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The last Office for Mac update (sept 2019), wiped out Categories in Outlook for Mac. Anyone else suffered this severity 1 data loss problem

Following the last update by Microsoft of Office for Mac in September 2019, I found that my categories have been erased.

I depend heavily on customised categories in tasks, email and calendaring. The entire history of colour coding of 5 years has been lost. Microsoft O365 support kindly suggested to recreate the 20 categories I lost however this means manually re- categorising thousands of tasks, emails and calendar items. 

Has anyone else suffered this problem?

Where are the Categories stored? 

This is major data loss following a simple Office update. Love to hear from you!! Best 

Hi Kurtvan,
What type of email account do you have configured in Outlook? POP, IMAP, Outlook.com, or Microsoft Exchange?

Was the category list removed - leaving you with white categories not in the master list or were they removed from the outlook items too?
--
Diane Poremsky
M365 MVP, specializing in Outlook, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 apps.

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Thank you for your interest: Microsoft Exchange (O365). The category list (some 20 items) was removed but strangely two categories were left in place. It impacted all mail, task and calendar items that were categorised and colour coded over a 5 year period. In other words the categories were also removed from thousands of mail items. 

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Hello Kurt,

 

I do apologize for the inconvenience it caused in your daily work and life. If the mailbox is an Exchange Online mailbox, you can sign in Outlook Web App(OWA) and double check whether the categories are missing. Usually, they should still be available in OWA since they are stored in the cloud. However, if it is an IMAP or POP mailbox, you may need to re-create the missing categories again.

 

If you still have any concerns about it, please contact in-app support for further assistance and check whether they can help recovering the categories. We have experts there for Outlook for Mac issues and they will help you further on it. Simply go to Help -> Contact Support in Outlook for Mac.

 

I do apologize again for the inconvenience it caused! Your understanding and cooperation would be highly appreciated.

 

Best Regards,

Rick

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Dear Rick 

Thank you for your contribution. This was already immediately covered off as OWA was "updated" with all but two Categories missing, in the same way that the latest Office for Mac update appears to have erased my Categories data on all my mail items. 

I run Outlook on Exchange.

O365 Support telles me "something happened at their back end" and Office for Mac Support is not helping either. It is the first time I feel let down by Microsoft and I worked with the company for over 20 years both personally and professionally. 

Yes it is s concern as Microsoft losing customer data is not a good thing and should be made public as it transpires from Support I am not the only one that suffered this problem.


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Hello Kurt,

 

Sorry for many inconveniences it caused in your daily work and life. I do apologize for the data loss. I want to make a summary here to make it clearly to you and other community members.

 

Issue: Because of some reasons at the backend, categories are wiped out after Outlook for Mac update.

 

Suggestions: To prevent data loss, I suggest export items to OLM files as a backup, or use time machine to back up Outlook for Mac items automatically.

 

I do apologize again for the issues. In the future, we will keep working to prevent this kind of issues happening again. Hope you can understand.

 

Regards,

Rick

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Dear Rick

Thank you for the OLM Backup suggestion. Finally maybe ...

One reason I am working with Office for Mac, is because my regular Macbook running Windows 10 and Office for Windows is temporarily unavailable to me. I trusted Microsoft because of my experience with Outlook for Windows as a robust and user friendly, feature rich product used by millions arounds the world

When I get that laptop (running Windows 10) back, should I assume that that version of Outlook will also "benefit" from the undocumented feature and be "updated" when I access my Exchange account, with the no-categories version of Outlook that I now "enjoy" on Office for Mac and OWA?

Should Microsoft not be getting to the point that the (paid) versions of Outlook provide the same customer experience, irrespective of the version used whether it be OWA, Mobile, Mac or PC? 

Microsoft's core expertise and cash cow for a very long time now has been their Office productivity suite...

Appreciate all constructive input. 

Best 

Kurt

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Hello Kurt,

 

If you configure the account via Exchange, once you set up categories for other items, they will sync on the Cloud and all the devices, except the mobile applications. I hope you can enjoy the use of Office suite and we will keep working to improve the user experience.

 

Your understanding would be highly appreciated.

 

Regards,

Rick

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Last updated October 6, 2023 Views 294 Applies to: