In this article I will describe some of the errors, list corrected dates and provide links to files I have prepared with the fixes already in to save you some typing. I have also posted a separate article about adding and removing holidays from your Outlook calendar, rather than making this one even longer with a great big discussion about the mechanics of doing this.

Background

When you add holidays to Outlook, they are read in from a specially formatted text file, formerly outlook.txt, now (since 2002?) renamed to outlook.hol but essentially the same thing. This contains sections for various countries and a couple of religions, so that you can easily choose the ones you are interested in. This approach has a couple of limitations but some upsides too:

• each holiday is specified as a single date, so even things which have on obvious recurrence pattern must be included several times for different years, which means only a limited number are included in the interests of file size
• it is hugely subject to human error, as we will see
• when there are errors, at least you can easily fix them by editing the file or replacing it with one someone else has done (like me)
• you can add extra sections for “countries” you want to include, such as for a special interest group, or additional company holidays (such as winter shutdown periods)

Outlook 2010 errors

The version of the outlook.hol file which shipped with Outlook 2010 final version (RTM) has some serious flaws in it, affecting at least 23 countries as far as I can see (basically most of Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand), and likely many others I have not been able to identify. As I mentioned above, because of the way this file is used, this is relatively easy to fix as it is not an actual bug in the program, but is still very annoying, especially for anybody that has already imported the incorrect holidays.

After much effort, a couple of phone calls and emails and a long-winded web form, I finally managed to log a support call with Microsoft* – not to get a solution (since I could easily fix the problem for my own individual case and share that with my clients as well) but to alert them to the breadth of the problem so they might come up with a hotfix (as they have done before for similar problems) or include an updated file in the next service pack. So far there seems to be some dragging of feet and although they have said they are hoping to get a hotfix out I got bored waiting and thought I might as well share the information I have so that others might benefit.

I have a client with several hundred users in the UK and thousands worldwide who are migrating from Lotus Domino (Notes) to Exchange right now, and I want to be able to work with them to make sure they get a fixed version of the file before users start adding holidays all over the place.

Four main problem areas

I first noticed the problem with the holidays because of some incorrect dates for Easter Monday. I was also adding school holidays to Outlook and realised the Spring bank holiday in 2012 is not the usual last-Monday-in-May. I also spotted that Christmas and Boxing Day always show on the “correct” dates, when I really need to see the Bank Holidays if this is to be useful at all. In the end this got me digging deeper in the file and I found four main classes of problem relating to the UK and many other countries too:

• Incorrect dates for Easter Monday from 2013 to 2019 (or 2020 in some cases)
• No lieu days shown for Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day when they fall on a weekend
• No additional holidays for Scotland (even though there are holidays for Northern Ireland included in the UK)
• UK Spring Bank Holiday is incorrect for 2012 since there is a special case because of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Note: I have only checked the English language version of the file so it is possible that for some of the countries I have identified as having incorrect dates, those dates might be correct in the files that would normally be used in those countries in their native language. The cynical side of my head says that may not be the case…

How to fix the holidays file

There are a few different approaches you can take here, which largely depend on whether you just want a one-off fix for your own machine, or a wider-scale rollout for an entire organisation. You can use a file someone else has already corrected (such as the ones I have created and linked to below) or go in and fix, amend and add to the file yourself.

First let’s look at where the file is and how it is formatted so you can make changes to it if you want to.

Finding the outlook.hol file

The outlook.hol file is shared between all users as it is stored along with your installation of Outlook. This is in:

<program files>\Microsoft Office\Office<version>\<LCID>

The <program files> folder would usually be C:\Program Files\ unless you are running a 32-bit version of Office on a 64-bit version of Windows (quite common now for Office 2010 on Windows 7), in which case you need the one in C:\Program files (x86)\.

The <version> is the internal version number, so 2010 is version 14, 2007 was v12, 2003 is v11 and so on (there’s no unlucky version 13!).

The <LCID> is the “locale ID” associated with the country and language of your installation. There is a list of all Locale IDs Assigned by Microsoft on MSDN which you can use to identify which one you need, but notice that the code used here is for the language of your installation not necessarily proofing tools or anything else you configured – so in the case of most (all?) of the English speaking world, the code you are looking for is 1033 for US English, as that is the language the program runs in, even if you have things like British English spell checking enabled (the .lex files used by proofing tools are not stored in LCID folders, but simply named according to language such as MSSP7ES.LEX for the Spanish spell checking dictionary). There is no installation for British English, Strine or any other variation.

The path on my machine running Office 2010 32 bit edition installed in US English, on a Windows 7 64-bit machine is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\1033

In that folder you will find the Outlook.hol file, which any user can access, but only administrators can modify it. So, the best thing to at this stage is simply to copy it then paste it somewhere else such as your My Documents folder or some temporary directory. This is sensible practice anyway, as you probably want to work on a copy of the file rather than editing the original in situ.

If you create your own version or borrow mine you can use this without putting it anywhere special, although I would recommend replacing the original broken

Structure of the holidays file

The file has a very simple structure, with a section for each country which is named inside square brackets followed by a number indicating how many entries there are for that location. For example:

[Australia] 172
Anzac Day,2009/4/25
Anzac Day,2010/4/25
Anzac Day,2011/4/25
… …

In the built-in file the countries are listed alphabetically, although this makes no difference as Outlook will always present the list in alphabetical order regardless of the way they are arranged in the file. If you want to add an extra country (such as Scotland) or a non-country (for additional company days off perhaps) you can do this anywhere, and the end of the file is probably a good place for these.

