iCloud changes your Outlook calendar and contacts.

How do you get Outlook to show all the calendar items in a list so I can "control-A" and copy them back to my normal Outlook calendar?

I also get this message when I set up meetings with the iCloud calendar

What a nightmare...

MartinFromZurich, I experienced the same problem. Saturday I upgraded my iPad to the new OS and installed iCloud for the first time (never used MobileMe). 2 hours later, all entries are gone from the default Outlook 2003 calendar and the Icloud Calendar has them FOUR TIMES!!

Not sure what to do now. Did you find a resolution? Anyone?

Strongly encourage everyone to send negative feedback if we want this resolved.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html

I agree christianTee. I just took your advice and submitted the following:

"When I bought my new 4s I was very excited to set up the iCloud aspect and start making my life simpler. Instead, I got massive wholesale changes to my existing calendars and contacts instead of just syncing like I expected (and like your advertising led me to believe). I have since had to basically recreate my Outlook contacts and calendar by copy and paste just so everything was back like it started since the iCloud removed it all. I uninstalled/disabled the program from both of my pc's as well as my 4S. Thanks for nothing. "

I am seriously considering changing my e-mail signature to "iCloud iSucks" 😠

I too have had the same problems with lost or duplicate entries in contacts and calendar. I also found that when using Contacts from icloud while in Outlook, one cannot search contacts by entries that were listed in the "notes" section of Contacts. So with hundreds of contacts that makes Contacts unusable while in icloud. I am surprised Apple has not yet addressed this.

What is interesting is that Outllok on the Mac doesn't operate this way. It leaves your contacts alone and all syncing is done through address book. Now, this still means if the icloud contacts go away, it will feed erase your contacts on address book which will propogate back to Outlook and we will still loose all our contacts.

Apple needs to find a way to make sure that can't happen. Maybe like it used to be in mobilme where you could set an alert on your PC, mac, whatever, that would warn you if it was going to change any of your data on your home machine.

I have set my PC to not sync with icloud. My iphone and mac and ipad will sync with icloud. This way, if iCloud ever messes with my contacts, i can always go back and sync my iphone with my PC and then go back and restore everything else. Couldn't this work with the calendar also?

Ok guys,

no more iCloud in my two Win7 PCs.

What a nightmare! Never again!

Hope it was not my fault. I started to migrate to Apple 6 months ago (with an iPhone4 and an iPad to start) just to avoid this kind of problems, typical in win env, and I find them exactly the same here. I swear, I didn't bring any curse!

I hope to be able to come back to the previous state, where I synced my iPhone using the USB cable and iTunes, with no problems. At the same time I'd like to keep iCloud running for the iPhone and iPad. But given this mess... who would bet about it working?

Updating to iCloud is definitely a mind twister. For me it was a paradignm shift -- the important calendar and contact data to preserve is no longer in Outlook on my desktop, it's in iCloud. Once that data is correct, no matter how many times it is deleted from a device, I can recover it from iCloud. To clear duplicates on a device (iPhone and iPad), I turned iCloud on and off a couple of times, each time *deleting* data from my device. (Do so at your own risk.) I did this for calendar as well as contact data.

For Outlook (Windows) it is a little different. The iCloud control panel puts iCloud calendar and contact data in separate "buckets" from Outlook's main calendar and contacts. I had to play with it awhile and ended up deleting all of Outlook's main calendar and contact data, and simply just using the iCloud "buckets" in Outlook as my main calendar and contacts. Again, do so at your own risk.

(Synchronizing an Outlook IMAP email with iCloud is another story.)

Thanks Richard. I wasn't sure how to even approach Apple. Is there any other way besides sending in a feedback form that you know of? Can you get email support for this application?

I found this discussion on the internet.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/outlook/thread/d3f7254b-71b2-4b a0-9341-9bff22968d8f

Private developer in Germany who has a solution to this problem and is customizing it specifically for outlook.

I emailed him to ask for more information. I got an autoreply. Apparently, he solved the problem, updated his product and went on vacation. Love that German efficiency!

I downloaded a trial of his software (will cost 20 Euros) and it seems to work great, so far. Install the program, restart Outlook, and select the properties of the folder in iCloud you want to sync to the default folder in Outlook and apply. Takes a while to move lots of records (appointments and tasks) but they populate and show up as one would expect in the Outlook reminders and To-Do pane.

I chose the optioin not to sync reminders but I end up with two reminder panes popping up anyways for tasks but not appointments. Small hassle so far and I will ask the developer if I can't figure it out myself.

Here is the link to the download page for the software that solved my problem (so far)

http://www.somebytes.de/27-1-OLMixedFolders.html

Calendars must sync to the root Outlook Calendar (do not create a folder) but tasks seem to work if you create a folder to mirror iCloud.

This is a work around and not a true solution. Really all we need is some code to permit Outlook to gather tasks and reminders from a none default folder. Seems like it shouldn't be to hard, but I am not a programmer.

First of all - thanks to everybody who contributed to this stream. It made me feel I was NOT alone! I think I have the same problems, so here is a bit of detail - I am running a PC with Windows 7 and Outlook 2007, and using an iPad 1 and iPhone 4. I always kept my PC as the master, and used iTunes to keep everything (Calendars, Contacts, Notes, Bookmarks, etc) in sync. I used categories extensively in Calendar to group meetings etc visually. Until now, everything worked well, except that email items appear 3 times - on the PC (I use POP3 into Outlook) , iPad and iPhone and deleting on one device doesn't delete on the others (I had a blackberry before this and that did the syncing of email between devices just fine). I had concluded I just have to live with the email triplication.

Then Apple announced iCloud and it looked a good solution to syncing on the move, and then David Pogue (NY Times) gave iCloud a great write-up so I took the plunge. But what a result:-

1) Contacts disappeared from Outlook, but a new group has appeared "iCloud", containing "Contacts in iCloud". Some contacts copied across and sync'd ok, some duplicated, some triplicated. Some holidays (Outlook holidays) 4x and 5x copies!

2) Calendar disappeared from Outlook, but a new group has appeared "iCloud", and in that, all my outlook calendar items appear - but at least twice and sometimes three times. there are 3 calendar tabs in "iCloud" - "Calendar", "Calendar in iCloud" and "Calendar merge conflicts in iCloud". "Calendar" appears to be just a copy of "Calendar in iCloud", because if I untick "Calendar in iCloud" then "Calendar" goes blank too!

I think I'm convinced that I need to disable iCloud sync of Calendars and Contacts, back them up. and then spend hours removing the duplications - but at least I know from everybody's comments in this message stream that there's no easy remedy. Any last comments from anybody before I retreat into "solitary" to correct all the errors?