Adding Holidays to Your Outlook Calendar
One of the more popular features for Outlook’s calendar is the capability to add your country or region’s holidays into your calendar. This way, you’ll never miss the next holiday.
Adding holiday items to your calendar is pretty easy:
- From the Tools menu, click Options, then click Calendar Options.
- Click the Add Holidays button under Calendar options.
- Select the check box next to your location, and any other location you might be interested in, and then click OK.
Note for Outlook 2003 users
When we shipped Outlook 2003, we only included holiday information through the end of 2007. Since it’s now 2008, you’re probably wondering how you can get holidays back on your calendar again. An update is now available to fix this issue by downloading and installing a patch for Outlook 2003. More information is available through knowledge base article 924423.
This update will replace the holiday file (Outlook.hol) with the latest holiday information, and you can use the same process from above to add holidays for 2008 and beyond into your calendar.
Watch Out For Duplicates
Each time you import a set of holidays, Outlook will create a new appointment for each item in the holiday file for the locations you select. There is no duplicate checking, so if you have already added holidays once, adding them again will cause two all day events to be added for each holiday.
Outlook 2007 will prompt you if you have already imported a set of holidays, warning that duplicates may be created.
Create Your Own Holidays
You can also customize the Outlook holiday file to include your own holiday information. You might choose to do this if a particular local holiday is not included in the Outlook file and you want to deploy new holiday information to a large group of people (if you just want to do this for yourself, it’s probably easier to just add events directly to your calendar).
You can open the holiday file, usually located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office<Ver>\<LCID>\Outlook.hol, to edit which holidays are added to your calendar when you import holidays. For example, if you are using a US English version of Outlook 2007, you would usually find your holiday file at C:\Program files\Microsoft Office\Office12\1033\Outlook.hol. If you don’t know the LCID of your language, look for a folder under the Office12 folder that only has a numerical name, that’s probably the right one.
Note: You need to be a local administrator on the computer to edit the holiday file.
After you have the file open, you’ll find a listing of holidays for several different locations. Each location’s holidays start with a header, that includes the location name inside square brackets, and the number of holidays listed for that location. For example, for the United States you might see a header like this:
[United States] 168
If you add additional holidays to the file, make sure to increment the number or some holidays will be missed.
Each line inside a section represents a specific instance of a holiday. For example, the section for holidays in the United States contains a line like this:
Groundhog Day,2008/2/2
This line includes the holiday name (Groundhog Day), then a comma, and then the date the holiday occurs in the format year/month/day. To add your own holidays to the calendar, just add new lines to the bottom of the file in the same format, save the file, and then import your location’s holidays.
If you decide to edit the holiday file to add your own holidays, consider adding them as a brand new location instead of adding them to an existing location. This way you can choose to import only the new holidays without creating duplicates of the existing holidays you have previously added. For example, if you wanted to create a listing of all your associates birthdays, you could add a listing like this to the end of the file:
[Birthdays] 3
Ryan's Birthday,2008/1/1
Ryan's Birthday,2009/1/1
Ryan's Birthday,2010/1/1
After you have finished editing the holidays file, remember to keep a back up. Because the file is installed with Outlook, it can be modified or replaced with the original if you install an update or upgrade to a newer version.
For more information about adding or removing holidays, see Office Online. There is also more information over on Outlook-Tips.net, a site run by one of our Outlook MVPs.
Enjoy,
Ryan Gregg
Outlook Program Manager
