Phone will NOT sync calendar

Question

I just bought this very expensive phone that I have spent the last 2 days trying to get to do the simplest task. I should have kept using my reliable Palm PDA. My I-Phone will not sync from my calendar to my phone. I have read every discussion on here and tried many solutions, but nothing has worked. In fact it has gotten worse. At the beginning I at least got a few, very few, appointments to sync, but now nothing works. I feel like it is something very simple in the way the phone or Outlook is set up since some people get theirs to work right away and some after some trial and error. Right now I just want to throw mine out a window. Does anyone have any step by step instructions you would share with me? I am willing to work through steps, trying one thing, then another. I just want it to work.
PLEASE HELP!

Answer 1

I figure I'll get the contacts to sync correctly before I pull my hair out with the contacts. So, syncing my Outlook 2003 calendar to my iPhone's driving me crazy. I tried the Apple instructions, but it still is acting strange. The first calendar entries I made worked fine -- setting a bunch of recurring daily events -- but then I tried to enter events that occur on the first Thurs of each month, or the 3rd Monday of each month, and that's when I started having trouble. Sometimes they sync to the phone, but in the wrong week/day slot, sometimes they are missing altgether. One of the great advantages of having this iPhone is to be able to work between calendars, contacts, email and phone applications. If it won't sync correctly, I should have spent a lot less money and gotten something that would else. I'm still naive enough to think that it will work.
Actually, I should be able to sync Outlook to the iPhone or the iPhone to Outlook. But that doesn't seem to work right either. Do I need to take everything off and start over?