I'm trying to help a friend who has just installed Office 2016 on her computer, which was recently upgraded from Win7 to Win10.
She's been using Outlook.com and has accumulated a fair amount of email, contacts and calendar appointments. I've managed to get her email to show up by adding it to Outlook 2016 as a POP3 account. I was able to import her contacts into Outlook 2016 from a file called OutlookContacts.csv. Now I'm trying to get her calendar with all its many calendars and appointments into Outlook 2016.
I'm not sure why but the appointments all show up just fine in Mail and Calendar for Windows 10, even though we did nothing to put them there (as far as we know). But she'd like them to appear when she clicks on the Calendar in Outlook 2016 and I can't find any information on how to do that. I've also looked for some kind of Export function in the Mail and Calendar for Windows 10 app but I came up empty.
How do I get her calendar into Outlook 2016?
I can't be the only one who finds Microsoft *awful* at documenting this kind of basic functionality. Millions of people must have tried to do the same thing before me but if there's any information out there on how to do this, it has eluded me so far....
You can manually export calendars from Outlook.com using a round-a-bout method I posted at this link. However, I don't think that's going to help you because what you really want to do is set up Outlook 2016 so that her email, calendar and contacts sync with (and stay in sync with) her Outlook.com account.
Therefore, instead of setting email up as a POP account and then importing calendar, contacts, etc. separately, why not just setup Outlook 2016 to work with her Outlook.com account? I haven't done it with Outlook 2016, only older Outlook versions that used Hotmail Connector, however the following instructions for Outlook 2016 seem fairly straight forward.
If she has two-factor authentication switched on for her Outlook.com account, then you may need to generate an app password from her Outlook.com account, and use that as the password instead of the actual Microsoft Account password.
Thanks for the suggestion, ARC1020, but I'm not sure of the best approach in her case. Her email address is not hotmail.com, outlook.com or one of the Microsoft-owned domains. She's been using outlook.com to access her Sympatico email address; it ends with sympatico.ca. We're in Canada and this is one of the main domains of Bell Canada. I probably should have mentioned that in my original post just in case it was a factor in formulating an answer.
The best way would probably be to use her Outlook.com account as the primary account and then add the sympatico.ca email address as a 'send and receive' email accounton that Outlook.com account. Essentially, outlook.com becomes the main client and Outlook 2016 then syncs with it. This way she will be able to sync her email, calendar, contacts, etc. between multiple devices IE: Phones, laptops, desktops, etc. and also if she buys a new computer in the future it will be a case of just entering the outlook.com account details and everything will automatically sync to it.
The problem however is I am not sure whether this will work properly for you yet. With the Windows 10 Mail app, Microsoft changed it so that you could no longer just choose the 'From' email address (alias) when sending an email and/or also change which 'From' address to make the default one. If this is also the case with Outlook 2016, then I would imagine this will create a problem because presumably she will want to send email from her sympatico.ca email address, not just her outlook.com email address.
However, just over a week ago Microsoft said thatthe new Outlook.com infrastructure has come out of preview and is now being rolled out in the North American region. I don't know whether this is the case yet, but if her account is on the new infrastructure then they also said "Outlook on Windows now supports Outlook.com email aliases, while Outlook for Mac can now sync calendar and contact information". I obviously haven't used the new infrastructure therefore can only take a guess, but it sounds like you should be able to choose which from email address (alias) to use to send email and if this is the case should be able to set her sympatico.ca as the default 'From' address.
As mentioned, I have not tried this first hand yet, so hopefully someone else will come along who has actually tried it and can therefore advise you better.
I have to admit I'm pretty confused here between outlook.com and the Outlook 2016 (or earlier) programs.
I believe my friend has only one main email account, the sympatico.ca one. (She has a single Hotmail account which she uses for correspondence with the local organization where she volunteers because Sympatico won't let some of that organization's mail through for no reason she has ever been able to determine but 99% of her email volume is on the Sympatico account. She was accessing that email through Outlook.com because, until the other day, she did not have any version of the Outlook program from the Office suite.
I really don't get the "big picture" here. Is Microsoft's vision that contacts, calendars and email be done OUTSIDE of the Outlook application and that the Outlook application on each computer and device sync with that outside location, whatever it is? I can see it would make sense to store all the data on the Cloud - in other words OneDrive - so that all your devices can access the data. Is that what they have in mind here? I can certainly see some benefit in making it easy to access your contacts, email and calendars on your desktops, laptops, tablets and phones whether you're home or away.
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So where does this leave my friend? What should she be doing in Outlook 2016 so that she can see and update her calendar while still leaving it possible to see and update her calendar from other devices like tablets and phones?