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Viewing Recurring appointments in Outlook

Hi Experts

We have a customer who uses recurring appointments heavily for booking their engineers out.

Basically they have their own clients where they regularly send out engineers to.

So for a typical customer, they will book an engineer to visit on every 3 weeks for up to 14 visits.

So setting the appointment recurrence is not a probelm at all. The problem is searching.

If their customer call them and say that when is the 7th appointment because they need to change it, the user has to search for it. The search will unfortunately find only one appointment with recurrence but it will not show the actual dates when that recurring appointment occurs.

So the question is, is there a way to see the occurrances of a recurring appointment?

One can always count manually, but that is hardly the point of using technology !!

It it is possible to view the recurring appointments in a calender view, thats great but a search result with list view would also be fine as you can quickly scroll down to, say the 7th line, for finding out the 7th occurrrance.

Please ask me any questions just in case I have not been clear here.

Alex

David Lee

Hi, alex110109.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for or not. It builds a list of the recurrences of a given appointment and displays them in IE. You can click on an occurrence to open the actual item. The items are numbered to make it easy to find the occurrence you're looking for. It works fine in Outlook 2007. I don't have 2010 loaded yet, so not sure about it.

Follow these instructions to add the code to Outlook.

1. Start Outlook
2. Click Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor
3. If not already expanded, expand Microsoft Office Outlook Objects
4. If not already expanded, expand Modules
5. Select an existing module (e.g. Module1) by double-clicking on it or create a new module by right-clicking Modules and selecting Insert > Module.
6. Copy the code from the Code Snippet box and paste it into the right-hand pane of Outlook's VB Editor window
7. Edit the code as needed. I included comments wherever something needs to or can change
8. Click the diskette icon on the toolbar to save the changes
9. Close the VB Editor

Outlook 2007 doesn't automatically install the URL protocol handler for Outlook items. You have to edit the registry and add an entry. Here's a link to a page with details: http://mutable.net/blog/archive/2006/09/02/how_to_hyperlink_to_microsoft_outlook_messages.aspx. I don't know if 2010 adds the protocol handler or not.

To use the code

1. Run the macro
2. Enter the name of the appointment to find
3. IE will open and display a list of up to 50 recurrences of the appointment
4. Click an occurrence to open the Outlook appointment

Sub ShowRecurring()
    Dim olkCal As Outlook.Items, _
        olkApt As Outlook.AppointmentItem, _
        intCounter As Integer, _
        strSubject As String, _
        strResults As String, _
        objIE As Object
    intCounter = 1
    strSubject = InputBox("Enter the title of the appointment to find.", "Show Recurring")
    Set olkCal = Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderCalendar).Items.Restrict("[Subject] = '" & strSubject & "'")
    olkCal.Sort "Start"
    olkCal.IncludeRecurrences = True
    For Each olkApt In olkCal
        strResults = strResults & "<tr><td align=""right"">" & intCounter & "</td><td><a href=""outlook:" & olkApt.entryID & """>" & olkApt.Start & "</a></td></tr>"
        intCounter = intCounter + 1
        If intCounter > 50 Then Exit For
    Next
    strResults = "<table>" & strResults & "</table>"
    Set objIE = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")
    objIE.Navigate2 "about:blank"
    Do While objIE.readyState <> READYSTATE_COMPLETE
        DoEvents
    Loop
    objIE.Document.Body.innerHTML = strResults
    objIE.Visible = True
    Set olkCal = Nothing
    Set olkApt = Nothing
End Sub