Deleting Empty Outlook Appointments

Posted: September 26, 2015 | | Categories: Delphi, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Windows

Until recently, I've always kept my main set of contacts on my personal mobile device and used Exchange ActiveSync to synchronize it with my mobile device. When I joined Forrester, I decided to keep my work stuff separate from my personal stuff. So, rather than have all of my personal contacts available to me while at work, I let my work account sync my work PIM data to my device through its normal means and used a separate process to sync my person PIM data to my device as well.

Since I carry an Android device, I looked around and found an open source solution called Go Contact Sync Mod (https://googlesyncmod.sourceforge.net/) that works pretty well. I could have the sync run automatically, but for now I'm running it manually. One of the things I noticed when I run it is that it was showing an error indicating that it had found empty calendar entries in Outlook. I didn't know I had empty calendar entries nor did I know you could create empty calendar entries, but apparently my pst file had a bunch of them.

I looked around for a while and didn't find a solution for deleting those empty entries, and I couldn't 'see' them in Outlook, so I decided to write some code to solve the problem. I'd been helping a friend with some Outlook automation, so I had the basis of what I needed to make this work. I'm a big Delphi developer, although I'm pretty upset with Embarcadero right now, so it gave me a chance to dust off my Delphi skills and write some code.

I'm not going to go through everything here, but I've posted the code to GitHub at https://github.com/johnwargo/Kill-Empty-Outlook-Calendar-Entries. Basically you can open the project in Delphi then build and run it, or you can use the pre-built executables I've included in the repository. Enjoy!

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