The other issue is that I wasn't deleting the appointment, I was cancelling it. I was the meeting organizer, and needed to notify the other attendees that it would be cancelled. I couldn't find anything in a quick check of the on-line help that said whether deleting the meeting would send the update to everyone else. I didn't think to change the end date, which would have done what I needed.

If I request a meeting with you and you don't see the invite until after the time/date has passed, Outlook shows a message saying the appointment occurs in the past. So at that level Outlook is aware that appointments in the past are somehow different.

But on a more concrete level, if I have a meeting that has been recurring daily for three weeks, there are now two remaining meetings that I want to cancel, how do I do that? Yes, I can change the end date and programmatically that's the same thing. But here I was, Joe Average User[1], and I didn't think of it that way. I wanted to cancel the remaining two days. I check the online documentation for "cancel meeting" and it tells me to use the item on the Actions menu.

The problem is that Outlook uses the concept of "A recurring meeting". In reality you are scheduling multiple meetings on a regular schedule. I can cancel today's meeting without cancelling tomorrow's. In Outlook, I can cancel one instance of a recurring meeting without cancelling all of them. But there's no method (that I can see) to cancel all remaining instances without cancelling all past instances.

It might have worked had I selected the two remaing meetings and clicked "Delete", but like I said, I couldn't find anything in the documentation saying it would send the update. Would it? If it didn't, how would I get the meeting off of everyone else's calendar?



[1] And I'm not exactly J.A.U.