Each date entry has the form of a label for the day, a comma than the date in yyyy/m/d format. I have seen documentation claiming that this should be yyyy/mm/dd which is strange since the built-in entries don’t do that, and as far as my tests have shown, you can use either form, but you must use four digit years.

So now you can change any incorrect entries to fix them simply by editing the existing text, but what about adding new dates?

Adding extra holidays

You may want to add some additional dates for your country (that sounds surreally patriotic – “Add a holiday for your country, comrade!”) which is easy enough to do, and you can even paste in whole chunks if you want to, but you must remember to change the number of entries at the top next to the country name accordingly.

If you add lines but don’t increase the number, things will appear to work but when you import the holidays Outlook will simply read the number of lines indicated and stop, so you may miss out loads of holidays you wanted to import. For each of the errors described in detail later in this article I have included the number of holidays listed so if you are using these to edit the file yourself you know what number to add. The section for United Kingdom has 172 to start with, so if you extend the dates for some holidays out to 2035 that adds 3 x 7 = 21, then add the lieu days for Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year (3 x 8 = 24), then add the three corrected dates for May/June 2012 minus the incorrect one, this is a total of +47 = 219 lines total.

If you remove lines for any reason (such as holidays which are not observed across the whole country) and forget to decrease the number, you will get error messages when you try to import, but as far as I can see no damage is done, it simply imports as many as it can and either runs into the next country or the end of the file and stops. If you are editing the file in order for other people to use it you want to make sure you have eliminated any issues like this, so do make sure the number is correct. If you don’t want to see the Battle of the Boyne or St. Patrick’s Day for example you could remove these and decrease the count by 40 (leaving 132 based on the original file, or 179 with my suggested amendments).

Using or sharing your corrected file

Once you have a new version of your holiday file you can simply double click on it to add the holidays from there – you don’t need to put the file in any particular folder or give it a special name. This is fine for a quick one-off but less useful for administrators wanting to help out their whole company’s users. A simple option if you are just distributing a few updates such as additional company dates would be to email the file out to people or put it in a fileshare that users have access to, but this still means that anyone who uses the normal method to add holidays will get the wrong dates too, so you may be better to replace the file on everyone’s machine instead.

The only challenge to getting an updated file out to people is that it needs to replace the existing one, and that is under “Program files” which is not accessible to normal users. If your users are running with local admin rights then you will have no problem with this (although you probably have much bigger problems such as malware to worry about). The easiest solution would normally be to put the file in a share which is available to “authenticated users” to read, and then to include an appropriate line in a machine startup script (applied via group policy most likely) to copy the file down (use xcopy / robocopy so you only copy the file once, not every time the machine starts up). Don’t forget that the file must be called “outlook.hol” for it to be recognised and used by Outlook when users add holidays through the GUI.

If you clone machines as a method of deploying new workstations, make sure the corrected file goes into your “gold” build; if you use other deployment tools or scripts make sure it is included as part of that process.

Note that if Microsoft do issue a service pack, this might overwrite your file with their version (which may or may not be correct), or it might deliberately avoid doing so (this was the case with holiday updates issued for Outlook 2003 for example) and you might miss out on other fixes that you did not know about.

Corrected files and additions available for download

Major fixes

If you don’t particularly want to bother editing the file yourself, I have done most of the hard work for you and fixed all the problems discussed in this article, for all 23 affected countries. I have also extended the dates out to 2035 (for the United Kingdom) for Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year, added Scotland as a country, and thrown in a bonus of dates for System Administrator Appreciation Day (as a separate optional “country” to add).

Download a fixed version of outlook.hol holidays file

Alternative files

Rather than replace the entire file, you might want to just add in the corrected UK dates (and ignore the incorrect ones or manually delete these from your calendar). For this you want the UK additions file which has extra years, lieu days, Scottish holidays and SysAdmin Day (three separate countries so you can add what you want).

There is also a corrected, updated complete version of the dates for the UK mainland only, not Northern Ireland additional holidays.

I have also created a file designed for UK users who also want to be able to add holidays for Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Hungary and Poland without duplication of all the ones which are repeated in all those countries such as Christmas and Easter (yes, I had a specific reason to choose those countries for a client of mine).

Of course, you may not want any of these particular alternatives, but they may give you a useful starting point for ideas and a basis to start copying and pasting from – just remember to make sure the number of entries for a country is correct to avoid any problems.

Outlook 2010 holiday Errors in detail

The errors described briefly above are covered below, including the two different Easter Monday problems, and in most cases I have included my suggested additions if you want to correct your own files, or of course you can simply use my ready-made files with these changes already embedded.

Easter Monday on the same repeated date of 13th April

Despite the obvious rule that Easter Monday is on the day after Easter Sunday this was incorrect in many cases for the UK. This was the correct date for 2009 and will be again in 2020, but the file lists this as the date for 2013 to 2019 as well, despite this not even being a Monday in those years and they got Easter Sunday correct in every case. The fact that they are correct up to 2012 is almost certainly because that was the last year included in the outlook.hol file for Outlook 2007, so someone obviously started from that base and added a bunch of new dates but forgot to change them for each year.

This error is repeated for 6 countries: Andorra, Australia, Ireland, Luxembourg, Slovak Republic and United Kingdom.

The correct dates for Easter Monday from 2013 to 2020 should be those shown below but this is a replacement rather than an addition, so no net difference in number of entries:

Easter Monday,2013/4/1
Easter Monday,2014/4/21
Easter Monday,2015/4/6
Easter Monday,2016/3/28
Easter Monday,2017/4/17
Easter Monday,2018/4/2
Easter Monday,2019/4/22
Easter Monday,2020/4/13

Easter Monday on the same date as Easter Sunday

As if that was not enough, for 17 other countries, for all the years from 2013 to 2020 Easter Monday is shown as the same date as Easter Sunday. Yes, you can have twice as many Easter eggs but you have to go to work on Monday morning! Again, dates up to 2012 are fine.

