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One feature we like in Outlook 2007 is the, long overdue, support for appointments from different time zones but, as usual, when you dig deeper the improvement doesn’t go far enough.
In the past these appointments were difficult to enter – Outlook has a primitive dual time zone display which is rightly ignored by most people as cumbersome and unhelpful. There was no good reason for this because the underlying structure for saving appointments has always been able to store time zone details – for some reason Microsoft has chosen to obscure that powerful ability from their customers.
At long last you can enter an appointment according to a time zone different from the one that the computer is currently set for. For example, if you’re in Seattle, you can add an appointment for 3pm local New York time – great for phone appointments.
To do this create a new appointment in Outlook 2007 – on the Appointment ribbon there is a button ‘Time Zones’ which will make new drop-down lists appear next to both the Start time and End time lines.
click on image to see a full size version
Once that button is clicked, recurring appointments can also be created with time zone settings.
You can have the start and end times in different time zones – perfect for flight schedules. A flight that leaves JFK at 9am and arrives in LAX at noon can appear in the appointment exactly that way. The duration of the flight (6 hours) shows up correctly in your calendar.
Outlook 2007 will even easily deal with those strange appointments where the end time is before the start time (but in different time zones). For example a flight going east across the International Date Line can leave at 10:50am and arrive in the US at 7:10am the same day! That did confuse older Outlook’s and users no end (the usual solution was to enter the departure and arrival as separate appointments of zero duration). Now just enter the flight with the correct date, time and time zone.
Article posted: Thursday, 05 October 2006
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