Forum Discussion
Outlook 2016 defaults to an end date on recurring appointments now - need "no end date" fix
Unfortunately, I can see both sides of this argument equally strongly. When a reminder is created with an end date, then I, for one, would also have to remember to manually create a reminder for close to when that end date is, just to re-extend that end date when the time comes, for each recurring appointment.....what chaotic situation that sounds like! Perhaps, when that setting was (silently) changed from "no end date," Microsoft also should have progromatically and automatically created such individual reminders of recurring appointments' end dates nearing.....that would have solved this problem, and could still! True, it would be easier for us that need to, to try to remember to change the end date to none when creating a new recurring appointment, but even that is easier said than done (after decades of habit forming, creating recurring appointments in Outlook).
Is there no way to change the default back to "no end date?" I just had another scary thought: is it possible that the removal of "no end date" on June 25th applied retroactively to pre-existing recurring appointments?? How can I see what the end dates of recurring appointments currently are? I ask that last question because, even if end dates were *not* retroactively modified, there may have been some recurring appointments I created *since* I was (just now) aware of this (June 25th) change....if so, I would need to go and adjust those back to "no end date," of course.
Lastly, for others in this thread who were asking if the "short default end date" could be modified, it looks like this article has the instructions to do that: https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/calendar/encourage-users-to-set-end-date-on-recurring-appointments/
Unfortunately, that article won't help me, and my horribly bad (ADHD level/type bad) memory (as well as others like me). I had been relying on Outlook for decades for this purpose, and this change has definitely "pulled the rug out from me." At the same time, if no end date recurring appointments truly clog Exchange servers with multiple, infinite appointments, I understand how that is not a good thing either, but I then wonder how those Exchange servers survived for the past few decades, with the default for recurring appointments being set to "no end date?"
- Yes, server performance is absolutely not a reasonable explanation for making a change that is almost guaranteed to result in major inconveniences for many users--especially the most loyal ones. I personally have been using Outlook for over 2 decades now, and it has NEVER been this way. The whole point of the Outlook recurring events/appointments is to eliminate the need to juggle multiple future appointments/commitments in your head--it's supposed to be "set it and forget it". Having calendar events all of a sudden disappear from your calendar when you don't intend them to is completely counter to that premise. Even if this WERE a performance concern (which several people have mentioned, it's NOT), then the performance problem would be the appropriate thing to fix--not the functionality. The idea that it makes sense to hamper or remove critical, decades-old functionality users have come to depend on to improve performance is one I have a hard time understanding, at any level.
MaximillianC I'd love to see a class action lawsuit on this one. I promise you, someone, somewhere lost their job (or worse) because of this change. They, like many of us, had no idea this change was implemented. They set a critically important calendar event, made it recur, and without realizing this new configuration, they stopped doing the critically important detail they were supposed to perform. It's been 8 years now and I STILL forget to set this to 'No end date' on some of my reminders.
Microsoft's biggest problem is they let their engineers have the final say. A really intelligent engineer figured out how to save the company a few dollars in storage cost and they never considered the life-altering ramifications to their user-base. MS has never been customer-first...and this is just one of thousands (millions?) of examples.
