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Shorter version of preceding "Outlook flaw" post
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Based on all available feedback, the problem is not that I'm missing some tweak or setting in Outlook. It's that the program has a basic design flaw in the way it handles "all day events" -- for instance, St. Patrick's Day occurring on March 17.
Apparently Outlook provides no way to assign that event to the entire day itself. It is designed to assign it to a 24-hour span, so whenever you change time zones, you're screwed. The 24 hours that had run midnight-to-midnight now go 3am-to-3am. This is a design decision worthy of Clippy in its user-unfriendliness.
Oh well. Now at least I know. But please, Microsoft folk, can't you do better than this?
UPDATE: Here's what is really objectionable about Outlook's approach. The system's display suggests that there IS a difference between an "all-day appointment," like St. Patrick's Day being on March 17, and a 24-hour appointment running, say, 1am to 1am. The all-day event displays as a single line on your calendar; the 24-hour appointment spreads across every one of the hours included. But in their underlying architecture, it appears that there is no difference at all. An "all-day" event is just another 24-hour span, which happens to display as a single line if you're in the same time zone you were when you created it. To the best of my knowledge, this is different from how, for instance, Google Calendar handles the issue: GC treats "all-day" events as conceptually separate from other 24-hour appointments. The Outlook design decision seems unwise to me, because of the frustrations it creates. But its display decision goes beyond being unwise to being outright deceptive, since it suggests a distinction that the program itself does not support. (It would be as if Word, in certain conditions, displayed a passage in italics, when really the words were all stored as plain text.) Can't someone on the Office team do better than this?
Apparently Outlook provides no way to assign that event to the entire day itself. It is designed to assign it to a 24-hour span, so whenever you change time zones, you're screwed. The 24 hours that had run midnight-to-midnight now go 3am-to-3am. This is a design decision worthy of Clippy in its user-unfriendliness.
Oh well. Now at least I know. But please, Microsoft folk, can't you do better than this?
UPDATE: Here's what is really objectionable about Outlook's approach. The system's display suggests that there IS a difference between an "all-day appointment," like St. Patrick's Day being on March 17, and a 24-hour appointment running, say, 1am to 1am. The all-day event displays as a single line on your calendar; the 24-hour appointment spreads across every one of the hours included. But in their underlying architecture, it appears that there is no difference at all. An "all-day" event is just another 24-hour span, which happens to display as a single line if you're in the same time zone you were when you created it. To the best of my knowledge, this is different from how, for instance, Google Calendar handles the issue: GC treats "all-day" events as conceptually separate from other 24-hour appointments. The Outlook design decision seems unwise to me, because of the frustrations it creates. But its display decision goes beyond being unwise to being outright deceptive, since it suggests a distinction that the program itself does not support. (It would be as if Word, in certain conditions, displayed a passage in italics, when really the words were all stored as plain text.) Can't someone on the Office team do better than this?
