Duplicate Calender entries? Here's a solution
Like me, some iPhone/MobileME users have ended up with duplicate Calendar Events on the iPhone and in Microsoft Entourage, usually from multiple sync attempts of recurring Calendar Events like Birthdays and Holidays. In fact, after MobileMe syncing during the first rough week after the iPhone was released, my Entourage Calendar contained over 4,000 duplicate Events going back seven years! I found an Entourage Script on The Web that promised to delete these duplicates. It ran for seven hours, deleted a handful, but then timed out.
Time to rethink this problem. By nosing around Entourage, I discovered that you can't use the Shift key to select multiple Event items in Month, Week or Day View. This makes deleting multiple Calendar Events a very tedious proposition.
However, I learned that in Entourage, you can use the Shift key to select multiple items in the Search Results window. Here's the work around I finally used this knowledge to get rid of duplicate Entourage Calendar Events. Fortunately, I had tagged my Holiday and Calendar Items with color coded Category tags.
1. In Entourage, I selected List View (rather than Month or Week) to view my Events in a linear view and examine data entry patterns. I quickly saw that I might be able to quickly delete large groups of events if I
2. Searched for Events with no Category tag AND containing the Word "Day" (Birthday and most Holiday's have the word "day" in the title).
3. It was time consuming, but relatively easy to shift-select multiple Calendar Events (about 100-300 at a time) and delete these duplicate items from the Search Results.
The original Event used to create the "recurring" series of Events was not typically on this list, so it usually was protected, though I did see a few original entries show up in the search results for some odd reason. I think it took me about an hour to clear out all the duplicates. It's not exactly an automated way of using a computer's processing power, but it worked.
I'd recommend repairing the Entourage database and perhaps running Disk Utilities Permissions Repair and a Disk Warrior Directory Rebuild afterwards, but I have no special knowledge whether this will protect your database. I just use these tools regularly to keep my system tuned.
Time to rethink this problem. By nosing around Entourage, I discovered that you can't use the Shift key to select multiple Event items in Month, Week or Day View. This makes deleting multiple Calendar Events a very tedious proposition.
However, I learned that in Entourage, you can use the Shift key to select multiple items in the Search Results window. Here's the work around I finally used this knowledge to get rid of duplicate Entourage Calendar Events. Fortunately, I had tagged my Holiday and Calendar Items with color coded Category tags.
1. In Entourage, I selected List View (rather than Month or Week) to view my Events in a linear view and examine data entry patterns. I quickly saw that I might be able to quickly delete large groups of events if I
2. Searched for Events with no Category tag AND containing the Word "Day" (Birthday and most Holiday's have the word "day" in the title).
3. It was time consuming, but relatively easy to shift-select multiple Calendar Events (about 100-300 at a time) and delete these duplicate items from the Search Results.
The original Event used to create the "recurring" series of Events was not typically on this list, so it usually was protected, though I did see a few original entries show up in the search results for some odd reason. I think it took me about an hour to clear out all the duplicates. It's not exactly an automated way of using a computer's processing power, but it worked.
I'd recommend repairing the Entourage database and perhaps running Disk Utilities Permissions Repair and a Disk Warrior Directory Rebuild afterwards, but I have no special knowledge whether this will protect your database. I just use these tools regularly to keep my system tuned.
Powerbook G4 Al15/1.2GHz; iPhone 3G, Mac OS X (10.4.11)
