 1) Christmas Eve and Christmas Day
are added only through 2007, while other holidays are added through 2012
(such as Groundhog Day, etc). 2) Several holidays are added for 2005 even
though 2005 holidays already may be installed in Outlook 2002.

So I had to add Christmas Eve and Day manually for 2008 through 20012, and
manually delete duplicated 2005 holidays. Uninstalling holidays before
installing the patch or update would not be good because that would
uninstall holidays for years prior to 2005, and I don't want to delete those
prior year holidays.

- Don
 
G

Guest

Microsoft is aware of those errors and is fixing them -- I haven't tried to
find the download but it may be missing again until the file has been revised.

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***
 
G

Guest

I've tried everything in this string of posts and nothing seems to work.
Downloading the update from the Microsoft website gives you and outlhol.exe
file and not the .txt file mentioned. Each time I've tried, it says the
holidays have been sucessfully updated, but when I add them to my calendar,
it still ends at Dec 31, 2005.
 
G

Guest

Did you read the message of mine that you replied to? The revised update,
which should hopefully work properly in all ways, is being worked on and is
not yet ready for release. You'll have to either wait for it or you can just
do what I did and add the holidays to your calendar manually as recurring
annual events. (I realize this doesn't work for all holidays, such as
Easter, which doesn't follow a simple pattern so each year's instance would
have to be added one by one.)

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***
 
G

Guest

It is now coming up to the middle of January. Why are we still waiting for
Microsoft to sort this out? It is really inconvenient not knowing the public
and religious holidays for 2006. I would have expected this update to have
been available since the middle of 2005.
 
J

Jocelyn Fiorello [MVP - Outlook]

I use the Earth Calendar at http://www.earthcalendar.net/index.php to
find just about any holiday on the planet...I realize it doesn't solve
your Outlook calendar holidays issue but at least you don't have to
guess when a particular holiday will be this year or next.

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please
reply only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***


In
 
G

Guest

This does not address the issue. It is really inconvenient not having public
and religious holidays in my calendar when arranging meetings. It would be
helpful to know when the MS update will be corrected and available for
download.
 
G

Guest

Dear Joan, Dan, Jocelyn Fiorello, and all other Users of Outlook that are
frustrated by a lack of a reliable Calendar Update application for US
Holidays from Microsoft:

Well Jocelyn, it certainly seems like a poor excuse that "Microsoft is aware
of the problem...". I know you're trying as hard as you can, and you've
provided very good, detailed, information in your 7/30/2005 post concerning
ways to manually update the Outlook Calendar, but there is really no excuse
for a company the size of Microsoft not to provide the millions (yes,
Virginia, there are MILLIONS of Microsoft Office Users out there...) of users
around the world with an up-dated calendar.

I do NOT want to rake you "over the coals"; you've been chastized enough in
the blogs all over the net, including formal web pages (check out
http://www.slipstick.com/calendar/holidays.htm). And the good people at
EarthCalendar.Net, a web site you recommend, only provide dates to 2007.
Perhaps they are underfunded. Most of us would like to update our calendars
until 2010, at the very least.

And then there is the issue of our legal holidays (referred to as "Observed"
by the Federal Government) v. traditional holiday dates. You've NEVER gotten
that function correct. And did anyone notice that Microsoft had Election Day
in 2005 falling on November 1ST??? By law this can NOT happen. It is ALWAYS
the first Tuesday AFTER the first Monday in November, so it can never fall on
November 1st.

Well, using three (3) different web sites, the Feds at www.opm.gov, a
"secular" calendar site created by the good Marcos Montes at
www.smart.net/mmontes-cgi-bin/ushols.cgi, and a Christian site to calculate
the dates for Easter (The first Sunday following the Full Moon on or after
the Vernal Equinox, set by the Western churches to always be March 21st), I
updated my OUTLOOK.HOL text file found in %root%\Program Files\Microsoft
Office\Office10\1033 using Notepad and updated all the entries from 2006 thru
2010.

Then after saving that file and using the internal Outlook options to add US
Holidays to my calendar as discribed by Jocelyn in her earlier post from
July, all the dates have been correctly added to my calendar.

You may be interested in the Easter Dates. In the format you need to add
them to the OUTLOOK.HOL file under the US Key, they are:

Easter Sunday,2006/4/16
Easter Sunday,2007/4/8
Easter Sunday,2008/3/23
Easter Sunday,2009/4/12
Easter Sunday,2010/4/4

Good Luck everyone!

