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Moving Outlook Calendar items to Mac OS X iCal

A few people have emailed me in response to this post, asking me how to move Outlook Calendar Items to Mac OS X. Here are the steps I took:

  1. Open Calendar.
  2. Tools >> Find >> Find
  3. Click in “Look For” field, then hit Enter (this should find all your Calendar entries).
  4. Select all Calendar entries (hint: click on the blue Calendar icon in the left column first).
  5. “Actions” >> “Forward as iCalendar”. (trying to forward more than 1000 seemed to fail – you might have to perform this operation in batches).
  6. Send this email to yourself.

Importing Calendar items is less elegant.

  1. Save all your attached iCalendar files to a folder your Mac can access.
  2. Open this folder in the Finder.
  3. Select all files within.
  4. Drag these files onto your iCal icon in the dock.
  5. iCal pops up a dialogue for each file, asking which Calendar you’d like to import it into. I just held down the enter key. :) Annoying, but much better than paying for 3rd party migration software.

Enjoy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Responses to “Moving Outlook Calendar items to Mac OS X iCal”

  1. Pablo Rodriguez says:
    February 12, 2007 at 4:31 am

    Hi!

    I just bought a Macbook and tried to to the calendar exportation from my Windows XP Outlook… I couldn’t do it since it says ‘Operation error’. I did all your instructions but it seems I can only do it with ’some’ of my calendar appointments, impossible with others.

    Do you know why is that?

  2. Lucas says:
    February 12, 2007 at 9:42 am

    Pablo,

    Are you using Office XP or 2003? I only tested this with 2003.

    Also, is there anything special about the appointments that it failed to export? Did they have some special content in them or something like that?

  3. David Glassborow says:
    February 12, 2007 at 10:54 pm

    Try this: http://outlook2ical.sourceforge.net/

  4. gina says:
    January 19, 2008 at 7:15 am

    THANK YOU!!! both the calendar and contact info was spot on.

  5. pg says:
    January 20, 2008 at 4:25 pm

    awesome for Contacts and Calendar. You are the man!

  6. Pascal says:
    April 2, 2008 at 8:11 pm

    Hi

    I tried doing this but the attachment that came through on my mac was a dat file. When going to import the calender file in ical I was unable to do so.

    Any suggestions?

    Many thanks
    Pascal

  7. Norbert says:
    May 24, 2008 at 5:20 pm

    I have the similar problem as when I read your moving contacts to OS X iCal. I can not see the ‘Forward as iCalendar’ button under the actions menu. Many thanks.

  8. urvashi says:
    December 9, 2008 at 9:25 am

    I managed to import my calendar events in the same way that I’d done with my contacts. instead of mailing them to myself i just copied the attached files from the unsent outlook mail into a folder on a usb drive. this folder is easily imported into ical. i mostly had birthdays and anniversaries and i got the whole jingbag…ALL the recurring events. had to manually delete the past dates.

  9. cat703 says:
    December 23, 2008 at 12:34 pm

    Thanks! This worked great. It was tedious but it did the trick!

  10. jim says:
    April 25, 2009 at 1:23 am

    We can now use the iPhone and iTunes to do the sync from Outlook contacts and calender to Mac

  11. aniika says:
    July 15, 2009 at 1:46 pm

    Hello, I tried everything but when I get to the forward as icalendarl…i dont have that option under my actions tab…HELP!!!

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