Public holidays by federal state and school holidays as separate show/hide calendars in Outlook
While Outlook can insert public holidays for various countries into your calendar (File/Options/Calendar/Add Holidays), these holidays unfortunately do not include the differences for individual federal states. Furthermore, holidays inserted this way are always permanently entered in your calendar and always visible. If you would like to show/hide public holidays for specific federal states with a click—just like colleagues’ calendars—and also integrate German school holidays for specific federal states as an individually switchable calendar in Outlook, you can load the whole thing as a shared calendar:
- For Germany, open the following website: School Holidays.
- Please look for the corresponding link for your federal state (school holidays for a specific year or public holidays for the federal state). Click the corresponding link; an “ical URL” window will open. Solve the captcha there and select “Request download link”. Copy the displayed link to your clipboard (click/highlight so that the link is marked in blue, and copy with Ctrl+C).
- Now switch to your Outlook calendar and click the Open Calendar -> from Internet command on the Folder tab.
- Now paste the holiday/school holiday address copied in the previous step using the keyboard shortcut CTRL + V. Via
- After you have confirmed the integration of the calendar, the school holidays or public holidays will appear in a separate calendar in your Outlook. You can show/hide this like shared calendars from colleagues and place it next to or over your own calendar (check the box next to the name of the calendar on the left edge next to the day/week view in the “Other Calendars” group to show/hide it).
Show/hide calendars for Austria and Switzerland with a click
The page mentioned above provides German public holidays/school holidays by federal state. For public holidays in Austria (unfortunately not by federal state, but at least individually showable/hideable), simply copy the following link to the clipboard as shown in step 2 and then proceed with step 3:
For Switzerland, use the following link (the cantons where the holiday applies are listed in the text of the respective appointment as a description – so open one of the appointments 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 import public holidays permanently into your own calendar
(always visible, without showing/hiding)
If you do not want to show/hide public holidays individually but would rather import them permanently as appointments into your own calendar, that is also possible:
1. Find the appropriate link again as described above.
2. This time, do not copy the link in step 2, but use the “Download” button above the link to download the holidays/school holidays as a file.
3. File -> Open & Export -> Import/Export
4. Select Import an iCalendar (.ics) or vCalendar file (.vcs),
choose the file saved in step 2, and confirm everything.
