Time Zone changes screwing up my appointments

[csterns]

I am flying back and forth between Florida and California and my appointments in Outlook are getting screwed up. Any ideas how to handle the time zone changes to keep my East Coast and West Coast appointments straight?

[Sven Johannsen]

The first thing that needs to happen is that you need to understand what is happening. Then you can make a choice of how to work around it.

When you make an appointment in Outlook, PC or PPC, it looks at the time of the appointment, and the Time Zone you have set and makes a DB entry adjusted for universal time. When you then change the time zone, it displays the appointment adjusted, based on your new time zone. You have already seen this happen. If on the East coast you enter 10AM, and then change the TZ to West coast the appointment will move to 7AM, the time it would be on the West coast if it was 10 on the East.

This makes sense if you are setting up a conference call. You can send the 10AM appointmet to your west coast buddy, and when he puts it on his calendar it will be entered at 7AM. It also makes sense if you have a weekly meeting at 10AM in NY. If you go to San Francisco the alarm will sound at 7AM and you can dial in.

So that's what it does and it has been doing this since Outlook 98, and there is no evidence that it will ever change. MS believes this is usefull.

So what do you do about it. One approach is that you ignore time zones except your own. When you travel, you just open the clock setting screen and change the time, not the zone, just like you would on your watch. None of the appointments change.

The other option is to enter the away from home appointments at the offset time. That is the 10AM appointment you have in San Francisco, is entered at 1PM if you are sitting in New York. There are actually some little utilities that make this easy, such as CityTime. When you make a new appointment, the tap and hold menu offers you the option for a city appointment where you not only select the time, but also the City in which the appointment takes place, and the entry is adjusted. Then when you change the Time Zone all the appointments move. The ones enterd for the current time zone should be right.

I use the first method as it is disconcerting to me to see that 1PM appointment on my calendar in NY all week when it is really at 10AM. I might even mistakenly make plans to get to SF by 12 noon to make that "1PM" appointment, in which case I'll be two hours late when I change the time zone.

[csterns]

Ahhh, thank you Master, Grasshopper is greatful!