Importing Calendar in MS Outlook w/o duplicates
Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 8:59 pm
Calendar Downloads into MS Outlook:
If you have tried to import the calendar from your ward or Stake website into Outlook 2003 or possibly Outlook 2007 and have seen duplicate entries created each time you import. This post is for you;).
Apparently the implementation of the iCal standard by Microsoft into its Outlook products was not as robust as it could have been according to an inside authority I will not name here. When importing iCal files, Outlook does not provide any options such as replace duplicates like you will see when importing a CSV file. Only problem is the CSV file format exported from the ward/stake calendar is not compatible with MS Outlook 2003 for sure & other versions likely either. This is due to the organization and strict column naming requirements of Outlook when importing data. Currently members can only import 12 months at a time & to sync your Outlook calendar on a regular basis requires multiple downloads & imports of files. Due to the previous problem of duplicates this feature has not been used as well as it could or at all for Outlook users who have experienced this problem.
Solutions & work arounds:
Long term: Implementation of the new CalDAV standard across webservers & calendaring applications
Short term: Use my Macro until some one figures out a way to implement it on a Church Server to automatically spit out an Outlook compatible CSV file. The Macro was written in Excel 2003 & takes the exported CSV file from the calendar and automatically reformats it & spits out a new file in the correct format. All you have to do is take the reformatted file and import into Outlook as a CSV file using the option to replace duplicates.
Downside: This will not remove previous calendar entries that were downloaded and imported previously but then latter removed from the ward calendar due to cancellation etc... Those would have to be done manually.
Upside: It will let those who were previously unable to import Church calendars to do so and therefor be able to sync to their Smart phone as well if they have one. I attached the macro named Outlook converter.xls to this post. Once you have the file if you add it to your hidden XLSTART directory (Documents & Settings-Your account-Application Data-Microsoft-Excel-XLstart) you can then run it from within Excel with hot key Cntrl + (lower case letter o) or select from Tools-Macro-Macros after opening the downloaded CSV file from the calendar, to select it. Make sure you have a C:\temp directory before starting as the macro is hard coded to export to C:\temp. Suggest you save the downloaded CSV file there as well. Any questions send me an email through the forum & I will try to add additional information for benefit of all.
If you have tried to import the calendar from your ward or Stake website into Outlook 2003 or possibly Outlook 2007 and have seen duplicate entries created each time you import. This post is for you;).
Apparently the implementation of the iCal standard by Microsoft into its Outlook products was not as robust as it could have been according to an inside authority I will not name here. When importing iCal files, Outlook does not provide any options such as replace duplicates like you will see when importing a CSV file. Only problem is the CSV file format exported from the ward/stake calendar is not compatible with MS Outlook 2003 for sure & other versions likely either. This is due to the organization and strict column naming requirements of Outlook when importing data. Currently members can only import 12 months at a time & to sync your Outlook calendar on a regular basis requires multiple downloads & imports of files. Due to the previous problem of duplicates this feature has not been used as well as it could or at all for Outlook users who have experienced this problem.
Solutions & work arounds:
Long term: Implementation of the new CalDAV standard across webservers & calendaring applications
Short term: Use my Macro until some one figures out a way to implement it on a Church Server to automatically spit out an Outlook compatible CSV file. The Macro was written in Excel 2003 & takes the exported CSV file from the calendar and automatically reformats it & spits out a new file in the correct format. All you have to do is take the reformatted file and import into Outlook as a CSV file using the option to replace duplicates.
Downside: This will not remove previous calendar entries that were downloaded and imported previously but then latter removed from the ward calendar due to cancellation etc... Those would have to be done manually.
Upside: It will let those who were previously unable to import Church calendars to do so and therefor be able to sync to their Smart phone as well if they have one. I attached the macro named Outlook converter.xls to this post. Once you have the file if you add it to your hidden XLSTART directory (Documents & Settings-Your account-Application Data-Microsoft-Excel-XLstart) you can then run it from within Excel with hot key Cntrl + (lower case letter o) or select from Tools-Macro-Macros after opening the downloaded CSV file from the calendar, to select it. Make sure you have a C:\temp directory before starting as the macro is hard coded to export to C:\temp. Suggest you save the downloaded CSV file there as well. Any questions send me an email through the forum & I will try to add additional information for benefit of all.