Syncing Apple iCalendar in Outlook causes 'mass deletion' warnings

When Outlook is connected to an Apple iCalendar, OGCS may warn that all Google events will be deleted and then recreated¹. If this happens upon every sync, there are a couple of workarounds as described below.

Turn on two-way sync

This will allow OGCS to take into account the IDs of the synced events in Google, which don't keep changing, and thereby know the items are the same.

For this to work, the iCalendar in Outlook cannot be read-only.

Turn on simple matching

Where two-way sync is not possible, OGCS can be made to perform "simple matching" of Outlook to Google calendar items based only on their time, subject and location information. This is less determinate than using IDs, and when appointment dates change, OGCS will have to delete and recreate them instead of update them - but this is likely preferable to the deleting and recreating the entire calendar.

1. In OGCS, go to the About tab
2. Double-click the file path cell of the Config In table
3. Once the Windows Explorer window has opened, close OGCS
4. Open the settings.xml file in an editor, eg Notepad
5. Find the entry <SimpleMatch> and change the value from false to true
   • If there are multiple profiles, make sure only the value for the iCalendar profile is changed - check the <_ProfileName> value
6. Save and close the text editor
7. Start OGCS and sync!

🗒️ Note: Simple matching will only be in effect for Outlook to Google syncing.

¹ Technically, this is because Outlook calendar items have an immutable ID to identify them...but Apple in its infinite wisdom, changes the ID every time a calendar appointment is accessed 🙄 This prevents OGCS from being able to match up synced calendar items, instead having to delete and recreate them all.

🔗 #447 #1649