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Limitations

Paul Woolcock edited this page May 25, 2023 · 9 revisions

Limitations

Moving Outlook Calendar Items

There are various things to be aware of when changing the time of existing calendar items.

Outlook Click-and-Drag Can Suffer Delayed Sync

When changing the time of an existing calendar item by clicking and dragging it, the new time information is often not made immediately available by the Outlook API. This results in a delay in OGCS syncing the change, so if you need the change synced quicker you can try:

  • opening the calendar item, making a change (eg. add and then remove a space in the subject) and then save and close; or
  • restarting Outlook

Generally, changing the time of the item using the first option (instead of clicking and dragging) avoids the problem altogether.

Calendar Items Moving Through Sync Window Bounds

Manually moving an appointment you own

Depending whether an item is moved into or out of the synced date range, it may cause a duplicate to be created in the target calendar, or the original to be deleted.

Outlook Appointments

From v2.8.4, OGCS should be able to detect this situation occuring and automatically advise and alter the sync window date-range accordingly, thus preventing incorrect creations/deletions.

Google Events

Unfortunately, there is no way to detect moved items in Google. A workaround may be to increase the date range OGCS is syncing, thus reducing the likelihood an item is moved out of that synced range.

Past recurring meeting instance rescheduled, then cancelled by organiser

Consider a recurring meeting to which you have been invited, but an instance in the past has been rescheduled to the future. If the rescheduled item is outside of your synced date range but the new date inside, the rescheduled item will be synced. However, if it is subsequently cancelled, due to limitations within Outlook the deletion will not be synced.

The workaround is to increase the past number of days being synced by OGCS, in order that the original date of such cancellations are still within the synced date range.

2-Way Sync

Outlook Appointment Copy & Paste

When two-way sync is configured and an already synced Outlook appointment is copied (either by Ctrl+C&Ctrl+V or Ctrl+Click and drag), OGCS must be running in the background. If OGCS is not running, deletions of the both the original and copied calendar entries will propagate across both Google and Outlook.

To mitigate this, and for users for whom it may not be possible to have OGCS always running in the background, VBA code has also been provided that runs natively inside Outlook.

"Focus Time" Created by Insights/Cortana

OGCS can only see categories in Outlook's "Master Category List". However, the focus time appointments are automatically assigned a category that is not part of this list and is therefore not available with the category list shown within OGCS. This means it is not possible to select focus time appointments in an Include categories OGCS configuration.

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