The 17 countries where this version of the Easter Monday problem exists are: Austria, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand (odd that this has a different issue from Australia, I think), Norway, Poland, San Marino, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland.

The correct dates are the same as those given above.

Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s day falling on weekends

OK, strictly speaking the dates for these don’t change so the file is not incorrect in one sense, but since it is a feature to add holidays to my calendar, it is useless if it does not actually achieve that objective. In the UK when these kind of fixed-date holidays fall on a weekend, we get a day in lieu in the following week to make up for it (so the Monday or as is the case this year, both Monday and  Tuesday as both dates are at the weekend). I know that in some other countries they don’t apply this kind of rule for all holidays (for example in Germany if a Saint’s day is on the weekend you simply miss out), and in others they take the nearer date (ie. Friday for Saturday, Monday for Sunday). Either way these ought to have been included for several countries and they are not.

So, if we leave the original dates in place, the 24 additional holidays as days “in lieu” from 2009 to 2035 would be:

Christmas Day (lieu day),2010/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2011/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2016/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2021/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2022/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2027/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2032/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2033/12/27
Boxing Day (lieu day),2009/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2010/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2015/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2020/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2021/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2026/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2027/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2032/12/28
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2011/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2012/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2017/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2022/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2023/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2028/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2033/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2034/1/2

Incidentally, there are probably other holidays which should also have an extra day added in a similar way. Australia Day for example is celebrated on 26th January, but when that is at the weekend it seems to be common practice to have an extra “Australia Day (observance)” in the calendar, but I can’t find a definitive reference to what the rule is (nearest day, following week, or some arbitrary government decision). If you have any specific examples of this kind of thing I’d love to hear from you in the comments, ideally with citations.

No Scottish holidays

There are two main differences for Scottish holidays from the rest of the UK:

• In Scotland they party even harder at New Year, so they need two days to get over it, and when it is a weekend as well they add their usual level of indulgence on top so they also need an extra day in lieu when the 2nd January falls on a weekend
• The August Bank Holiday which is seen by many Brits as signalling the end of summer and the onset of cold wet weather does not make sense in Scotland (I’m not sure if this is because it is always cold and wet up there, or because the change comes earlier), so they have their August holiday on the first Monday of that month rather than the last.

Since Microsoft have managed to include Northern Ireland holidays along with the UK but totally omitted Scotland, I have added Scotland as a country in its own right in my fixed files so you can choose to include these or not, in addition to the rest of the UK. The “2nd January Holiday” is shown on the day it is observed, rather than always on the 2nd (it seemed a bit redundant to label the 2nd January as “2nd January” and then have a lieu day as well). You could of course take this idea further and have a section for all the Scots holidays including those also celebrated south of the border but without any of the Sassenach-only ones such as Late August.

The additional section for Scotland might look like the example below, with 54 entries in total if you include dates up to 2035 as I have done in the downloadable files linked here.

[Scotland] 54
2nd January Holiday,2009/1/2
2nd January Holiday,2010/1/4
2nd January Holiday,2011/1/4
2nd January Holiday,2012/1/3
… …
Summer Bank Holiday,2033/8/1
Summer Bank Holiday,2034/8/7
Summer Bank Holiday,2035/8/6

UK Spring Bank Holiday 2012

In the UK we have two national holidays in May – the May Bank Holiday on the first Monday of the month, and the Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday. The outlook.hol file follows this pattern correctly, and this would be fine except for a spanner thrown into the works because of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Firstly we get an extra holiday overlooked by the team at Microsoft on 5th June 2012, and secondly the end of May holiday has been moved to 4th June to act as a “bridging day” and give us a four day weekend. I can forgive people outside the UK for not knowing this (or frankly my dear for not giving a damn). I had no idea until I was looking at school holidays, and from the dozen or so people I mentioned this to since, none had any idea this was happening.

So, we need to add two dates to the holiday file, and I would suggest you should also explicitly include the non-Bank holiday so that it is clear to people who might otherwise assume it is just missed out and add it for themselves and take the wrong day off. In my amended files I have taken out the wrong one and replaced it with the explicit NOT shown below, so the net difference is two additions. The three added dates are:

NOT a Bank Holiday see 4th June,2012/5/28
Spring Bank Holiday,2012/6/4
Queen’s Diamond Jubilee,2012/6/5

Addition information and references

The Bank Holiday dates for the UK and Scotland (for the next few years at least) can be confirmed at the official UK.gov page here: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/LivingintheUK/DG_073741 (=http://tinyurl.com/5kdoa4)

*About that support ticket: because I am an MCT I get two free support tickets with Microsoft. I had to use one of them as the only way I could make them aware of the problem as an official bug report, rather than risk losing it in the noise of the support forums. If I had been a regular customer who would have had to pay to do this I think I might not have bothered.

Before you do though, it is worth noting that Microsoft have published a whole bunch of wrong holiday dates in Outlook 2010 for at least 23 countries, including many future UK Bank Holidays. You should probably read my other post about the errors and download one or more of the files with corrections for them before you go ahead and add anything.

This article is intended to help you add national holidays, remove holidays with an incorrect date, and use Outlook categories to make these stand out on your calendar. Although I wrote this to accompany my post about incorrect dates in 2010 to show you how to actually add or remove these from your calendar, what follows applies pretty much the same to Outlook 2007 and older as well, although to be fair I have not attempted to test this in any step-by-step fashion for Outlook 2003, 2000, 97 or older as I no longer have these antiquated, steam-driven versions installed for me to access.

