Ms Office Tune Up

By default, Outlook doesn’t display holidays in any Calendar view. This is problematic because you often need to know when holidays occur so that you can avoid scheduling appointments on those days and so you can plan other events such as family vacations. Holidays are country-specific, of course, so Outlook arranges holidays by country, with nearly 90 nations represented in all. You’ll certainly want to add the holidays for your own country, but you’re also free to add holidays from other countries, too. This is a good idea if you regularly deal with colleagues or clients in another country or if you’re planning a trip to another country.

Follow these steps to add holidays to the Outlook Calendar:

1. Choose Tools, Options. Outlook opens the Options dialog box.
2. In the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options. Outlook opens the Calendar Options dialog box.
3. Click Add Holidays. Outlook opens the Add Holidays to Calendar dialog box.
4. For each country’s holidays that you want to add to the Calendar, click to activate its check box. (In most Outlook installations, the check box for your country is activated by default.)
5. Click OK. Outlook adds the holidays and returns you to the Calendar Options dialog box.
6. Click OK to return to the Options dialog box.
7. Click OK.

Besides these standard, country-specific holidays, Outlook also enables you to customize the Calendar with nonstandard holidays, events, or dates, such as

• Religious holidays not found in the Outlook database.
• Company-specific dates such as the company picnic, the office Christmas party, year­end, and so on.
• Personal milestones such as family birthdays, your anniversary, vacation dates, and so on.

Most of the time, you can simply add these nonstandard holidays by hand as events in the Calendar. However, if you have lots of holidays to add, Outlook offers a faster solution: Customize the file that Outlook uses to track holidays. This is a simple text file that records the holiday (or whatever) name and the date on which it occurs. Here are the steps to follow:

1. How you begin depends on which version of Windows you use:
   • In Windows XP, choose Start, Run to open Windows’ Run dialog box.
   • In Windows Vista, choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, click Run as Administrator, and then provide your User Account Control credentials. Vista opens a command prompt session.
2. Type the following:

notepad “%Program Files%\Microsoft Office\Office12\1033\outlook.hol”

3. Press Enter. Notepad opens the Outlook.hol file. Figure 1 shows the first few entries in the United States portion of the file.


Figure 1 The Outlook.hol text file holds Outlook’s holiday data.

4. Scroll to the bottom of the list, start a new line, and type the following, where Section is the name of the section you want to add (this is also the name of the check box that displays in the Add Holidays to Calendar dialog box; make this your company name, family name, or whatever), and Number is the number of holidays you’re going to list: [Section] Number
5. For each holiday, start a new line and type the holiday using the following format, where Name is the name of the holiday, and yyyy/m/d is the date of the holiday (see Figure 2): Name,yyyy/m/d


Figure 2 An example of a custom holiday list.


6. Save your work and then close Notepad.
7. Follow the steps from earlier in this section to display the Add Holidays to Calendar dialog box. Click to activate the check box next to your custom holiday list, as shown in Figure 3 and then click OK.

Figure 3 The section name you added to the Outlook.hol file displays in the Add Holidays to Calendar dia­log box.

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