outlook.office.com ‘Birthdays’ calendar shows dates offset by +1 days.

G’day.

So, I’m trialling MS 365 Business Basic (exchange, 1TB OneDrive, web-only office apps) to see if it is worth my while for my email/calendar/contacts hosting. But I’m running into a bug with the outlook.office.com ‘Birthdays’ calendar (the one built into web Outlook, that takes birthdays from Outlook contacts and makes a calendar of them), where it is displaying birthdays and their dates offset by +1 days. So, a birthday for a contact on April the 2nd, shows up in the ‘Birthdays’ calendar on and as April the 3rd.

Dates are entered correctly into contacts (a mix of imports and newly created), and time zones are setup correctly in web Outlook, 365 Portal Admin page, and locally too in Windows and Mac. The issue occurs on both Windows and macOS, but not with the Android Outlook app. So, it would seem to be an issue server-side in web Outlook.

The reason I’m posting about it here, is MS 365 support don’t seem to know what’s going on or how to fix it. They’re nice, friendly, responsive… but just don’t know. And my trial is ticking away. While it might seem like a small bug, the fact is it’s pretty important I’m aware of when clients are having their birthday, not to mention family! 😉 It just isn’t good to wish someone happy birthday a day late. And I’m used to relying on this kind of contacts and calendar feature to see me right with this info. I don’t know if I want to progress with a sub once my trial runs out, if this issue isn’t sorted. I’ve way too many contacts to want to enter birthdays into my calendar, manually.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Did you discover what caused it? Is there a fix?

TIA 🙂

Conversation 6 comments

  • anoldamigauser

    Premium Member
    15 March, 2021 - 1:45 pm

    <p>I noticed something similar, awhile back, in Outlook.com (consumer version). When I went back to look today, it is actually worse, in that it is inconsistent. Most display on the correct day, some are offset by a day, one way or the other.</p>

  • JE

    15 March, 2021 - 4:38 pm

    <p>I also have this issue with consumer outlook.com. I created the account correctly and in the right timezone, I inputted the birthdays correctly to each contact, but the birthday calendar it generates has them all +1 which is a total deal breaker for its purpose. Worse, it’s inconsistent and I’ve noticed some being +2 days, and it’s been this way for multiple years. Beyond belief that the issue still exists</p>

  • matsan

    15 March, 2021 - 4:44 pm

    <p>It's not only on Office 365 – we are on Amazon WorkMail using Outlook (macOS and Windows) and the built-in apps on iOS (Mail, Calendar and Contacts). I guess the American companies forgot about different timezones somehow.</p>

  • garethb

    Premium Member
    15 March, 2021 - 10:12 pm

    <p>Yes, this is an annoying one. It seems that I fix it and then some dates change… very frustrating. As others have pointed out, the fact that it isn't consistent among contacts makes it even more annoying.</p><p><br></p><p>I have given up using my contacts for birthday storage because of this, and have a OneNote note for it. :-)</p>

    • matsan

      16 March, 2021 - 2:36 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#618283">In reply to GarethB:</a></em></blockquote><p>+1 for storing in another place. I use the Notes field and manually added recurring events for important persons.</p>

  • wizardling

    23 March, 2021 - 8:27 am

    <p>Well, after only 12 days I've cancelled my MS 365 Business account trial.</p><p><br></p><p>A summary of my issues:</p><p><br></p><p>In web Outlook in two separate 365 trial accounts, dates in the Outlook generated 'Birthdays' calendar are offset by +1 days.</p><p>In mobile Outlook for Android, the issue is not showing up.</p><p>Both MS 365 admin and local time zones and regions are set correctly, so they do not appear to be a factor.</p><p>The above issue happened on both a desktop PC and Mac, so it clearly is not a local issue.</p><p><br></p><p>In addition:</p><p>- I find the inability to selectively enable app-specific passwords without disabling other default security features, to be rather annoying.</p><p>- The inability to create multiple notification reminders for a calendar event means I have to create multiple events for the same thing, just to have more than one notification reminder, e.g. a week before + a day before. I know I can create multiple email reminders, but sometimes I only want a notification type reminder.</p><p>- The inability to set a custom time for an event notification reminder, yet I can create a custom time for an email reminder.</p><p>- I am seeing some multiple occurrences of birthday events in the Outlook generated birthdays calendar, despite their being only a single contact for that person.</p><p>- In Contacts, birthdates in the 'Birthday' field display as mm/dd/yyyy, instead of dd/mm/yyyy as is set for everything else, based on NZ regional preferences. This is annoying as the lack of consistency creates confusion as to what a date really is, when it is non-obvious which is the day and which is the month, e.g. 02/04/1988.</p><p>- Quality of life issues, like the 'Drafts' folder not hiding itself from the 'Favourites' list, when empty; and the inability to switch an email reply from the default of plain text that I have set, to HTML, until I 'Expand' the reply.</p><p><br></p><p>Thus, I feel MS 365 probably isn't for me. It's just too buggy and clunky, I'm afraid.</p><p><br></p><p>I was genuinely surprised it was that poor an experience. I mean, how long has MS been working on this product? Refining it? Squashing bugs? Listening to users? <em>Why is it still like this?</em></p><p><br></p><p>I mean, it wasn't <em>unusable </em>by any stretch. Just… disappointingly sub-par compared to Google Workspace.</p>

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