Jelle Druyts

Ok so with the end of my Lotus Notes era-of-hell in sight (since I'll be finishing my current project soon), I'll be returning to my trusted friend Outlook again shortly. I've always experienced a little annoyance with it, but I've just found a simple solution so I just figured I'd share that with you (you never know if one you - my trusted share of thousands of readers - suffers the same problem).

It's something really simple actually: I just wanted a weekly reminder. That's it. The problem is, I didn't get my reminders to work correctly... I created a Task in Outlook and made it recurring (every week on the same day). Then I set a reminder for it, on a certain time of the first occurrence of the day. When that reminder popped up on the right day, I typically clicked snooze and forgot all about it for a little while but at sometime when I was done with it, I clicked "Dismiss" to indicate my weekly chore had been fulfilled. But dismissing it also seemed to disable the reminder, so I wasn't notified about the task the week after. Bummer. I could've clicked "Snooze for a week" but then I'd have some serious time-shifting going on: each time I hesitated or snoozed for a little while, the reminder would just come later and later each week.

I guess I could've gone off and programmed it myself using .NET into Outlook through Visual Studio Toolkit for Office or something, but then again - where would we be without our friend the internet and Microsoft Office Online? Apparently, the solution doen't lie in creating a weekly Task, but instead you should be creating a recurring zero-minute-length calendar appointment. Not as pretty as it should be, but it does the job.