Recurring Appointment Silliness in Outlook

I was asked to troubleshoot an interesting issue today for a manager of another department… you know, one of those informal “can you come here and look at this really quick” type of things. He had a daily, reoccurring appointment set up for lunch every day.  On one of the days he needed to set up lunch with a couple of people, so he opened that day’s occurrence of the appointment and invited the two attendees. We should note that all attendees were in the same time zone (that’s relevant information if you look the issue up on TechNet).

Today, he was asked to move the lunch forward several days. So, in order to do so, he went to that day and deleted that days’ occurrence of his generic “Lunch” appointment, and then attempted to move the customized one with attendees to that day.

When doing so, he got the following error:

Cannot reschedule an occurrence of the recurring appointment “[appointment name]” if it skips over a later occurrence of the same appointment

There are two things going on here… one is end user perspective, and the other is the reality of how Outlook is viewing that appointment.

To the end user, when he customized that specific occurrence of that reoccurring appointment, that appointment became a standalone event… one that he felt he should be able to move anywhere.

The reality of the situation though is that Outlook still sees that as one reoccurring event, not a standalone appointment. So when he attempted to move it forward several days, Outlook sees that reoccurring event trying to jump ahead of the same event on the day’s in-between.

The solution was simply to educate the user, and he created an independent event for his lunch meeting which could then be freely moved around.