I bought a W8 phone to link with Outlook 2013 on my PC as this is now impossible using my Android phone after upgrading to Office 2013. I have been unable to sync contacts or calendar although the phone shows up on my PC when I connect with a USB cable. I spent hours hours text-chatting to MS W8 phone support who were unable to sort this out. I have come to the conclusion that the fault may be with the way my Outlook is set up but I cannot find any support to help me check the settings on my PC so that they correspond those on my phone.

I suggest you have app (Zune, Akruto Sync and etc) for directly syncing windows phone 8 to outlook on PC by USB cable.  Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-TfP8nR6po

 

Tony Chen
TechNet Community Support

Thank you for your reply Tony. I bought a W8 phone so that I do not have to use 3rd party software to sync with Outlook 2013. Akruto and others need a subscription. Is there no way that a sync can be done using MS programmes? I have gone through all the advice from MS on the web. I got help from an MS service person who got into my PC and changed the default Outlook account from Exchange to POP3 but this made no difference. There is a guide to setting up a W8 phone to sync on MS help pages but this gets as far as choosing an option which does not include Outlook 2013 and suggests downloading Outlook Connector which only works for previous versions of Outlook.

What kind of email account do you have?  (Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail etc?)

Mostly these days you should be able to sync your phone with your Outlook by setting up the email account on the phone with the same settings you used in Outlook on the PC and it'll sync everything for you.  You shouldn't need to connect a cable or manually synchronise anything

Matt

Systems Engineer

BOM Group

Hello Matt. I have a POP3 BTInternet account in Outlook which is the default. There is also an Exchange Active Sync account with the same address that I set up hoping I could use it to sync with my phone. The MS help person changed the default back from Active Sync to the POP3 Account. On my phone I have an MS account with a live.co.uk address; BTInternet with my usual email address and a Gmail account which downloads emails OK. the BT account shows as if it is syncing but nothing appears in calendar or people likewise the MS account. Any help to sort this out would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Oz,

Did the ActiveSync account in Outlook work before MS Support got involved?  If so I would switch back to using that because you can't sync calendar and contacts 'over the air' using POP3.  It should then just be a case of setting up an identical ActiveSync account on the phone.

Having said all that, I'm not sure if BT offer an ActiveSync service (I think they do for their business accounts but possibly not for home users) so you might be stuck with POP3.  I would have a talk to BT and see what they say.  They'll be in a better position to help than Microsoft at this point.

Another option would be to stop using the BT account all together and just use the live.co.uk address for everything.  Because live.co.uk is a Microsoft product it should operate fairly seamlessly with both Outlook and the phone.  You could add your live.co.uk email address as a forwarding address on the BT account so that you still receive any emails sent to the BT email address.

Sorry if this is all a bit vague.  It's hard to tell you exactly what to do without knowing all the details of your BT account.  It's also been a while since I dealt with BT so I'm not sure what their current services are.

I've probably raised more questions than I've answered!  Let me know if you need any clarification.

Cheers,

Matt

Hello Matt

I don't think my reply registered. Thanks for your sensible suggestions - I am glad someone knows how this all works! Everything in Outlook got in a mess so I 'refreshed' W8 thinking I would revert back to a previous setting as in W7 but found that this wiped all my PC and Office settings including Outlook. I  I managed to get emails after a lot of fiddling. I run a charity from home and get cut-price programmes but found that I am not eligible for free web-based support either from the provider or MS. I still fail to sync and continually get the  'Attention required' message on my MS account. I think it is time to pay for someone to sort it all out - not easy in the countryside of Cornwall!