Creating holidays in outlook

Here is a little known way to add a list of holidays to your calendar or the calendar of multiple people.

This is also useful if you need to let people know the dates you will be on vacation by looking at their own calendar.

( sending a meeting request will result in their free/busy information being marked as busy. ( unless of course they manually modify that )

I will demonstrate creating 6 holidays across two months

Create a text file

The structure inside should be of the following format:

[Description] #

Holiday Description, Date

Description	Can be any string to describe the list. ( typically a category )
#	Number of Holiday listed below
Holiday Description	any string of text to describe the date
Date	Date in YYYY/DD/MM format

===================== Example would be below =====================

[January Holidays] 2

New Year's Day, 2009/1/1

Holiday 2, 2009/1/15

[February Holidays] 4

Holiday 5, 2009/2/1

Holiday 6, 2009/2/10

Holiday 7, 2009/2/15

Holiday 8, 2009/2/20

=================================================================

Save the text file with an .HOL extension.

Double click the file and import to see the results.

Warning ! Don’t import the calendar more than once. It will result in duplicate entries in your calendar.

Additional resources