Last month I noticed that the calendar on my iPhone had a few duplicates. Worse, some of them were clearly wrong (x2 ‘Dad’s birthday’ items, one a day late !??).
The issue would seem to be something to do with the fact that I use Windows and Outlook to sync my calendar and contacts, and when I switched from my old iPhone 3 to my new iPhone 4, it seems it created a new calendar item in the .pst rather than just continuing with the existing one. Fair enough. My bad.
Issue now was, how to tidy the mess up? Solution, do it in Outlook.
First step was to get all appointments (even the incorrect ones) into a single calendar. To do this:-
In the Outlook open the Calendar section in the left hand nav. Note how it is possible to have multiple calendars with the same name (in the screenshot below circled in red).
Click the view drop down and select ‘All Appointments’. This will give you a table list view of all appointments in the chosen calendar.
Select the other calendar in the list and change it’s view to ‘All Appointments’. Now you can flick back and forth between the lists and compare them to see which calendar contains what.
In order to work out which one iTunes is using to sync with, create a dummy appointment on your iPhone in the calendar and then sync. The appointment will appear in only one of the calendars. Use the ‘All Appointments’ lists view to find which one this is. This is the calendar we want to keep.
Select the calendar that did not get the new appointment after syncing. Select all appointments with ‘CTRL+A’.
Now drag and drop all the appointments onto the calendar that you are going to keep going forward.
Now delete the superfluous calendar.
In the calendar we are keeping, in the ‘All Appointments’ view you can now edit/prune/delete the list of appointments until they are all correct. You can sort them by name to find duplicates and then correct/delete them as neccessary.
Now resync your iPhone, but this time, on the ‘Info’ tab, at the bottom in the ‘Advanced’ section, under the ‘Replace information on this iPhone’, tick the appointments checkbox.
The sync should remove the currently held appointments on your phone and replace them with the corrected ones from Outlook. You should also see the number of calendars drop down to x2, ‘From My PC’ calendar and ‘Other’ birthdays (the birthdays one is built into the iPhone, you cannot remove it, it obtains it’s data from the ‘Birthday’ field of the ‘Contacts’ app on the phone !
Eh voila :oD
