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I want to create a recurring appointment in Outlook for the Friday of the second Tuesday of each month to schedule server reboots because of Windows updates. Some months the second Friday is not the same week as the second Tuesday. I am not sure if this is even possible to set up within Outlook as the options aren't as advanced as this.

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  • I know this does not help much with the question, but for reference, the iCalendar spec for this would be RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;BYDAY=FR;BYMONTHDAY=11,12,13,14,15,16,17 Dec 23, 2011 at 15:26
  • This is a great question. I have had this scenario myself with recurring appointments. I think it can be done with VBA by setting the recurrence plus 3 days. Looking into how to do that and will get back to you.
    – CharlieRB
    Dec 23, 2011 at 16:40
  • I'm surprised this question isn't more popular... Good question @qroberts! For techs, this would be a big to be able to set appointments based on Patch Tuesday, such as a reminder to deploy a group of patches on the Friday after patch Tuesday, to set downtime in monitoring servers on the Thursday before patch Tuesday, to send out notifications to clients who need it on the Wednesday after Patch Tuesday, etc... Come on Microsoft! This is for their product...
    – David
    Oct 12, 2012 at 0:16

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This is an easy work around from using VBA. Unless you absolutely have to have this in the calendar, it just occurred to me you can use Tasks to do this. If that is OK, keep reading. If it has to be in the calendar, disregard.

Tasks let you set the reminder date and time, where the appointment doesn't.

  1. Set up a trecurrencescece of every second Tuesday with the due date of the same.
  2. Set the Reminder to the Friday following the due date. Save and close.

Task Creation

Every time you get a reminder for this Task and complete it, it will generate a new one for the following month. I already marked the one for January complete and it generated this one for February. Hope that helps.

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Bit of a cheat, but simply set the appointment for the second Tuesday, but give it a four day reminder so that it prompts you on the Friday before the second Tuesday!

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OK - Looking at the Appointment Recurrence screen from 2010 Outlook I do not believe exactly what you want is possible. You can certainly set this up for Patch Tuesday as there is the recurrence feature for that type of setting but... there doesn't seem to be any way that I am aware of or can see to modify that. The only work around I can think of would be the use of the second or third Friday vs using Tuesday. As you have clearly already noted though, that would leave you some issues for those months that don't fit the "usual" schema. Sorry but I just don't think this is doable in Outlook.

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Outlook will not allow you to set recurring appointments based on other recurring appointments. There are VBA work-arounds, but most of us don't like or aren't comfortable doing coding.

There's a way to do it by exporting your appointment to a CSV file, modifying it there, and then importing it. For example, in this case, you would create the appointment recurring on the second Tuesday of each month. Export you appointments, and modify this recurring item by adding three days to it. Then import the modified CSV file.

You can find instructions at http://www.msoutlook.info/question/793, then scroll down to "Export, Calculate and Import via Excel"

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