One serious problem with Outlook right now is that it's quite dumb in showing calendar previews in the Mail tab. Rather than aggregating all events from all calendars and displaying them there, it only shows events from the primary calendar.

For instance, I probably have close to 40 events on my collective calendars within the next 7 days, but this is what I see in Outlook:

Wow, what a liar, Microsoft!

If there were a way to change my primary calendar to the one that is at least used the most, I would consider doing that. But that is impossible. You cannot change the primary calendar.

Suggestions like this have not been useful because all my calendars are associated with one email account (which in this case is a Microsoft account). Merging them is also not an option. The ability to have multiple calendars exists for a reason.

I don't really want to go the third-party route, as up until now, I have been able to recover from Outlook's limitations rather reasonably, but it seems this is a feature that was removed from Office one or two versions ago (as with many other useful Office features). If I had it my way, I'd probably be using Office 2010, 2007, or 2003, but I have a free license right now so I guess beggars can't be choosers.

Is there any third-party workaround to enable this functionality in Outlook?

3 Answers

You can use the Puresoft Outlook Todo Pane AddIn to display multiple calenders in the todo bar. Link is enter link description here

1

Just as you said, this is by design. You are able to change the default calendar shown in the To-Do-Bar via change default data file if the calendars are belong to different email account.

If all the calendars are belong to the same email account, then I am afraid there is no official recommended tool for this.

1

I do rely a lot on this list. And I would be happy to purchase the puresoft todo pane tool. I consider 15 € a fair price. However the vendor is asking this rather as a yearly fee, which in effect makes it more expensive than outlook itself. Obviously everybody may ask for whatever is deemed appropriate, but I am unwilling to pay this amount.

So here is -- a workaround, rather than a real solution. However it does the job for me. My work calendar is exchange, my personal calendar is on gmail. So I have already an additional calendar sync-tool outlook<->gmail up and running anyhow (caldavsynchronizer). What I have done is:

1. Create a new local PST file (MergeView.pst) und make it default. It does not need to be visible/selected in the calendar view tab.
2. Create a new google calender (called "MergeView")
3. Create a new sync rule to one-way-sync the local copy (i.e. PST folder) of my gmail calender to this special MergeView-Calender in gmail
4. Create a new sync rule to one-way-sync the local copy (i.e. OST folder) of my exchange calender to this special MergeView-Calender in gmail.
5. The MergeView-Calendar in gmail now has both work and personal events. Create yet another one-way-sync rule, pushing events from the gmail-MergeView-Calendar to the newly created (see #1) MergeView.pst-Outlook-Calendar.

This will result in seeing the merged appointment list in outlooks to-do-pane. Depending on sync intervals changes will need a couple of minutes to appear there.

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