I am but one of thousands of Outlook users who were flabbergasted that Microsoft removed future appointments from the ToDo Bar in Outlook 2013. You can only see what’s happening on the day that is selected.

Not only does the calendar not BOLD the dates with appointments, it doesn’t show me what’s coming up in the next week or so besides the single 9pm appt I have tonight. I have an important appointment tomorrow afternoon but I won’t know until I open up outlook tomorrow. If I had to be somewhere at 8am tomorrow morning, I could completely miss it because I may not see the reminder until tomorrow morning.

This was a show stopper. I have really bad short term memory. I had grown very dependent on the constant reminders every time I looked at my email about what work, vet, hair, user group, dentist etc etc appts I had to be aware of in the next week or so. And the Outlook 2013 solution is either to open up the Calendar or start clicking around on the ToDo calendar. This takes explicit thought  and multi tasking. Not for me. Not at all.

Many simply refused to upgrade from Outlook 2010.

There were no add-ins that solved the problem.

Until now.

A friend who refused to update to 2013 for this reason pointed out this Coding4Fun blog post : Bringing some Outlook 2010 features into 2013 with this add-in… to me this morning. It leads to the VSTO download on codeplex. I realize that I downloaded an earlier version of this in April but never succeeded in installing it and must have just given up and forgotten about it. With today’s reminder, I tried again with the latest version. I had the same install problems today but finally solved them!

Installation Problem …. Solved

I use Chrome by default. I downloaded. Unblocked. Unzipped. but when I attempted to install, got the dreaded “Deployment and application do not have matching security zones” error message. This typically happens when you try to install right from the web without explicitly downloading, unblocking and unzipping. I tried repeatedly. Restarted my computer. Googled again and again. Finally I opened up IE, downloaded, unblocked, unzipped and installed. It worked.

See Future Appointments

I’ve closed the other ToDo bar since I only use the calendar. Otherwise I’d have to devote more of my outlook window since I can’t seem to stack the panes for the ToDo bar and the Appointment window.

I’ve set this to show me the next 7 days and to show me my local calendar, my Windows Live calendar and the internet calendar. You can see that I’ve gotten in the habit of copying my LIVE calendar to my local calendar and vice-versa. I’m not ready to go 100% dependent on the web-based calendar. So now I’m seeing the duplication but better safe than sorry. 🙂 (I’ll get into modern times soon). The tool did not black out those appts tomorrow. I did. They are private. 🙂

It has a feature to alert you when new mail comes in via the windows notification bar. I get a lot of mail so that is definitely a feature I disabled quickly.

Drag and Drop Emails to Create Appointments

Another Outlook 2010 feature that was inconceivably axed from 2013 was the ability to drag and drop emails onto the calendar to create appointments. It is another feature I used all the time and saw almost as many complaints on the web about its disappearance as the future appointments.

That’s back thanks to this add-in.

Go Get It!!

Here is the codeplex download page: https://outlook2013addin.codeplex.com/.

The codeplex project is created by a mystery author: https://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/gamosoft

I am not a fan of developers who have public projects hiding behind an alias. I just want to pat their back and thank them publically and set them on a little pedestal. Maybe gamosoft is hiding because he or she is a Dalek or Cyberman or something? (yes, I’m watching too much doctor who lately)

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