This step by step tutorial shows how to safely delete duplicate appointments and meetings in Outlook calendars and be able to restore deleted entries. Related utilities: Find Duplicate Calendar Entries, Remove Duplicate Messages, Remove Duplicate Contacts, Remove Duplicate Tasks, Remove Duplicate Notes, Remove Duplicate Journal Entries. How to delete ‘duplicate’ holidays in Outlook. When you add holidays to Outlook, sometimes you can end up with duplicate entries because Outlook isn’t smart enough to detect simple duplications in the calendar. Here’s an example of triplication of holiday items in the Outlook Calendar. It’s easy to do given Outlook’s poor holidays support.
I found that the latest holidays are missing from my calendar. I checked for updates but none are there and manually trying to install the latest holiday updates gives an error that the update is already installed or does not apply to my system.
How can I get the latest holidays to show up?
After applying updates that contain new holiday information, the newly included holidays are not directly added to your Calendar. You’ll have to reselect the option to include the holidays for a specific country in your Calendar.
To prevent duplicates, it is recommended that you delete the currently imported holidays from your Calendar before importing the holidays again.
The easiest way to remove previously imported holidays from your Calendar is via the “By Category” view;
Now you can easily select all the items that have the Holiday category (by clicking on the Holiday group header) and delete them all at once. If you use SHIFT+Delete to delete them, you’ll skip the Delete Items folder and permanently delete them.
Deleting all Holidays at once is easy via a By Category sorted view.
To import the new holidays you can reselect the option for the holidays of your country in the Add Holidays… dialog;
Below you’ll find a list of the latest holiday updates supplied by Microsoft.
Includes holidays to 2028
Note: The standalone hol-file can be used with all Outlook versions and not just Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 as the download page might suggest. See below for more information on how to import the holidays included in the hol-file.
Outlook holiday files have the .hol
extension. If you have an updated hol-file that you wish to use with Outlook, then you can simply double click it to to launch the “Add Holidays to Calendar” dialog. You can use this method for instance to import holiday updates or custom holidays or vacation lists provided by your company.
When you create a hol-file of your own, make sure you save it in the Unicode format (use the Save As… option when using Notepad).
When you have an updated holidays file (.hol),
you can double click on it to directly open it with
Outlook and select which holidays to import.
If you want it to replace the holidays list of Outlook, then you can overwrite the outlook.hol
file that is located in the language ID folder of the Office installation directory.
Examples of locations:
C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice121033
C:Program FilesMicrosoft Office (x86)Office141033
C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice141043
C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice151033
C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice161033
Note: To lookup the language ID folder for your language you can use this table. You need to look in the “LCID” column for the correct number.
Note 2: Overwriting the outlook.hol file is not a supported method for Office 365 and Click-to-Run installations of Office.