Jon
 
B

Brian Tillman

CourtMCSE said:
I do NOT want to rake you "over the coals"; you've been chastized
enough in the blogs all over the net, including formal web pages
(check out http://www.slipstick.com/calendar/holidays.htm). And the
good people at EarthCalendar.Net, a web site you recommend, only
provide dates to 2007. Perhaps they are underfunded. Most of us would
like to update our calendars until 2010, at the very least.

What's stopping you? Microsoft's Knowledgebase explains in detail how to
create Holiday files of every ilk.
And did anyone notice that
Microsoft had Election Day in 2005 falling on November 1ST??? By law
this can NOT happen. It is ALWAYS the first Tuesday AFTER the first
Monday in November,

That's exactly where Outlook 2003 had it for me, right where it should be.
Then after saving that file and using the internal Outlook options to
add US Holidays to my calendar as discribed by Jocelyn in her earlier
post from July, all the dates have been correctly added to my
calendar.

So you have what you want. Problem solved. Thanks for an informative post
about the remaining Easter occurrences. It came in handy.
 
G

Guest

Dear Brian:
:

What's stopping you? Microsoft's Knowledgebase explains in detail how to
create Holiday files of every ilk.

Well, with ANY search engine it's often how you ask the question... I was
searching for an "UPDATE" application in the DOWNLOADS area of the OUTLOOK
web-site, not for KB articles on how to manually create a holiday calendar.

Once I did that search, I found KB161587 & KB180985 that refer to the
holiday calendar in the old OUTLOOK.TXT file. Then KB811544 said "Outlook XP
calendar only goes to 2005" by design. However it DID point to KB280976 which
listed the correct OUTLOOK.HOL file for XP and where it was located and how
to edit it with a test editor.
That's exactly where Outlook 2003 had it for me, right where it should be.

I have a licansed copy of Office 2003 we bought for evaluation and sure
enough, that calendar file DID have November 8th, 2005 as the correct
Election Day. Office XP however lists November 1st, 2005. I'm using the
Office XP version that all my users have on their PCs, not the newer version
used for evaluation.

We looked at Office 2003, but could NOT justify replacing a major
productivity suite that cost our local county government a considerable
amount for nearly 250 user licenses just a year before, even with the
generous discount Microsoft allowed for government use. With only 90,000
residents in our entire county, Office XP (2002 version) will have to last us
for at LEAST six more years.
So you have what you want. Problem solved. Thanks for an informative post
about the remaining Easter occurrences. It came in handy.

Now I have a good OUTLOOK.HOL file going until the year 2010. However, each
user is now going to have to manually update their own Office XP Outlook
calendar by replacing their file with the new one, which I located on a
shared network drive.

I'll put out a detailed memo on how to do this, but Brian, most of these
users know little more than pushing the "ON" button and moving the mouse.
Many do not even relealize they can hit the [ENTRY] key instead of scrolling
the mouse over the "OK" button... so I expect a LOT of helpdesk calls on this
one. And since our IT Department is a staff of ONE, I'll have to go out and
do this on every machine for users who don't know what a "file" is or how to
copy one.

Wish I knew more about VB so I could write a little app that would do this
for me, and this might be an excellent project for learning about the use of
VB in the Office Suite, but I'm busy trying to repair my Compaq servers that
are busted by a Microsoft Security Patch while trying to upgrade them to
Windows 2000 Sp4 in anticipation of the Windows 2003 Server upgrade I have
planned for the Presidents Day weekend. Can't get them to start Network
Connection Services now, even though they're functioning normally on the LAN.
And without Network Connection Services running, trying to uninstall SP4 or
any of the Security Patches just hangs. So I'm in a "Catch 22" loop. Can't
install, and Uninstall.

Well, thanks for your comments, and have a great day.

Jon
 
B

Brian Tillman

CourtMCSE said:
I'll put out a detailed memo on how to do this, but Brian, most of
these users know little more than pushing the "ON" button and moving
the mouse. Many do not even relealize they can hit the [ENTRY] key
instead of scrolling the mouse over the "OK" button... so I expect a
LOT of helpdesk calls on this one. And since our IT Department is a
staff of ONE, I'll have to go out and do this on every machine for
users who don't know what a "file" is or how to copy one.

Had this been evident from the beginning, I might not have been quite so
cavalier by saying, "problem solved." I'm part of an IT staff that cares
for thousands and we've had to go to each PC to make some global changes as
well. It's, well, "fun."
 
G

Guest

Dear All

The good news is that Microsoft has published an update to the holidays in
Outlook 2002 and it downloaded OK. Unfortunately, they seem to have got
themselves into a bit of a muddle regarding how the Christmas and New Year
Bank Holidays work. If 25 or 26 December and 1 January falls on a Saturday
or Sunday we get an extra Bank Holiday to compensate.