Adding Holidays to your Outlook 2010 Calendar

The normal way to add these holidays from the outlook.txt or outlook.hol file already installed on your machine is through Outlook’s own options as follows:

In Outlook 2010 go to File > Options then click the Calendar tab on the left, then click then “Add Holidays” button and carry on as described below.

If you are still using an older version, then for Outlook versions up to 2007, go to Tools > Options, then on the Preferences tab click on the “Calendar Options” button, then click on the “Add Holidays” button in the middle of the dialogue box which appears.
Now in either case you will see a list of countries you can add. Tick the boxes for the ones you want, and click OK. If you have previously added any of the countries you chose this time you may see a warning message that this may create duplicate entries. If you previously added the incorrect entries for a country, it is usually better to delete them all first (see below) and then add a correct set instead. If your administrator has provided any specialised versions of the file, you may see unusual “countries” listed, which you can also add in just the same way.

If you try to add the holidays for the same country more than once, you will get a prompt like the one below to check if you really want to do this. If you know you only have a special subset list to add, or you have deleted the ones you already installed, you can safely say yes to this, otherwise say no to avoid any duplication.

What do the holidays look like?

All the holidays you import for the countries you chose will be added with the following characteristics:

• They will be an All-Day Event for the date in question
• The time will be marked as Free (always the default for an All-Day Event)
• They will be in a Category called “Holiday” (see note below)
• The Location will be the name of the country where the holiday applies (we will make use of this later if you need to remove any)
• There is no reminder set for these entries (regardless of your default reminders setting)

What does the “Holiday” category do?

Out of the box, nothing. Outlook has had a feature for many versions which enables you to categorise items according to categories you define and show them in colours you associate with those categories. In Outlook 2010 you can pretty much define as many categories as you want (to the point where they become unmanageable), although in the drop-down list under the “Categorize” button you will only see the fifteen most recently used for that type of information (ie. 15 recently used in your Calendar, Tasks, Mail, Contacts are remembered as separate lists).

Categories are especially useful for Calendar entries as they show up in colour in your Calendar and the To-Do bar. If you add a flag to an email to follow it up, you can easily also add a category to it so the associated colour shows up in the To-Do bar as a visual clue which might remind you why you decided to follow up that item in the first place.

In your Mail or Contacts view the “Categorize” button is on the Home ribbon; in your Calendar you need to select an entry and it will be shown on the additional ribbon which appears (for a meeting or appointment as appropriate). The drop-down menu (shown below in a cut-down form) includes an option for “All Categories”.

When you choose this you can add new categories, rename existing ones and choose different colours to associate with them. So if you simply select an existing one or add one, and name it “Holiday”, Outlook will start showing items already saved using this category in the colour you choose.

As an aside, the same applies if you create a meeting request, categorise it and then send out invitations to your colleagues. The meeting will remember the category you assigned, but this will not change how it shows up in the other person’s calendar. If they do have a category of the same name, or later add one, it will show up in the colour they choose to use for this.

Note: All Day Events and Time Zones

Aside: All-Day Events are intended to take place on a specific date and are NOT “time-zone aware”. For example New Year’s Day is 1st January, it does not start half way through the day even if people around the world start celebrating at different times according to when midnight comes around in their time zone. Normal timed appointments and meetings are shown to a user as taking place at the specified time adjusted for their time zone. This is great for international corporations when sharing and viewing other people’s calendars in order to fix up a time for a remote meeting, telephone call or video conference, as you don’t have to think too hard.

Adding holidays directly from a new Outlook.hol file

The alternative way to add holidays is to start Outlook, then simply find any correctly formatted .hol file (such as the ones linked from my article about the incorrect holiday dates in Outlook 2010) and double click it.

Outlook will then prompt for you to choose a country in the normal way, and you may get a warning about duplicate entries, but if you know the file only contains some specific subset of dates (such as only the lieu dates for Christmas and New Year) then you can go ahead quite safely.

Removing Holidays from your Outlook Calendar

You might need to remove holidays from your Outlook Calendar for various reasons:

• If you still have holidays going way back from previous versions of Outlook you have used
• You have holidays showing for a country you no longer need to see (maybe for a supplier or customer you no longer deal with)
• You added holidays before you realised some of them might have been incorrect
• After adding holidays for multiple countries you have lots of duplicates for dates which are celebrated in many countries (eg. New Year, Christmas, Easter, various Islamic festivals and so on)
• Some of the holidays you added do not apply to you (eg. in the mainland UK you may not be interested in the holidays which only apply in Northern Ireland such as the Battle of the Boyne and St. Patrick’s day)

I have seen various articles in the past which discuss using the categories to search on and identify these, but I find this is not ideal if you have added multiple countries, or when you have also added your own holidays for time off work and used the same category for these dates as well. I would suggest instead using the “location” which you might normally use to show where an appointment or meeting is to take place, such as in a booked room or more generally a particular site, office or even town.

Change your view and sort your calendar entries

So, to start off, in Outlook 2010 open your Calendar and on the View ribbon at the left hand end click on Change View > Events. This will change to a list view with information in columns (rather like a view of email messages), but filtered to show only All Day events, such as holidays. (You could equally choose the more general “List” view and achieve the same goal of seeing things in columns but there will be more entries to go through).

In Outlook 2007 and earlier, you can get to a very similar column format from the View menu > Current view > Appointments.

