Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Fix for Outlook 2011 slow calendar

I've been having a problem lately that was driving me crazy on my Mac Outlook 2011 (version 14.3.9).  MBP Mountain Lion (still).  It took around 30 seconds to go from any tab to calendar which was quite frustrating.  Any other tab I had no problem or delay when switching to.

My Outlook is only used for Exchange connectivity at work that I believe is running Exchange 2010.  I'm connected to 10 or so shared calendars at a time.

I noticed in the Calendar tab that I had a folder 'On My Computer' that had about 1000 Recovered Folders.  I googled what these were and could only find that they may be related to rebuilding an identity database on the client (which I've had to do in the past).  Further googling found suggestions on some forums that you shouldn't delete these folders but that didn't seem to be based on any particular knowledge base article or experience, just random opinion.

I couldn't find the folders on the Mac so I just started deleting them in Outlook.  I could not figure out how to mass delete them so I just started deleted Recovered Folders in the Calendar tab under 'On My Computer' one by one.  I apologize to you that I didn't take a screenshot before deleting them so I just recreated what I saw.  I had many more Recovered Folders though.  Once I deleted them, calendar is zipping around.  No delay between inbox/calendar/contact tabs now.  Opening shared calendars is even quicker now.  I have restarted Outlook numerous times and deleting the Recovered Folders doesn't seem to have impacted anything.



I didn't find this particular suggestion online, so hopefully this helps someone.