Outlook import Creation Time
 

Second big problem I've found, as a new UR user:

I would love to use UR as a replacement for Outlook, so I experimented with importing some data: my entire Tasks, Notes, and Contacts folders. Worked OK, mostly. However, the Date Created for each imported item was set as the current date, instead of the matching Creation Date in Outlook.

This sucks for at least 2 reasons:
* I have my Notes organised by date (kind of like a journal). This destroys that history.
* When I Synchronized my Tasks items back to Outlook, it synced all of them (though I hadn't changed anything), and updated the Creation Date fields in Outlook to the later, incorrect dates.

Not good. Creation Date is an important historical attribute, and should not be changed by copy, import, or export procedures.

Any solution to this?

BTW, using UR 3.5a.

It is true that the Date Created attribute for an item imported from Outlook will be assigned the current date+time.

But I don't believe the creation date of an Outlook item is easily accessible within Outlook. For a note, it displays the modified date at the bottom, but I don't see any obvious way to determine the date created for a note (or other Outlook item) in Outlook 2003.

Now, I'm pretty sure that an Outlook item does have that property (accessible through the underlying object model, and I'll have our Outlook guru investigate what it would take to keep this in sync with the original Outlook value), but it doesn't seem likely to be used.

Actually, UR sets both the Created and Modified dates to the current time. Neither are preserved from Outlook.

I'm using Outlook 2007, but I'm sure 2003 has a Created Date as well: Select the Notes folder, choose View/Arrange By or Customize Current View, then Choose Fields. All similar to UR's Choose Columns, only several times more complicated, in the way everything in Outlook is :(

BTW, the fields in Outlook are named simply "Created" and "Modified". I tried creating those attributes in UR, to see if they'd automatically map on import, but nope...

If it helps...when viewing the list of notes in the Outlook Notes folder...set View > Current View > Notes List. If the creation data is not one of the visible columns...just modify the the view to add that column.

There are several ways to modify a particular View...but an easy way is to right click on the current column heading and select "Field Chooser" from the context menu. In the list of "Frequently Used Fields", left click on "Created" and drag/drop it onto the list of column headings.

This illustrates how you can see nearly any property of an Outlook object.
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dg