Once you have your column layout, the first thing to do is sort on “Location” by clicking on that column heading. I would then usually also sort by Subject and by date (this might be labelled “Recurrence Range Start” if you are using the same view I suggested above). To sort on these additional fields, hold down the Shift key while you click on those headings, so you now have everything sorted by Location (eg. all “United Kingdom” together, then by subject (“Christmas Day” all together) then by date, which in most cases will be the year for these annually occurring holidays.

Selecting multiple entries to delete

You should now be able to easily scroll down to find and identify any entries you don’t need, such as duplicates. If you have imported the same holidays twice then you may need to select every second line. To do this use the usual method of holding Ctrl while clicking to select many individual lines before pressing delete to get rid of them. To select a whole block and get rid of them click on the first item then hold Shift and click on the last and you will get a continuous set from one to the other. I would suggest you do this to remove all the holidays for the United Kingdom because you know they include wrong data and you will want to start from scratch before importing a new set of corrected date.

I often import holidays for other countries where I have business relationships so I can easily see that other people are not working, but I don’t need to see things like Christmas and Easter multiple times, so I tend to go and delete all the entries for these which are the same as in the UK. Similarly I tend to delete the Battle of the Boyne and St. Patrick’s day entries which are included for Northern Ireland, but since I am not there I don’t get to take a day off then so I get rid of them. (You can’t miss St. Patrick’s round here anyway for the number of fake Oirish pubs that are bedecked and festooned in green shamrock bunting for two weeks prior to the big day and even bigger night). You might not want to remove holidays for other countries if it is important for you to know if they actually do observe it as a holiday of course.

Don’t forget to switch back to a normal Calendar view when you are done, so in Outlook 2010 go to the View ribbon > Change view > Calendar (in older versions use View > Current view > Day / Week / Month).

Alternative methods

In some countries it can be easier to simply ignore many of the dates provided in the Outlook.hol file and just create your own recurring events. For example in the UK there are Bank Holidays traditionally on the first and last Mondays in May, and the last Monday in August. (except in Scotland, who do it on the first Monday in August instead). This may not be 100% accurate when special cases arise (eg. Spring Bank holiday in 2012 has been moved form May to June – see my post about incorrect entries for more information).

It is also no use for things such as Christmas Day – the date of the Christian festival may be fixed, but the Bank Holiday may be observed on a different date if Christmas itself falls on a weekend. In the UK the rule is always to observe the day on the following Monday (and / or Tuesday if Boxing day also falls on the weekend), and likewise for New Year’s day. However, in other countries they take the Friday in place of a Saturday, and the Monday in place of a Sunday (ie. the nearest day) – I’m fairly sure this is the case in the US for example.

Do you have any special ways you use the features of Outlook for managing holidays? Any workarounds for strange recurrence patterns? Have you had problems in the past or simply never used the feature at all? All comments welcome!

When you export from CRM to Excel the data is derived as XML, saved with an XLS file extension and Excel is invoked to open the temporary file. Unfortunately Excel checks to see if the file being opened is actually of a type which matches the file extension and tries to be helpful. Normally this is to help overcome problems such as a comma-separated variable (CSV) file being saved as an XLS file extension, which ought to mean Excel tries to read the XLS file, fails because the contents are nothing like a real Excel binary file and gives up. Instead, Excel actually looks at the content, spots that it looks very much like a CSV and allows you to open it just as if the file extension was correct in the first place. However, this cleverness is tempered somewhat by the fact that the default setting for this is to ask the user every single time what they want to do.

As always, this is probably intended to be a helpful warning and prevent people opening files which might have insecure content, but it fails to do so because most users do not understand the implications and the longwinded message is probably not even read properly anyway. Certainly the 50th time someone sees a dialog like the one below, they just click “yes” without reading and it no longer provides any benefit whatsoever (by the way, I have done nothing to this, it displays in this ridiculously wide, un-resizable window on my machine).

Whenever I have managed people in IT support roles I try to eliminate fixes which involve things like “ignore that error message, just hit OK and it will work fine”. This not only numbs people to the meaning of that particular error message but to these sorts of warnings in general. Too often I have heard users explain why they did not report a problem until it was too late, saying “well, I got an error every day saying something about faulty disk or something but I just clicked OK, like John said we should with that other one…”. Find the root cause, eliminate the error, or suppress the error somehow, don’t teach people that errors don’t matter or they just ignore them. If you went to your doctor and said “it hurts my neck when I lift my arm up” you would not be impressed if she replied “then don’t lift your arms up!”, would you?

Stop Excel asking unhelpful questions when you export records from CRM

Luckily there is a really easy way to control this behaviour across your whole network using Group Policy. You will need to download the appropriate admin files for Office 2007 or Office 2010 and add them to your Group Policy in the usual way* (either to a new policy or an existing one you might already have for applying other Office policy settings). Go to:

User configuration\Administrative templates\Microsoft Excel 2007 (or 2010)\Excel options\Security

Look for the policy setting for “Force file extension to match file type”, enable it and choose one of the three options:

• Allow different (this is the one you need to stop the warning when exporting from CRM)
• Allow different, but warn (this is the default behaviour)
• Always match file type (this stops the warning but prevents mismatched files from being opened)

This is the full explanation text which you can see in that policy setting, or in the spreadsheet of available Group Policy settings for Office:

This policy setting controls how Excel 2007 loads file types that do not match their extension. Excel 2007 can load files with extensions that do not match the files’ type. For example, if a comma-separated values (CSV) file named example.csv is renamed example.xls, Excel can properly load it as a CSV file.

