Saturday, March 18, 2017

Outlook Time Zone Conversion Strangeness

I have used Microsoft Outlook on a Windows machine for years and am currently running Office 365 with automatic updates. A few months ago I configured my Outlook calendar to show 2 time zones, Pacific and Eastern, which are 3 hours apart. Although it was working as expected for many weeks, earlier this week I noticed an error in which the Eastern time zone was being incorrectly shown as 4 hours ahead of Pacific:


Note that Daylight Saving Time went into effect on Sunday 3/12, and I noticed the error a day later on Monday 3/13. I tried quitting and re-launching Outlook, tweaking the time zone settings from my Outlook Options menu, and even rebooting my Windows virtual machine on Parallels Desktop, but still no luck. I was in the Eastern time zone at the time, and my Outlook for iOS application was showing the correct local time for my calendar appointments, so I think this issue was isolated to Outlook for Windows.

In any case, after starting up my machine the next day, the issue disappeared. I wonder if there was a temporary bug due to Daylight Saving Time that Microsoft had fixed? I do have automatic updates turned on, but the last update was in January 2017. Hmmm...

1 comment:

  1. More on this topic... https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/calendar/dual-time-zone-dst-calendar-display-bug-in-outlook/ Looks like it's still an issue.

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