Tip 347: Indiana Time Zones and Daylight Savings

This Sunday much of the US switches to Daylight Savings time and starting this year, Indiana drops the Indiana (East) time zone and residents move to either Eastern time or Central time, depending on the county they live in. While the time changes always seem to lead to many questions that start with "all of my appointments are off by an hour…", this year could be more problematic than usual because of the changes in Indiana.

If you are in Indiana (East) and are going to Eastern time, you should have switched you computer to Eastern time last fall. This would have minimized problems with future appointments by creating them in the correct future time zone. Those who live in the Central time zone should have fewer have problems with their appointments, but should take the same precautions as those switching the Eastern and export or print out a copy of their calendar for future reference.

If you haven't yet switched to Eastern, first export your appointments to Excel or to a text file then print out a copy of your appointments (a table view works fine for the printout) for future reference. Next, you'll need to edit all of your appointments and adjust the time for daylight savings time. I recommend entering the correct time in the message body then changing the appointment time. When finished, change the computer's time zone to Eastern.

You can use Excel to make changes quickly. Using a copy of the file you exported the appointments to, you can use search and replace or other Excel methods to change the time. Keep in mind that Outlook exports the time as text (leading entries with a ') so using formulas to change the start time isn't a simple process. When the changes are complete, import the file back into Outlook.

While the following KB article was written for Exchange servers, the Outlook section applies to all Outlook users. I recommend reading it before changing the time zone.
How to incorporate Indiana's time zone change in Outlook e-mail clients in Exchange Server
//support2.microsoft.com/kb/915577

Published March 30, 2006. Last updated on June 17, 2011.