Birthdays Disappearing From Outlook.com Calendar

I have also some Problems with birthday calendar.

At first: I'm using Windows 8.1, WP 8.1 and outlook.com.  The next days are the birthdays of 2 friends of mine (14. January and on 16. January).

I noticed: only one birthday of them is shown in calendar (the Birthday on 17. January is shown in W 8.1, WP 8.1 and outlook.com )

I checked the contacts: in both profiles the birthday is correct.

In next step I deleted the unshown birthday (14. January) in the profile of this friend. I waited 2 days - then I saved the birthday again. Today (one day after) the former unshown birthday is now shown.

But: the birthday of the other friend (16. January) is now missing in "all" Calendars!! What happens?

In both profiles the birthdays are still correct - but shown is now only the last edited birthday.

By the way: Both friends are members of the same group.

How can I trust entrys in outlook.com? Is it only a bug in the birthday calender or are also any similar bugs in other calenders?

...sorry for my bad english....

Please follow the documentation of incidents in my birthday calendar at the new thread listed below.

Information will be summarized and presented in an easier format so you can see what actions I have taken in my outlook account what consequences those actions have on my birthday calendar.  Again, i use no social networks or cell-phone so the calendar incidents should not be affected by any activity related thereto.  The calendar is used only in outlook.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/ocalendar-obirthday/birthday-calendar-incidents/6c0fb774-05cc-455b-91e5-37f66c12c7cb

Well it seems my thoughts that the problem with the calendar had been solved were a bit pre-mature.  I’ve run across yet another observation.  Previously, I reported that I did not think that placing contacts into groups or deleting them from groups was a contributory factor in the operation of the birthday calendar.  I am going to have to re-tract that statement.  Last night after I had to delete some records and re-create them I remembered that these individuals had to be placed in one or more of my groups.  I went back to the each of the records to complete this task after I made what was going to be a Final Post.  Here is what transpired:

Contact AW (husband & Wife) Added Husband only to a Group.  Next morning husband’s birthday is missing from calendar, wife’s birthday still present,

Contact RM (husband & Wife)  Added Husband only to a Group. Next morning husband’s birthday missing from calendar, wife’s birthday still present

Contact AC (single Contact) Removed person from group.  Next morning contact’s birthday missing from calendar.

Contact SR (single contact) Added contact to group.  Next morning contact’s birthday missing from calendar.

In the morning, I further tested this scenario out by removing three contacts who were all members of the same group.  An hour later, birthday information for these three contacts was missing from the calendar. 

Reviewed all contacts in People Hub by calling up each record individually, found two more contacts with  multiple outlook records.  Both of these had two birthdays listed.  One of the birthdays was correct, the other an error.  I suspect that each record at some time in the past had been edited by me after the wrong date was first put in then subsequently corrected.  Records deleted from People Hub for these two contacts.  Have yet to re-create them. I Noted that when records for these two persons were accessed in the People Hub the word “links” appeared in the outlook ribbon at the top of the screen, next to the word favourites.  I did not note this until I looked at the screen shot for the record.  I did go back and check the People Hub for other records with the word “links” displayed.  This appeared where two persons shared the same e-mail.  Will watch for it again if another ‘single user’ shows up with multiple outlook records.

I guess for now the theme song continues.. touch me once, and touch me twice…… As it seems peculiar things happen when you add or subtract people from groups.  Stay tuned…

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.