how to update recurring meeting in Outlook without losing history?

I did this and it works!

I made a tester meeting first, before doing it on an actual client meeting. It leaves the historic meeting data as it was, and only updates everything from the selected meeting and onward.

To confirm that it didnt make it as a new meeting, i doubled check the series. Before the meeting was scheduled as weekly and then updated as weekly. It leaves the meeting ID and passcode the same as well as the call in number. Thus is all the same meeting series.

I wonder why you cant do it this way on the app.

This def works!! But does so in 3 parts. It sends 3 things out to the meeting recipients:

1. A cancellation of the meeting from which, going forward, you want to update the series
2. An updated series that goes from the start of the original to the last one you want to be in the old timeframe of the series
3. A new meeting series invite that starts with the first date of the new series going forward

My example:

I had a series that occurred on the third Tue of each month.
Starting with December, I wanted them to be on the second Tuesday of each month.

I did the steps above, editing the Dec 17th meeting for "This and following events".

Outlook sent:

1. A cancellation of the Dec 17th meeting (and I suppose all future third-Tue meetings, because they're gone too)
2. An updated series that started in June 2024 (when these meetings began) and ended Nov 19th 2024 (all the old third-Tue meetings prior to Dec 17)
3. A new series that started Dec 10 (the second Tues) and went forward perpetually

I can't say how #2 would've handled meetings between June and November that I had individually changed, because I didn't have that scenario.

But yeah, this effectively did what I wanted, so yay! (It just did it a few more steps than I was anticipating). :-)

Thank you for posting this, Leon!!

Finally! It was finally added to the latest update ("new Outlook").

Well.... I´ve got issues with updating some changes and…. so many things. At least it seems they are working on it.

Thank you for the hint to use the web version – it helps me a lot.

This solution worked like a charm. Not sure why the same feature is absent on the Outlook app though. Would have been nice to have it.

This only works when you are the inviter, so the creator of the recurrence. If you're the invitee, and the originator has changed or cancelled the meeting occurrence with the limitations this is about, there's no way of having it effect only the future occurrences. Hence when cancelled, if you accept that, the whole history is cancelled as well. To prevent that the only way is to not accept the cancellation and remove the future ones manually. Unfortunately, the occurrences in history will display 'Canceled' and a different color, and if the series had no end date set, you can keep deleting them manually forever!

Then, surprisingly, the desktop version has more functionality if you're the invitee. For canceled meetings, in the desktop version you can delete the occurrence or series, while in the web version you can only remove the series (I tried to see if there would be a follow-up question, but there wasn't and it just removed the series. Luckily it has an undo function.).

A pity, and annoyance, to have these differences, also in wording by the way (delete vs remove, event vs occurrence)!