I often get given calendars and lists of events as Word documents or Excel files. This is not very convenient for uploading to my calendar – especially if the list of events is quite long. Today I managed to wrestle a Calendar from Word, via Excel into my Google calendar with relatively little editing. Here’s how:
- Copy all the events into Excel. I was copying from tables in a Word document, so this was pretty easy.
- Make sure each event is on a separate row – this involved a bit of editing
- Google Calendar will accept an import from a CSV file, but it must have exactly these headings:
Subject,Start Date,Start Time,End Date,End Time,All Day Event,Description,Location,Private
Yes, exactly these headings – that does seem to include the capital letters. Extra spaces are not allowed, so make sure there are no extra spaces at the end of each heading. - I added these headings, in this order, to my spreadsheet so that I could fill in all of the relevant data quickly.
- I used Excel formulae to grab the event title (Subject), Start Date, Start Time, End Date and End Time for each event from the list I had been given.
NB If the times are blank, the calendar will assume it’s an all day event. If the times are present, there’s no need to put an end date. - Once I had filled in the first line, a quick copy and paste updated the information for all the events on my spreadsheet.
- I put "True" in the field for Private on each event, although my calendar is set to Private by default, so I could probably have left this blank.
- It is vital that the the dates and times are formatted correctly. (Actually, I did this on my second attempt. If the formatting is wrong, the events won’t get imported, so this part is important) The dates must be in the format MM/DD/YYYY; I formatted the times as 24 hour times, ie hh:mm
- Now copy all of the data and formats from the Subject, Start Date, Start Time, End Date, End Time, All Day Event, Description, Location, Private columns into a new spreadsheet (not a new page in the same workbook, it must be a completely new spreadsheet).
- Save the new sheet in CSV (Comma delimited) format. Click through the eleventy-nine “Are you sure?"… "Are you really sure?" warnings that appear.
- Almost done! Finally, I headed over to Google Calendar. Clicked the settings icon, chose Settings, then Calendars and clicked the Import option. I followed the instructions to upload my file, then did a triumphant dance when 108 events uploaded in seconds.
I would not faff around doing this for just a few events (it would be much quicker to type them in!), but it was definitely quicker than uploading each event individually for this number of calendar entries. Now I know how to do it, next time will be even quicker 
Google do warn that there is a 1MB limit for the upload file, so that might be a problem for a really long list of events.
I got my instructions from:
- Google support: About CSV files
- Google support: Trouble importing CSV files
- and most importantly, Nathan Henrie’s really helpful page – Import a Spreadsheet Schedule of Events to iCal or Google Calendar — Updated
… and here’s a sample CSV file (with a very short list of fictitious events!)
Photo: Calendar from Calendar Project by Caroline on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
