In last week’s post I wrote about adding other countries’ holidays to your Google Calendar, a tool to help stay in sync with your international colleagues. This time I’ll attempt to do the same for users on Microsoft Outlook. For people on Windows computers it’s pretty simple but for Mac users…well, read on.

This Microsoft help page shows you how to add holidays to your calendar on Outlook on Windows:

  1. Click File > Options > Calendar.
  2. Under Calendar options, click Add Holidays.
  3. Check the box for each country whose holidays you want to add to your calendar, and then click OK.

Going by the contents of the page it looks like Outlook adds individual holidays to your calendar, rather than syncing with a centralized repository. You can’t “unsubscribe” from a holiday calendar; in order to remove a country’s holidays from your calendar you must search for them and delete them manually. That’s one disadvantage Outlook has compared to Google Workspace.

So…I tried doing the same on Outlook for Mac but I couldn’t find the menu for adding holidays. In fact, this page outright says the feature isn’t present in this version of Outlook.

As Microsoft says, it’s time to take it to the Outlook Suggestion Box . I’ve already went out of my way to find the suggestion item to add public holidays for calendars to Mac. While you’re at it, bump up the suggestion to synchronize online calendars as well. Vote away!