If you enable this policy setting, you can choose from three options for working with files that have non-matching extensions:

• Allow different – Excel 2007 opens the files properly without warning users that the files have non-matching extensions. If users subsequently edit and save the files, Excel preserves both the true, underlying file format and the incorrect file extension.
• Allow different, but warn – Excel opens the files properly, but warns users about the file type mismatch. This option is the default configuration in Excel.
• Always match file type – Excel does not open any files that have non-matching extensions.

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, if users attempt to open files with the wrong extension, Excel opens the file and displays a warning that the file type is not what Excel expected.

*Adding group policy ADM files to GPMC

Just in case you don’t know how to do this, here’s the quick version:

Download and unzip the ADM files you need to use, and remember where they are. Open Group Policy management Console (GPMC), find the policy you want to change, right click > Edit.

Navigate to Computer or User Configuration as necessary, then right click “Administrative templates” and choose “Add/remove templates”. Click the Add button and navigate to where you saved them. Select the policy template you need (Excel12.adm or Excel14.adm in this case) and click Open – you can use Ctrl-click to select multiple template files before clicking Open, or just double click a file if you only need one. Click Close.

Double click Administrative Templates to expand that branch, and look for your new template as a “folder” – Microsoft Excel 2007 or 2010 as appropriate.

Finally Microsoft have released a client installation package with a recent rollup already included in the package (“slipstreamed”). Unfortunately, nearly 4 weeks after the release of update rollup 11 it is only rollup 10 that is included. While this is a move forward from the rollup 7 client that was available, it still means that most people are going to need to install the client and then immediately apply a patch to UR11, so it is probably of limited help really. Thanks but no thanks.

Get the new CRM 4.0 client for Outlook with Update Rollup 10 if you are using the on-premise or partner-hosted (“service provider”) versions of CRM. If you are using CRM online you are stuck with installing the original version of the special online client and patching it yourself. Note: CRM on-demand from Microsoft is only available in the US and Canada despite the announcement back in April about worldwide release, because it seems that will only be for the next release, version 5 available later this year.

Hat tip to The CRM Business for the original heads-up on this one.

When you right click something in your chart you see the usual right click menu as with Excel 2007 but now you also get the floating mini-bar above it as shown below (click for larger version)

On the right hand end of this you can see the selected element (Series 3 in this case) which you can then directly format, but even more usefully, you can use the drop down here to select another element, format that, then another and so on, and the mini-bar stays on top throughout.

Now of course you can achieve the same thing by selecting elements on the Chart Tools|Layout or Chart Tools|Format ribbons, but for some items like labels and axes you want to change font properties and that means going from one Ribbon to another. If you want to rapidly change the colours or borders of various things, make the gridlines and plot area less obvious, alter the fonts of data labels or axes and other quick changes, you can do all of this without ever leaving this mini-bar area

In the screenshot below you can see I have made all sorts of changes, including making the borders of the hidden series visible, so you can see that this waterfall chart is basically a stacked bar chart with no gaps between series, and did this without going up to the Ribbon once. (I am not suggesting the formatting of the final version is better, in fact the opposite is probably true, I simply wanted to make several changes to demonstrate the new feature).

While this is not quite as instantly available to use as the tear-off colour palettes used to be in Excel 2003 and earlier, it does go a long way to replacing that functionality, and has the slight benefit of remembering the last choice made for most items so you can easily apply the same colour to axes and gridlines, for example, or the same fill colour to two related series (font options show the current value for the selected element, rather than the previous choice, and this makes good sense to me intuitively).

One minor niggle with this mini-bar is that you can’t move it, so it can obscure the things you are changing, so you should right click in the chart area near the top edge to avoid it getting it the way.

Helpfully, formats which don’t make sense get greyed out, so you can’t use fill colour for lines, which reminds you that the formatting option for “outline” applies to any element which consists only of lines, such as the axis, gridlines and so on.

Have you used this new feature already? Have you discovered other small but valuable features of Office 2010 (or earlier versions)? What are your favourite time-saving tips?

I chose to continue using the “Add exception” button to get to the screen where I could see the certificate details. Nothing wrong with the certificate issue, path and so on, except that it expired a few hours ago at 18:26 GMT:

This certificate is not actually for live.com that runs the logon part of the process, but profile.microsoft.com which looks after the other parts of the page which wrap round this. So, not vital but likely to cause much confusion and FUD until they get a new certificate to fix the problem.

Do you know when your certificates expire? And all your different domain names? What about other vital contracts which would stop you doing business if they expired suddenly? How do you manage all of these; is it a central business policy or does it just come down to one overworked IT Manager’s Outlook calendar?

Businesses have been able to get their hands on Office 2010 through various licensing options such as Software Assurance for just over a month now, and system administrators may have begun testing, rolling out and managing their new Office 2010 estate. Now the rest of the world can catch up as Office 2010 becomes available through all sorts of channels to purchase as boxed products through high street stores and online retailers, as well as options to download if you really can’t wait for the postman.

Eric Ligman has a great page about Office 2010 with lots of links to more information, documents, videos and the Office team blog. Really useful stuff all put together in one place for you to help you find out about the new features in Office 2010, decide if you should upgrade, and choose the right version for your needs.

Stephen Elop, president, Microsoft Business Division said:

Working with major retail partners and PC makers, we’ve made dramatic changes in the way we deliver Office 2010 to give consumers more buying choice, making it easier than ever to unlock the power of Office on new and existing PCs. For the first time, people can purchase a Product Key Card at retail to activate Office 2010 preloaded on new PCs. For those who want to download Office 2010 direct from Office.com for an existing PC, the new Click-to-Run technology will have them up and running in a matter of minutes.

