Outlook 2003 and iCal

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John Schultz - 14 Feb 2005 21:56 GMT

I've seen some messages on this in the past, but am hoping someone has new
information on iCal support in Outlook 2003 SP1 (11.6359.6360).

When I try to import the .ics file via File | Import and Export, I receive
"vCalendar/iCalendar Import failed. The input file may be corrupt."

When I double click the file on my desktop, Outlook reports "Cannot import
vCalendar file." Clicking on the Show Help button says "This error can
appear if you have attempted to save a recurring Lunar appointment in
iCalendar format. To avoid this error, set the appointment option to
Gregorian instead of Lunar." I looked at the .ics file in a text editor
and CALSCALE:GREGORIAN is present in the file. I do not see any reference
to lunar in it.

I had seen somewhere (here or another site while searching) a
recommendation to remove the BEGIN:VTIMEZONE/END:VTIMEZONE section from the
file, but that did not change matters.

When I dropped the .ics file onto the Outlook calendar, I was told "Can't
copy the items. Cannot import vCalendar file." The Show Help button
reported the same message about lunar formats.

The calendar I am accessing can be found here:

http://www.lpmo.org/events/calendar/MOLP.ics

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Telmo Amaral - 15 Mar 2005 18:24 GMT

I recently needed to import some .ics (iCalendar) files from Mozilla
Calendar / Sunbird to MS Outlook. Here are some important steps I had to
manually go through, to avoid the annoying "Import failed" message:

- Backup the .ics file.
- Make sure it contains only VEVENTs, no VTODOs. The easiest way to achieve
this is to open the file in the Mozilla Calendar or Sunbird and delete all
tasks that may exist. Remember to uncheck Hide Completed Tasks, to see all
the tasks before deleting them.
- Open the file in UltraEdit-32.
- Do File > Conversions > Unicode to ASCII. If you switch to Hex mode, will
clearly see the difference this makes.
- At the beginning of the file, right under "BEGIN:VCALENDAR", delete
"VERSION :2.0".
- Split the file into more than one file, if necessary to ensure that there
won't be more than, say, 30 VEVENTs in each file. Of course, remember to
start / end each file with BEGIN:VCALENDAR / END:VCALENDAR.
- Outlook should then be able to import the names, descriptions, and start
/ due dates of the events from these smaller files; recurrence information
is lost and must be manually recreated.

I'm sure there must be better ways to do this, but I don't know the
iCalendar format well. For someone who does, it shouldn't be difficult to
create a filter to achieve this, and maybe even translate the recurrence
data to something that Outlook would understand. Of course, a decent filter
is what Outlook should feature to start with, instead of one that reports
an error and doesn't event tell you which line in the .ics is causing the
problem...

Cheers,
Telmo

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Telmo Amaral - 15 Mar 2005 18:40 GMT

John, if you're still around, I tried your MOLP.ics file (under Windows XP)
. Removing the line "VERSION:2.0" at the beginning seems to be enough to
work around Outlook 2003's "Import failed" message. The imported result
seems far from perfect, but at least you'd get some events at the proper
dates into Outlook...
T.

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