Birthdays Disappearing From Outlook.com Calendar

CONCLUDING POST

The big Question is:  Did the Microsoft engineers do something to solve this problem almost simultaneously while I was doing my own sleuthing, or did I end up correcting things in my outlook account outlook which were interfering with the calendar?

Please note, I do not subscribe to any social networks and my calendar in outlook is not synced with any other device such as a cell phone.  I use a stand-alone lap top.  But here is a summary of what has happened over several days:

1. When I first noted I was missing birthdays, I entered all the missing ones directly on the calendar, despite the fact that their hub records already contained birthday information.  After this manual entry, I verified that my Hub records matched my card site address book.  All looked fine.  This was done in December 2014. A review of the calendar showed that all birthdays were now being displayed.
2. In January 2015, all birthdays for that month (5 of them) had disappeared.  That’s when I contacted my internet service that offers support for e-mail problems etc.  They could not help and told me that the forums were reporting similar problems.  I then reported my problem on the forum starting a new thread.  At that point only 11 of 47 Birthdays appeared on the calendar.
3. After several discussions with Microsoft, I elected not to give them permission to access my account as I did not believe this would help.
4. The next step I took was to remove 6 contacts from a group which contained 10 contacts.  I had created this group at the end of November for a special e-mailing.  Six of the members no longer wanted to part of the e-mail program so I wanted to remove them.  Suddenly, these six names appeared on my birthday calendar. Becoming more concerned about the reliability of the calendar  I also started a project of entering contact and birthday information into another outlook account that I do not use for sending out mail.  This account had no calendars and I thought I would try creating a new one from scratch.  That was not going to happen until mid January.
5. I went back to the original account which had the birthday calendar and I executed a “Clean up Contacts” because I knew duplicate records had been created in the People Hub when I manually entered the birthday information using the New Birthday Option in the Calendar Hub.  Eleven more birthdays appeared.
6. When the calendar was examined a few hours later, more birthdays had appeared, but I knew some of them were still missing.  At this point I had created a separate birthday list in excel using my card site address book.  I updated 3 Hub records with recent birthday information that I had just acquired in January 2015.
7. I decided to compare my excel report with the calendar.  At this point only 10 birthdays were missing.
8. On examining each of these records in the hub, I noted that 6 involved married couples who shared the same e-mail address, 3 were from the new birthdays I had just input into outlook and 2 were from persons whom I had at some time in the past entered the wrong birthday information and subsequently corrected.  With the exception of the 3 new ones, the other 7 all had a number of duplicate outlook notations that were not visible in the Hub listing for contacts.
9. I deleted each of these “bad” records and added the individuals back a second time with all the correct information.  A final comparison of the excel report and the calendar showed that the two were equivalent and all 52 birthdays showed on the calendar.

I don’t know why the records of the 7 people got strangely combined.  I never did this.  I also wonder if once a record is supposedly deleted, it is not actually physically deleted, but is just “flagged as deleted” but still lurks in the background.  Could this ‘unseen’ record influence the calendar performance if a new record containing some info from the deleted one is updated or touched in any way again.  I guess I will leave that to the software engineers.  That’s why I think the theme song for the calendar should be:  Touch me once and touch me twice and touch me once again.. its been a long long time.  Look at your calendars again and see if they are working as expected.  If you want to try manipulating your records the way I did, I strongly suggest that you download the information from your People Hub into an excel sheet so that you will have a hard copy of the records before you go messing about.  Good Luck.  I will keep you posted if my birthday records start to magically disappear again.  So far the calendar has remained stable for about 10 hours.

Now for the last piece of this puzzle.  After dealing with the record clean up described in the last post, I decided that I probably could not rely on the outlook birthday calendar.  I then used the data of my card site address book (which I had previously verified as being equivalent to my People Hub records) to create an excel spreadsheet where I could prepare a simple sortable birthday list.  I could then sort this list by birth month so I would always know how many people I had to send cards to in any particular month. (The main reason why I used the birthday calendar). There were 52 names on this list.  I had added 3 new individuals to my card site address book, but had not updated their People Hub records with this information because of the on-going investigation into the calendar non-performance.  Once I sorted this list by birth month, I went back to the People Hub  to add the birthday information into the 3 hub records that needed to be updated.  My next step was to review the calendar and compare it to my excel report.  Here are the results:

3 records that had just been updated with birthday information were not in the calendar.

7 records which already had birthday information were not on the calendar.