Buy Office 2010 Professional on Amazon.com

In December, the European Commission and Microsoft arrived at a resolution of a number of long-standing competition law issues. Microsoft made a legally binding commitment that PC manufacturers and users will continue to be able to install any browser on Windows, to make any browser the default browser, and to turn access to Internet Explorer on or off. In addition, Microsoft agreed to use Windows Update to provide a browser choice screen to Windows users in Europe who are running Internet Explorer as their default browser.

So, when I install shiny new Windows 7 machines for my clients with a perfectly serviceable browser (IE8) with some great security features such as protected mode, I make sure the Windows Update has brought everything up to date and BAM! An icon appears on their desktop and prompts them to choose what browser they want.

So I choose IE, delete the icon and everyone is happy.

This is a complete waste of everyone’s time and money. The users who want an alternative still go and download the browser of their choice. Most don’t bother. Making a bad choice from the popup screen and deciding a while later you want to switch, or revert to IE is just a waste of people’s time, and in business this time will cost money. Across Europe this hidden cost will be huge.

The choice screen is currently only being pushed to users in UK, Belgium and France, but later will cover the whole of the European Economic Area. Just like the pointless “Windows N” without media player, this panders to niche software vendors without delivering any real value to anyone that cares. Pushing this out via Windows Update will only serve to confuse huge numbers of consumers. Many consumers are perfectly happy with the browser, media player, calculator and notepad that come with their computer. A few are not, and may go out and freely choose to install any software they wish, and pretty easily make it their default. Should we take away the simplicity of buying a PC, turning it on and using it? Why not strip out all of these free applications and make people go and download only the ones they choose? Once upon a time it was seen as a great idea that Microsoft (and Apple, and anyone else) gave away free software with their OS so you could just get up and running; this is now seen as anti-competitive.

There is lots of media buzz around Firefox, Chrome and other alternatives. Anyone that cares has probably read about these and can easily find out more and make their own choice. Presenting them with a screen in this way makes it feel like they have to make a choice, and then gives them options which are virtually impossible to distinguish – the fastest, shiniest, safest, most standards-compliant, most popular browser. How is any of this helping them to make an informed decision?

Next time you buy a box of cornflakes should it have a money-off voucher on the side which gives you a discount from any brand of breakfast cereal? Should it have helpful descriptions so you can choose an alternative to your normal shopping option? How would they differentiate themselves? The tastiest? Crispiest? Sugariest? Healthiest?

Is Internet Explorer really all that bad anyway?

Yes, I know some users will never hear about, or understand, or care enough to change their browser to an alternative. So what? IE8 is really a pretty good browser. I’ve been a Firefox user for years, and still use it as my main browser on a regular basis, mainly for some of the add-ons like NoScript and AdBlock Plus, but I do find myself using IE more often for sites that don’t load properly. In fact, the main thing which keeps me from using IE8 as my default browser is probably that I use IE for my Dynamics CRM work, and it is much easier for me to mentally separate by application than merely by tabs or sessions. The jump list for IE on Windows 7 makes more sense than for FF (frequent sites rather than local pages) and the ability to jump straight to a tab or open window from a list would be useful if I didn’t tend to have several dozen open tabs at any given time. I do find that Firefox seems to recover better than IE from crashes (of the app or of Windows) and get my tabs back more reliably (my laptop sometimes locks up when undocking and has to be forcibly powered off and cold started, and FF usually picks up where it left off).

I understand that publicly funded institutions like the BBC should not be in the business of advertising, and need to have disclaimers like “other listings magazines are available” (just in case you did not know there are alternatives to the Radio Times because you have lived in a cave and never visited a newsagent or supermarket in the last 25 years). I just don’t get why this should apply to a company whose prime objective is (and should be) to increase shareholder value. It’s that simple – their shareholders want to earn money, not make the world a fluffier warmer cuddlier place.

I tried Opera a year or so ago and at the time it was no better than Firefox (and worse in some ways), so inertia won out and I stuck with what I had been using for a few years. I would need a compelling reason to change, and I have not seen one yet from Opera. IE8 is beginning to convince me that Microsoft has the best alternative for me. Firefox went from nothing to holding a significant market share. Google Chrome is following nicely, albeit with a much bigger marketing budget and established brand.

Arguments may be made about which browser is the most secure – for me probably the biggest reason choose one over another right now since drive-by malware infections seem to be getting more frequent and worse to remove. There is certainly a discussion to be had about whether the same ruling should be made about Apple’s software bundling – I don’t care if they ship Safari and IE, should they not also be forced to provide the same breadth of choice as MS? What about their productivity applications? Should you get the choice to install OpenOffice (or some other third party option)? I have nothing against Apple, but they do seem remarkably immune to these sorts of legal challenges (because of their market share) when they are actually a much more closed shop bundling hardware and software together.

I wish the European Commission had better things to do with their time and my taxes than this kind of nonsense. I wonder if it makes any difference that the company making the noise about it (Opera) is European, and they felt duty bound to stand up to the perceived might of a US software giant.

What about non-MS applications bundled with new PCs?

A much better use of their time would be considering banning PC manufacturers from bundling trialware with PCs, or at least restricting this in a variety of possible ways:

• all trialware must come NOT installed, but give the user the choice to install it as part of their setup. This is NOT the same as giving them a choice not to register and run it.
• trialware must be free for at least the period of warranty of the hardware, usually at least a year
• before installing, the consumer should be told the current cost of continuing their subscription for longer than that trial
• if we can’t force them to not install it in the first place, there must be penalties for having uninstall routines which fail since the hardware is not fit for purpose with a half-uninstalled Norton suite on it which prevents other AV products working properly. Been there, sworn at that. Forcing me to download a separate removal tool is not an option unless you pay for my time in doing this. About £100 penalty should suffice.