For example, in 2006, Monday 2 January is a public holiday because 1 January
falls on a Sunday, in 2009, 26 December falls on a Saturday so Monday, 28
December is a public holiday and in 2010, 25 and 26 December fall on Saturday
and Sunday so the following Monday and Tuesday (27 and 28 December) are
public holidays and so is Monday 3 January 2011.

I have given the above examples to illustrate the principle and there will
be others that I have not listed. Also, the situation may be different in
Scotland because I believe that they have two New Year public holidays (1 and
2? January).

I should be grateful if you would check the English public holidays again,
make the necessary corrections and reissue the Outlook 2002 holiday updates.

Many thanks

Joan

CourtMCSE said:
Dear Brian:
:

What's stopping you? Microsoft's Knowledgebase explains in detail how to
create Holiday files of every ilk.

Well, with ANY search engine it's often how you ask the question... I was
searching for an "UPDATE" application in the DOWNLOADS area of the OUTLOOK
web-site, not for KB articles on how to manually create a holiday calendar.

Once I did that search, I found KB161587 & KB180985 that refer to the
holiday calendar in the old OUTLOOK.TXT file. Then KB811544 said "Outlook XP
calendar only goes to 2005" by design. However it DID point to KB280976 which
listed the correct OUTLOOK.HOL file for XP and where it was located and how
to edit it with a test editor.
That's exactly where Outlook 2003 had it for me, right where it should be.

I have a licansed copy of Office 2003 we bought for evaluation and sure
enough, that calendar file DID have November 8th, 2005 as the correct
Election Day. Office XP however lists November 1st, 2005. I'm using the
Office XP version that all my users have on their PCs, not the newer version
used for evaluation.

We looked at Office 2003, but could NOT justify replacing a major
productivity suite that cost our local county government a considerable
amount for nearly 250 user licenses just a year before, even with the
generous discount Microsoft allowed for government use. With only 90,000
residents in our entire county, Office XP (2002 version) will have to last us
for at LEAST six more years.
So you have what you want. Problem solved. Thanks for an informative post
about the remaining Easter occurrences. It came in handy.

Now I have a good OUTLOOK.HOL file going until the year 2010. However, each
user is now going to have to manually update their own Office XP Outlook
calendar by replacing their file with the new one, which I located on a
shared network drive.

I'll put out a detailed memo on how to do this, but Brian, most of these
users know little more than pushing the "ON" button and moving the mouse.
Many do not even relealize they can hit the [ENTRY] key instead of scrolling
the mouse over the "OK" button... so I expect a LOT of helpdesk calls on this
one. And since our IT Department is a staff of ONE, I'll have to go out and
do this on every machine for users who don't know what a "file" is or how to
copy one.

Wish I knew more about VB so I could write a little app that would do this
for me, and this might be an excellent project for learning about the use of
VB in the Office Suite, but I'm busy trying to repair my Compaq servers that
are busted by a Microsoft Security Patch while trying to upgrade them to
Windows 2000 Sp4 in anticipation of the Windows 2003 Server upgrade I have
planned for the Presidents Day weekend. Can't get them to start Network
Connection Services now, even though they're functioning normally on the LAN.
And without Network Connection Services running, trying to uninstall SP4 or
any of the Security Patches just hangs. So I'm in a "Catch 22" loop. Can't
install, and Uninstall.

Well, thanks for your comments, and have a great day.

Jon
 
G

Guest

Just wanted to say that I also have Outlook 2002 and the SNSSMIS linked
worked for me as well.
 
G

Guest

Jocely,
I have XP Pro SP2 with Outlook 2002. When I downloaded and ran the update
(officexp-KB910619-FullFile-ENU.exe) it reported "The expected version of the
program was not found on your system."

Below, you suggest that Rippster (who also reported that he/she uses Outlook
2002) download "the holidays update for Outlook 2000". Was that a typo? Or
would the OL 2000 version of the update fix my problem as well?

Possibly related: when I initially tried to download the update I followed
the recommended verification process. It reported that my copy of Office was
not activated. I knew this was incorrect, and verified that by doing
Help...Activate product from Outlook. That reported "Product already
activated", so I skipped that the second time. Are these two errors related?

I looked for recent log files, but only found setupapi.log with a timestamp
in the right range, and no messages relevant to my "version" error. I then
tried to run the update executable with a the "/lv <logile>" switch and it
gave me a command error. IMHO, these udate executables should pass such
switches in to the installer.

So, why am I just now getting around to updating holidays in August? I'm a
single-member LLC ... what's a holiday?!
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top