Wednesday, December 1, 2004

Outlook 2000 bug: January 1, 2005

THIS WEEK'S POWER TIP

By Diane Poremsky

Outlook offers a cool feature that allows users to publish the calendar as a Web page. All you need to do is select a calendar folder and choose the File->Save as Web Page menu to open the Web page wizard and create an HTML page of your calendar, suitable for use on a local drive or an Internet server.

Unfortunately, if you use Outlook 2000 and try publishing the calendar for any date after January 1, 2005, your calendar won't be correct. All dates in the calendar published to the Web are a day early, possibly because the Web publishing algorithm didn't take into account that 2004 was a leap year. Microsoft is aware of the issue and investigating, however I'm not expecting a hotfix for this issue for two reasons: Outlook 2000 is no longer supported, and it only affects calendars published using the Web publishing wizard, not the actual Outlook calendar.

Newer versions of Outlook are not affected, and if upgrading isn't possible, you'll need to use a Word template that pulls calendar data from Outlook, then save it as an HTML file. These calendar templates are generally better for printing calendars as they allow customizations such as pictures and coloring dates, and they make nice Web calendars.

You can visit http://www.slipstick.com/calendar/olpubcal.htm#olcal for the templates that are available. You'll need to set Word's macro security to Medium (Tools->Macro->Security) before opening the template, and allow the macros to run in order to use any of the templates. You can also find other calendar publication utilities at the above site.