I even object to bundling of unnecessary applications, browser toolbars, gadgets and other crapware, and double FAIL points for those which insist on trying to update themselves every day. Some are arguably designed to get the most out of your hardware (such as a utility to selectively switch off WLAN, Bluetooth or 3G connections), while others are just generic fluff. If a system builder installs Google toolbar I am surely less likely to feel a need for Yahoo toolbar. Isn’t this just the same anti-competitive behaviour MS is being accused of? Please at least give me the choice at the time of purchase to avoid all non-essential apps, especially those I could easily install later for free if I choose to. And while we are on the subject, Acrobat reader is NOT an essential app, and in light of recent security vulnerabilities, not far away from installing a backdoor for malware.

What do you think? Is this a big waste of money or an important decision for fair business practices? What browser(s) are you using right now and why?

You must have Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed to apply this update rollup. Update Rollup 7 is a prerequisite for Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Data Migration Manager.

Update Rollup 1, Update Rollup 2, Update Rollup 3, Update Rollup 4, Update Rollup 5, Update Rollup 6, Update Rollup 7, Update Rollup 8, Update Rollup 9 and Update Rollup 10 are not prerequisites for the server section of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Additionally, you must have Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 installed to apply Update Rollup 11. To obtain Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, visit the following Microsoft website: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99342f-5d1a-413d-8319-81da479ab0d7&DisplayLang=en)

Note that for the server component there is no prerequisite, this rollup can be installed on a base installation (plus MUI if you have multiple languages installed). For the Outlook client you need rollup 7 (same goes for the data migration manager), and for new client installations you can just install the Outlook CRM client with rollup 7 already slipstreamed in. I must admit I find it annoying that the client install is not set up with a proper manifest to trigger UAC elevation – you have to remember to do “run as administrator” (if you are not using the deployment management tools, as many small businesses may not bother to do). The fact that programs prompt me rather than having to remember to do this is one of the reasons I like UAC (since I never run my client machine with local admin rights).

Update Rollup 11 highlights.

There’s all sorts of little fixes and updates in this rollup. A couple that I have seen referenced around the support forums and newsgroups causing problems for people which now claim to be fixed in UR11 are:

• Windows Internet Explorer crashes or stops responding when you use the Advanced Find view on a computer that is running Windows 7.
• Reminders for Microsoft Dynamics CRM activities appear in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Microsoft Office Outlook even though the task for the activities is set to Complete in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web client.

I have not seen this behaviour at all:

• Assume that you have a phone call activity that uses a contact or an account as a recipient. After you delete the contact or the account, you cannot open the phone call activity.

Then again I would pretty much never delete an Account or Contact (I would deactivate them instead) except in cases where I have set up a dummy just for some testing or demo purposes. Usually I would advise that almost no-one should have or need the rights to actually delete these kind of records – how bad would it be if someone accidentally (or maliciously) deleted your top ten customer or prospects from your database?

Outlook 2010 gets proper Ribbon group for CRM

For me, this one is the biggie:

• The Microsoft Dynamics CRM buttons are displayed on the Add-ins tab. You expect the buttons to be displayed on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM ribbon or on the Home tab in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 client for Microsoft Office Outlook 2010.

Office 2010 was released last month and Update Rollup 10 cam out at about the same time. Considering the Outlook 2010 beta had been around for so long, and the RC was available within MS and to a very small number of  external third parties as well, and the RTM code should have also been usable before the unwashed public could actually download or buy it, I was pretty disappointed to see that the main CRM toolbar was relegated to the Add-ins Ribbon while working in your main screen such as mail inbox, calendar or contacts. Admittedly, individual record types such as contact, appointments and emails had their own buttons in the Ribbon, but not your main, central screen where you manage your work. So before Update Rollup 11, you would have to go to the Add-ins tab to find CRM actions (as shown below, click for larger version).

This was frustrating, and a step backward from using Outlook 2007 where the toolbar was always available. After installing Update Rollup 11, your main Outlook toolbar looks like this:

So, that Ribbon group which is on the right hand end when you are in your Mail items, and nearer the middle when in Calendar or Contacts, looks like the screenshot below. So you can track items, set regarding, and even start creating new activities or any other record type, straight from the Ribbon.

You should note that because the CRM add-in is now loaded after Outlook starts, so that you can get started sooner rather than waiting, you may get a scary effect where none of the the drop-down buttons have anything in them if you try to use them straight away, so New Activity, New Record and More seem to have no options, as seen below. This can take a minute or so before they are ready, especially the first time it loads after the update (or that’s how it seems to me – it gets populated much faster now, and is available in ten seconds or so)

New help files!

Or not, as it turns out.

Somewhat misleadingly, the rollup description includes the same boilerplate as previous releases about the fact that there is “a separate update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Help” which you are encouraged to download and install. Don’t get too excited though, this is the same “update” which came out in September 2008, between UR6 and UR7. So if you are installing CRM from scratch, or never got round to doing this before it is useful to get the newer version of Help for on-premise CRM but otherwise there’s nothing to see here, move along.

Do you manage to keep up with the rollup updates? Do you trust them and install straight to production, or do you have a test or development environment you put them on first? Have you had problems installing any of them or had to roll back?

(Ideally view it full screen to avoid the jagginess in some of the fonts at the reduced size in the window here)

This also contains some great examples of varied slide layouts and clean lines, it’s worth a look just for some inspiration to brighten up your next presentation.