Public holidays by federal state and school holidays as collapsible/expandable separate calendars in Outlook
Whilst Outlook can insert public holidays for various countries into your calendar (File/Options/Calendar/Add Holidays), unfortunately, these holidays do not include the differences for individual federal states. Furthermore, holidays inserted in this way are always permanently entered into your calendar and always visible. If you wish to integrate holidays for specific federal states, such as your colleagues' calendars, by clicking to show/hide them, and also integrate German school holidays for specific federal states as individually switchable calendars in Outlook, you can load the whole thing as a shared calendar:
- Open the following webpage for Germany: School holidays .
- Please find the relevant link for your federal state (school holidays for a specific year or public holidays for the federal state). Click the corresponding link; a window titled „ical URL“ will open. Solve the captcha there and select „Downloadlink anfordern“. Copy the displayed link to your clipboard (click/highlight it so that the link is marked blue, and press Ctrl+C to copy).
- Now switch to your Outlook calendar and click on the tab Folder the command Open calendar -> from the internet.
- Now, using the keyboard shortcut CTRL + V, paste the holiday address copied in the previous step.
- After confirming the calendar integration, school holidays and public holidays will appear in a separate calendar in your Outlook, which you can show/hide like colleagues„ shared calendars and overlay with your own calendar (mark the calendar name on the left-hand side next to the day/week view in the “Other Calendars" group with a tick to show/hide).
Calendar for Austria and Switzerland show/hide with a click
The page above provides you with the German public holidays/school holidays by federal state. For the public holidays in Austria (unfortunately not by federal state, but can be shown/hidden individually at least) simply copy the following link to the clipboard as shown in step 2 and then proceed to step 3:
For Switzerland, please use the following link (the cantons for which the holiday is applicable are listed in the text of the respective date as a description – so open one of the dates with a double-click to see the associated cantons):
https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/de.ch%23holiday%40group.v.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
How to permanently import holidays into your own calendar
(always visible, without showing/hiding)
If you don't want to show and hide holidays individually but rather import them permanently as appointments into your own calendar, you can also do that:
1. Find the appropriate link again as described above.
2. This time, in step 2, do not copy the link, but use the „Download“ button above the link to download the holidays as a file.
3. File -> Open and export -> Import/export
4. Import an iCalendar (ICS) or vCalendar file (VCS) choose,
select the file saved at 2.) and confirm everything.
