Importing and Migrating

Most people today have some sort of electronic calendar at least partially filled in with family birthday reminders. Rather than retyping the information or calling your cousin Ed to ask him when his birthday is, again, you can import information you’ve exported from other calendar programs, or in some cases, you are able to simply migrate from one calendar program to the Google Calendar. You can use either iCal format, commonly used by popular calendar software programs, or comma-separated value (CSV) files to import data into the Google Calendar.

Importing events from iCal or CSV files

Before you can import a calendar file, you must first have an exported calendar. See your calendar software about exporting either iCal or CSV file format, and export the file. It is then ready to import into Google Calendar. To import events from iCal or CSV files, follow these steps:

1. Click the Settings link at the top of the Calendar page.

2. Click the Import Calendar tab in the Calendar Settings form.

3. Type the path to the iCal or CSV file, or click Browse and navigate to the file.

4. Select the calendar into which you want the events to be imported.

5. Click Import.

Note 

Recurring events may be added as individual events rather than being recurring events when you import from CSV files. After importing events you need to edit any events that need to be configured as recurring events.

Migrating Outlook Calendar events to Google Calendar

To migrate your events and information from Outlook Calendar to Google Calendar, follow these steps:

Note 

These steps are for Microsoft Outlook 2003. They may vary in later versions.

1. Launch Microsoft Outlook.

2. Choose File Import and Export to launch the Import and Export Wizard.

3. From the action list in the wizard, select Export to a file.

4. Click Next.

5. In the Export to a File dialog box, select the type of file to be exported. This should be Comma Separated Values (Windows).

6. From the folder list, select Calendar.

7. Specify a name and file location for your exported file. You can click Browse to help you locate where you are saving the file.

8. By default, Export “Appointments” from folder: Calendar is selected. You can optionally map custom fields at this time. These are special information fields where you may have stored custom information in Outlook. Click Finish.

9. Now select the date range of events you want to include in your Google Calendar. Click OK after entering start and stop dates. Your calendar is exported to the location you specified.

10. Close Microsoft Outlook, and import the exported file into Google Calendar by clicking the Import Calendar tab on the Calendar Settings form. Click Browse to navigate to the exported file. Choose the calendar to import into, and click Import.

When the import process is complete, you are notified how many events were added to your calendar.

Migrating events from Yahoo! Calendar into Google Calendar

Yahoo! Calendar is another Web-based calendar similar to Google Calendar. If you’ve started creating your online calendar in Yahoo! and now you want to migrate your calendar to Google to take advantage of the Google features, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your Yahoo! account, and start your Yahoo! Calendar by clicking the Calendar tab.

2. Click the Options link in the upper-right corner of the page.

3. In the Management column of the Calendar Options, select Import/Export.

4. Select Export to Outlook to export your file as a CSV file.

After you download the file, follow the instructions in the preceding section to import your CSV file into Google Calendar.

Note 

Google does not support Yahoo! recurring events. Instead, individual events are created. You can modify them manually using the edit features of Google Calendar.