I then decided to examine each of the hub records separately for these 10 discrepant birthdays to see if I could find any type of a pattern.  The three that were newly added looked fine.  I reasoned that maybe the calendar had not synced them yet.  However the other 7 provided some startling information.  There were three married couples in these seven records.  Each couple shared the same e-mail address.  The birthday records for two of the couples were missing from the calendar. However, for the third couple only the wife’s birthday was missing.  In the case of the first two couples, I looked at the husband’s record in the Hub.  Only one record was listed for each husband in the Hub list.  Clicking on the image frame for the record in the hub causes the record and its details to be displayed to the right of the listing.  The image frame is enlarged and right underneath the image is a blue outlook symbol and the word “Outlook”  For some records you might also see the notation “found on skype”.  There might be others for other social networks but I don’t use these so they don’t appear in displays.  In the case of the first two married couples, each husband’s record had not one but 4 notations for outlook.   There were obviously 4 outlook records for this person yet in the Hub Listing only one was visible.  For some strange reason, and not by my doing, the husband and wife’s records got merged together because when the record displayed the birthday information was shown for each partner.  I unfortunately did not think of creating a screen shot when I noted this.  Instead I clicked on “Delete” to get rid of the records.  If I entered the wife’s first name in the Hub Search Box, a single record came up showing the Husband’s and the Wife’s first names together opposite the image frame.  Once I deleted the record for the husband, the wife’s name could no longer be found.  The last married couple was a bit of a puzzle.  There were 4 outlook records under the wife’s name.  The record contained the birthday information for both partners.  Her birthday did not show on the calendar. The husband’s birthday did show.  After I deleted the wife’s record, the husband’s record disappeared as well, but his birthday continued to show in the calendar.  Two of the other records appeared to be corrupt. I do recall that initially I made an error in adding the birthday in both of these records, but I did go back and edit my error when I did the comparison with my card address book. (this was done some time ago even before I had trouble with the calendar). I ended up deleting these records as well.  Next I went back and added new records for all 8 individuals.  6 of them share a common e-mail and the two others were from previously edited birthday records.  Why these records got combined I will never know.  I certainly did not combine them when I was cleaning up my contacts.  I can only assume that something happened at Microsoft to cause this to occur.  After all of this manipulation I again went back to the Clean up Contacts.  The 4 records that I deliberately do not want to combine (the unrelated people without their own e-mail address) and the records for the 3 married couples who share an address are shown.  I combined none of them.

Next, I went back to the calendar and began to compare each month to my excel listing and now miraculously ALL 52 birthdays are displaying in the Calendar.

This will be a long post, but again some marvelous things are happening with the birthday calendar.  In the morning hours of Jan 9th, I began looking at the calendar again.  At this point, I know that I had duplicate contacts that were created when I had gone back in December and entered several birthdays manually by going to the calendar hub and selecting the down arrow in the “new” tab.  That allowed me to click on ‘birthday’ and then enter the person’s name and birthday information manually into the calendar.  Unfortunately, if a record already exists in the People Hub for the person I was manually creating the birthday for, this manual input method created a second record in the People Hub with just the name and the birthday but without any e-mail address information.  I had several of these to clean up.  I went to the People Hub and clicked on the down arrow for the “Manage” Tab.  This allowed me to select the “Clean up Contacts” option.  All the duplicates are displayed and each record has a check mark in a box at the upper left.  You have to be careful here, because the instruction is “Clear the Checkbox for any you don’t want to combine”.  I have 4 contacts who do not have e-mail addresses, so I have given each one of them THE SAME e-mail address.  It is actually one of my own out-look addresses that I reserve for special use.  That way, I could put them in my card site address book and I would get a notification when their birthday came around and I would send them a regular ‘mailed’ card.  To make things simple, I also used this e-mail address in their People Hub records.  When these records come up in the “Clean Up Contacts” I leave their checkboxes alone, so they are never combined.  Besides these 4 that I did not want to touch there **were 10 contact names whose records I did want to combine.**Nine of these individuals had only 2 records each, their original hub record and their new record from manual creation of the birthday in the calendar.  One individual had 3 records.  After I did the clean up process, I went back to the calendar and to my great surprise, all of the cleaned up records were now listed in the birthday calendar. I was stunned! 

There was one other peculiar observation.  When you first access the People Hub, you get information about social networks and skype.  I use none of these, but the Hub would list 4 of my contacts found on skype.  The person with the three records would always appear here, but after the cleanup, she no longer appeared as a person found on skype.  Earlier that evening I had gone to one of my other out-look accounts that I never use for outgoing mail so it has no contacts in it.  I decided to add all the contacts with birthdays because I was going to create a calendar in that account and see what happened.  In that account this person is listed as being found on skype.  I assume that when the records were combined, the skype information was somehow lost for my usual outlook account, the one where I have been having all the trouble with the birthday calendar.  It still is not listed as a skype participant even today.

From this exercise I learned that out-look considers creating a birthday record manually as a new record.  It apparently makes no comparison to an existing record even if the name and the birthday are identical. All the individuals for whom I created manual birthdays on the calendar already had birthday information in their people hub record.  Apparently outlook considers records as possible duplicates only if they have the SAME E-Mail address.  Stay tuned more results to come.

