Does your birthday fall on 19 March, 00:00 (GMT +8)?
If yours does, congratulations. Your birthday format is acceptable by Microsoft Outlook.
Outlook has this weird property, where birthdays are represented as an event which has a specific time in the day when it happens, instead of just the day itself. So let’s take an example of my own birthday, which happens to fall on 19 March. (a little ego…) Let’s say my computer’s time zone is set to GMT +8 (Singapore Time).
What happens is that Outlook will store my birthday in the above format. The one you see on the title. That’s right, 19 March, 00:00 (GMT +8). And to make it more interesting, your birthday ends on 20 March, 00:00 (GMT +8). This is still fine, because when an event ends at 00:00 on a particular day, Outlook will treat it as if there’s really no event happening on that day, in this case would be 20 March.
A problem occurs when you go to another place on another time zone. Let’s say that I change my computer’s time zone to GMT +7 (Western Indonesian Time). The starting time will change to 18 March, 23:00 (GMT +7) and ending time to 19 March, 23:00 (GMT +7). Now that’s a big problem.
To make it even worse, the date shown on the Contacts page is the date as indicated by the starting time. So I had everyone’s birthday moved forward by one day! And to revert everything back to normal, I would have to open my Contacts one by one and changing every single entry’s birthday to the correct one!
Well, that’s ridiculous! People’s birthdays don’t change just because you’re on a different time zone, right?
And this happens on a Microsoft product… What a shame…
February 8th, 2004 at 2:35 am
u’re born at midnight?!?
February 8th, 2004 at 9:07 pm
Nope. But Outlook thought I was. And everyone else in my Contacts too.
February 18th, 2004 at 8:40 am
I’m still lost how does e outlook thingy work? how can you lose a birthday??
February 18th, 2004 at 11:42 pm
you don’t lose your birthday.
it’s just that outlook stores your birthday as an event. and outlook stores an event complete with a starting time and an ending time. so basically your birthday stored in outlook ’starts’ at midnight, and ‘ends’ at midnight the following day.
a problem occurs because outlook also stores the timezone in events, let’s say 00:00 (gmt +8). so when you change your computer’s timezone, the ’starting time’ and ‘ending time’ of your birthday go haywire, because 00:00 (gmt +8) is equivalent to 23:00 (gmt +7) the previous day, and so it looks as if your birthday is moved forward by one day.
it’s kinda hard to explain if you’ve never experienced it yourself… so try it!
go to outlook, create a contact and store some birthday in the contact. you can store the birthday in the ‘details’ tab in case you’re wondering. then go to control panel, go to ‘date and time’, and change the timezone to something else earlier than the one you’re using, e.g. gmt+7. then go back to outlook and watch as the contact’s birthday is ‘moved forward’ by one day!