[Lebodde]

I have got to believe that this has been discussed before but I did a search and nothing came up.

How can I convert a text file to an .ics file? We often get schedules for the kids sports via email. More often than not, it's a text file or an Excel file. Short of manually copying each event one by one into iCal, is there a converter that will generate an iCal import-able file directly?

Thank you for any help.

Bo

[larkost]

The problem is that any importer would need to deal with an astonishing number of variations in the format of the data, computers are netoriusly bad at adjusting to that sort of data. At this point I have not seen any transltor that even attempt to do this, and it would take a lot of work.

The best of all worlds is that the organizer would use any of the programs that use the ical format and publish the file to a server that everyone could get access to. The calendar/sunbird project over at Mozilla.org would be a free solution for the Windows/linux crowd.. and of course it is free. It is still a pre-release piece of software, but useable.

[Lebodde]

Thanks Larkost.

Actually I did some more research as I thought that SOMEONE must have done something about this. And Version tracker came to the rescue. Through it I found iCalMaker at
http://www.mmisoftware.co.uk/pages/icm.html

"iCalMaker is a text based appointment creation tool for use with iCal or to create appointment files which can be used for a range of tasks/functions."

So you basically copy the sched from email or whatever into TextEdit and add tabs in between the fields, make sure each line represent one event, import it in iCalMaker which then exports it straight into iCal. Seems pretty nifty.

I ran into one little problem which prevents me from exporting correctly but I emailed mmisoftware and I presume I will get an answer soon. (The prob is that I did not give an End Time and I get an error msg. You shouldn't have to give an end time for every event...)

Looks promising...