Just wanted to report any interesting event with the birthdays and the calendar.  From my previous posts you will know that consistently since I first noticed the problem in early January, my calendar has shown the same 11 of 47 birthdays it should show.  I had not touched anything in the calendar since reporting on this site in anticipation that I would give microsoft access to my account.  However, after making the decision to deny access, I went back to the calendar to clean up one of my small groups of 10 members.  Six members were to be deleted from the group.  I called up the group in the People Hub, I did not put a check mark next the group name, but simply clicked on the picture icon next to the group.  I then clicked on edit in the coloured bar that runs across the top of the screen.  This allows the group members to be displayed individually on the right of the screen.  I then went through the group clicking on the "X" for the members I wanted to delete.  When I finished I wanted only 4 names in this group.  I was a bit hasty in doing the delete option so I kept deleting  one of the names that should have been one of the final 4 members.  When I finished and only had 3 in the group, I had to hit the cancel button at the bottom of the page instead of the 'Save' button. I actually did the same error twice more and had to hit the cancel button twice more.  Finally, I got it right (I think I was a bit tired it was 2am my time).  Once I hit save, the calendar went a little nutty and began deleting 10, then 20 then 30 contacts.  I hit the stop button not knowing what was happening since only 6 had to be deleted.  The calendar went into some kind of crazy loop "Saying we are going as fast as we can".  It hung up at 30 contacts deleted.  I had to close down my browser and come back into my account a second time.  I thought half of my contacts from my People Hub were going to be gone.  But no, they were all there.  But the group only contained 3 of the 4 that should have been there after I deleted the correct six.  Guess which one was missing?  It was the one I had kept marking for deletion that should not have been deleted and as a result cancelling the operation before it could happen.  I put that person back into the group and then decided just to take a look at the calendar.  Another revelation:  the six contacts whom I had deleted from the group all had birthdays in their People Hub records and magically, they all RE-APPEARED on the calendar.  That made me think of a hit song after WW2 "Its Been a Long Time"--- The first line of which goes: Kiss me once and kiss me twice and kiss me once again...its been a long, long, time"  I think I will make it the theme song for the outloook calendar, only we will change the word kiss to "touch", because every time you touch the calendar something marvelous happens to the birthdays.  Stay tuned, I'll be doing a few more things with my calendar and I will report in.  Don't delete your groups just yet.. I think thats a red herring right now.

I have been having this same problem since forever, no matter what I do the calendar randomly deletes birthdays, which are about the only events I have in the calendar.

I tried sorting the problem on this forum and eventually the support people stopped answering my messages, so I figure even they have no idea how to fix this or what is going on.

As a matter of fact, this put me off completely from what once was my beloved WindowsPhone, no using **** Android which at least works at the very basic level, like remembering darn birthdays.

Although Microsoft has asked permission to access my account, after careful consideration, I have declined that request.  I have spent some hours reviewing many posts regarding the disappearing birthdays and the outlook.com birthday calendar.  From my review, it would seem that the some of the initial reports came through as early as May 2014.  Eight months have passed by and still there is no solution from Microsoft.  There are a lot of notes saying it’s with the software engineers etc etc, but still no resolution. I also see repeated comments from a few users expressing their dissatisfaction with the lack of response or action from Microsoft to correct the problem.  I doubt access to my account would result in any solution.  I am sure other users have allowed Microsoft access to their accounts and in the end I have seen no solution from Microsoft.

Fortunately, I belong to an inexpensive commercial card site which has a great address book for birthday information.  The site sends me an e-mail notification of an upcoming birthday event about a week before the actual day.  The reason I used the outlook calendar as well, was to facilitate sending cards out.  I would sit down and do all the birthday cards for the month at one go and simply set the send dates for the cards as the actual birthday of the person.  Now I will do this when I am notified of the birthday. 

I realize this is not a solution for many users out there, especially if you are using social networks or a cell phone.  I have neither, so the loss of the birthday calendar is only a minor inconvenience to me.

I agree with several other posters that the issue relates to the syncing of the birthday information in the People Hub (contacts list) and the calendar itself.  Also, the 24-48 hour time frame for syncing seems snail slow given today’s technologies. There is neither rhyme nor reason for why some are there and some have faded away.  I have several people in “groups” in my People Hub.  I checked to see if this was an interference, but all the people whose birthdays still show are in one or more of my groups so that’s not it.  The same is true for the missing birthdays.  So far the calendar has remained static.  The same 11 birthdays that showed up after the loss of 36 birthdays noted in January 2015, have remained on the calendar.

As time permits, I will do a little experimenting on my own.  If I discover a way to restore the birthdays so that they no longer disappear I will post that in the forum.

I unfortunately started this new thread because I was unfamiliar with how to use the forums.  I will keep an eye on the relevant threads to see what transpires but I am not holding out any great hope that this issue is of enough significance to Microsoft to get resolved any time soon.  I have posted this information on two of the other threads about this issue so other users can see my comments.