Outlook Categories vs. iPhone Calendars

[jerryf]

Is there some way to have my various events show up on the iPhone color coded as they are in Outlook? I use multiple categories on my PC, but everything shows up the same on the iPhone. I see that there is some notion of multiple "Calendars" on the iPhone, but don't see how to map that to the categories I have under Outlook. Can someone give me some guidance here? Thanks.

[jerryf]

FWIW I have figured out what is going on here. The iPhone does not recognize the existence of multiple categories in Outlook. It recognizes the existence of multiple calendars. If you want events of different types to show up with different colors on the iPhone, you have to create a new calendar in Outlook for each one. This is really dumb. No one will do that. The normal thing that Outlook users do is assign events to different categories, within a single calendar. The real reason to have multiple calendars is to establish independent projects that you want to manage separately, each with its own calendar of dates. I assume this is why you can't assign a category to an event you create on the iPhone. The iPhone doesn't know how to deal with the category designation, either natively, or imported from Outlook. It substitutes the (less than useful) multiple calendar approach instead. Hopefully, some day, the Apple folks will get this corrected, and implement the same approach that exists in Outlook. Supporting multiple calendars is fine, but it is not a substitute for enabling (the more intuitive) categories.