Outlook.com Calendar birthdays sync issue

Hi 7simonchapman,

Welcome to Microsoft Community!

We would like to apologize for not replying in a timely manner. I understand that you are having difficulty in using your Outlook.com Calendar in syncing with your account, let me help you

Please be informed that you need to access your Outlook.com Calendar options by clicking on the gear icon and choose "options" , then choose your "Birthday  calendar". Look for the word "Refresh now" and kindly click it. Once you have clicked that option it will sync all of your contacts from your People page.

I hope this will help with your concern and let us know the result.

Thank you,

I tried refresh - nothing changed.  Some birthdays are showing some nit - a month ago as far as I know they were all showing and have been for years - I have 4 birthdays on Nov 3rd two are showing???

I periodically receive in my e-mail, notifications regarding problems reported to the thread “Birthday Sync Issue”.  I rarely add a reply, because it would only be a regurgitation of previous replies.  However, since “Mary with a Problem” sent a reply on October 26, 2015 to 7SimonChapman’s post of May 2014, I thought I would take a moment to chip in my two-cents worth.  So here it is in a nutshell.

1.  Many posters (too numerous to count) have been reporting problems with missing birthdays and few if any have resolved their issues.
2. My problem first surfaced in early January 2015 and not being familiar with the Microsoft forums, I started a new thread about the problem titled ‘Birthdays Disappearing from Outlook.com Calendar.  That thread contains lengthy posts describing my problems with disappearing birthdays.
3. On Jan 11, I started another post titled “Birthday Calendar Incidents” (later identified as discussion thread by Microsoft) wherein I tried to present the ‘results’ of various manipulations to my calendar in a more concise way over time.  It may make interesting reading if you are so inclined.
4. After several days had elapsed along with several hours of testing, my calendar miraculously on Jan 22, 2015 started showing ALL 53 that were in my People Hub Records.  Maybe the “little calendar man” finally gave up trying to thwart me, and decided to relent and display all my birthdays.  It certainly was not due to any assistance from Microsoft.
5. By this time I had also created a separate excel worksheet of my birthday reminders and had reconciled myself to use this sheet and avoid relying on the calendar.  I had also created a separate calendar in another outlook.com e-mail account where only People with Birthdays were listed in the People Hub for that account.  That calendar remained stable from the day I created it because I never altered a people hub record in it.
6. At the same time I updated the address book information in a commercial calendar site I use to coincide with all the correct birthday information.  That site gives me a 7 day advance notification of an upcoming birthday to my e-mail account and in the past it was quite reliable.
7. On January 30, I started another thread (which also became a discussion thread) titled Birthday Calendar Solution.  To date, no one has provided any responses to that discussion thread.
8. In late January I also noted a problem now occurring with notifications from my commercial card site.  I notified that site and while it did take them a few weeks to fix the problem, finally by April everything was back to normal and my notifications have been coming in normally from that commercial site once their techs addressed the problem.
9. When the notification came about a reply on Oct 26, 2015 by Mary with Problem in response to questions raised by 7simonchapman back in May 2014, I decided to check on both of my birthday calendars in outlook.  My regular calendar still shows all 53 birthdays that had reappeared by Jan 22, 2015 and my test calendar (where only people with birthdays are in the People Hub of that account) also shows the identical 53 birthdays.  So for the last 9 months my birthday info has remained stable and PRESENT in the calendar.  I don’t get notifications from the calendar about birthdays, but simply check it manually on a monthly basis when I send out cards.  My commercial site provides all the notifications. 
10. As I said previously, I do not have a cell phone, so I don’t need to sync the calendar with that device, nor I have I ever belonged to any social media site.  My problems with the calendar were occurring with the calendar alone independent of cellphone or social media site.  As I said the “little calendar man” seems to have tired of my attempts to elucidate the problem and finally relented and allowed all birthday info to be displayed.  I previously tried all the steps re-iterated by “Mary with Problem” to absolutely no avail.  So my conclusion is that the bug remains somewhere deep in the calendar code and no Microsoft tech or department has, thus far, been able to correct the deficiency and that’s why these problems continue to be reported.   That’s my two cents (more likely a dollar’s worth by now) for what its worth.

Bruce Z.

This is really getting annoying :-(( 

When are you ging to get this fixed?

We are having this issue also. We use Outlook on the web as a standalone product due to the security aspects with Outlook 2013. As a business, employees will want to add a birthday to their calendars for their personal reference, but do not want that person as a contact.  How do we do this? There was no article in either the forum or online that addresses this.

Thank you for your assistance,

Doreen Tuell

We are having this issue also. We use Outlook on the web as a standalone product due to the security aspects with Outlook 2013. As a business, employees will want to add a birthday to their calendars for their personal reference, but do not want that person as a contact.  How do we do this? There was no article in either the forum or online that addresses this.

Thank you for your assistance,

Doreen Tuell

Hi Doreen,

I don't know if this will work in the long term but here is what I did to test it out.

Open Calendar

Click on the down arrow for New in the Ribbon

Click on Birthday

Enter the First Name and Last Name of the Person and The Birrthday Info

Click on Save.  (The birthday will now appear in your birthday calendar)

Open the People Hub

Enter surname of the 'new birthday person'

Select the record that is the new birthday person, by clicking on the box next to the picture icon

The record will appear on the right side

Click on the Edit tab in the ribbon

The Entire Record will display but there will be no information in it other than the Name and Birthday.

You can Cancel the Edit at this point.

This method of course will increase the number of contacts in your People Hub, but none of them can be e-mailed since no e-mail exists.

After doing this, I called up the record again in the People Hub and this time selected the Delete

option from the Ribbon.  I confirmed the delete when the drop down dialogue displayed.

I went back to the calendar and the Birthday still shows.  I searched the People Hub again and the people record for the new birthday person was gone.  I created a second birthday for a new person, but this time did not delete the people hub record.

The questions is:  Which of these birthdays will remain in the calendar over the next 48 hours?  I will follow up in 2 days to let you know.  Also, given all the problems reported with syncing the calendar, I don't know what affect this methodology will have on that problem

BruceZ

Hi Bruce,

I tested your above directions, but when I deleted the contact, the birthday record was gone from my calendar.  I have devised a work around for this until (and/or if...) Microsoft fixes the issue.  I added the birthday into the calendar, but entered zz First Name and zz Last Name for the contact details and left everything else blank.  Since there will never be a first or last name that begins with zz, this put all of the extraneous contacts created due to the Birthday Calendar entries at the bottom of my Contacts List and mainly out of my view.  Yes, it made my Contacts List a bit longer, but as the entries don't clutter up my list, it doesn't bother me.