If you are missing to take benefit of your upcoming holiday, it is a particularly good chance you have not used the future in the Microsoft Outlook calendar, it makes everything smooth for you. Remembering and reminding are both important.
In this article, you will learn “How to Add Holidays to Outlook Calendar.”
Initially, the Outlook calendar is clean and has no holiday listed. You must add manually.
You can easily add all holiday calendars of specified countries and copy the holidays to the second/public/all calendars easily.
Here is the step-by-step tutorial.
Microsoft Outlook is a global platform; every user is required to update their own country holiday into their system to keep track of regular holidays.

To add holidays to your Outlook calendar:
- Step 1 – Open Outlook >> Click File >> Click Options
- Step 2 – Options dialog box appears, click Calendar in the left bar, and then click Add Holidays button

- There is every country’s calendar holiday available in Outlook [Scroll up and down and find your
location], all you must do is select, you can also select multiple countries according to your requirement and click OK.
- So far, all holidays of the specified location (country name) have been added to the default calendar of the default email account in Outlook already.

- Once you’ve added holidays to your Outlook calendar, they will appear in the Calendar desktop app that accompanies Outlook.

How to add custom holidays to the Outlook calendar?
Add holiday feature only include holidays of the country in your outlook calendar, what if you want to add custom holidays? There is a feature outlook import custom holidays, here is the step-by-step guide.
How to add holidays to the Outlook calendar? it is just like adding a custom template and adding it to outlook templates.
Most companies have their own set of holidays on top of national ones. The Human Resources department distributes to their employee accordingly to their area.
If you look closely, MS outlook by default sets a bunch of holiday lists installed in their system with the extension file of [.hol], this file can be found in the following path:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\1033\Outlook.hol
The file contains: [for instance]
[United States] 8
Christmas Day,2016/12/25
Christmas Day,2017/12/25
Christmas Day,2018/12/25
Christmas Day,2019/12/25
Christmas Day,2020/12/25
Christmas Day,2021/12/25
Christmas Day,2022/12/25
Christmas Eve,2023/12/24
For the purpose to add a personal Holiday calendar, follow the steps.
In this, you can create your own [.hol] file, which was later uploaded to Outlook.
- Open Notepad
- [Your company’s US Holidays 2017]8
NEW YEAR’S DAY,2020/01/01
NEW YEAR’S EVE,2020/01/02
MEMORIAL DAY,2020/05/29
INDEPENDENCE DAY,2020/07/04
LABOR DAY,2020/09/04
THANKSGIVING DAY,2020/11/23
DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING DAY,2020/11/24
CHRISTMAS DAY,2020/12/25
Note: – 8 is the number of holidays listed. It is crucial to keep this format intact, no change space excepted, wise you must encounter the error.
- Once the above content is entered in notepad, save the file with [.hol] extension.
How to save a notepad file with (.hol) extension?
Once your file is ready, click to save as from the File tab.


Important Note: – Filename must be “.hol” only no other alphabet or space will be used select All Files in the type of section and click save.
- Now you have your customized list of holidays saved in your computer hardware with (.hol) file extension.
- Simply double-click the file a popup appears select your list and click OK. Your holidays are added to your calendar you can cross-check in your calendar.

The human resources section creates (.hol) file for different branches state-wise and easily mail to their employee, they can save the holiday list in their outlook.
How To Remove Holidays from Outlook Calendar?
Deleting holidays from the Outlook list individually is a very time-consuming process, here you can check an effortless way to remove duplicate or selective holiday entries in Microsoft Outlook followed by a few steps.
After your country selection, the lists grab their respective dates and sat on the dates.
- Step 1 – Open Outlook >> Click Calendar from navigation section
- Step 2 – Click View Tab >> Change View >> List

- Click Category from the arrangement group. This will sort all of your events by category.

- Scroll through the list and select the category name of Holiday >> Click the right button on the mouse

- Click Delete and all the holiday available in outlook with the category holiday is deleted.
Once you’ve completed the steps, people who also have access to the shared calendar will be able to see the updates.
Also Read:
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- Share Outlook Calendar Outside Organization
- How to customize the theme and formatting for Outlook Mail? (Creating Stationary)
- How to Schedule Meeting in Outlook? + [How to Cancel Meeting Email?]
- How To Keep Microsoft Outlook Running in the Background?
- Outlook Address Autofill Not Working – (Find out Why?)