(The short story is: if you want to convert Google Calendar iCal v2 files to vCal v1 files for import into your Palm Desktop, use this web application I made last night. Please leave a comment on this posting if you use it!
If you’re interested in recent changes to the application, see the dynamic changelog on Google Code.)
It’s amazing how just when you really do need to put all your time into some deadline, you find the perfect WAB, better known as Work Avoidance Behaviour.
In any case, last night I was planning to work on two proposals with rapidly approaching deadlines, instead I somehow was convinced that it should be easy to import some of those neat iCal v2 files available on the web (for example as exported from Google Calendar) into my trusty Palm Desktop 4.1, which I use on my laptop to manage my life and synchronise with my Palm Tungsten C.
It turns out that this is far more complicated than necessary. Google Calendar only outputs iCal version 2, Palm Desktop, even the latest version, only imports vCalendar version 1. There are a number of websites that state that simply renaming the .ics file to .vcs, and changing the version tag to 1.0 does the trick. WRONG. Google Calendar iCal files actually use iCal version 2.0 features, so this idiot workaround does not, well, work around.
By now it was almost time for bed, and I’d tried Sunbird (exports ical v2), Evolution (the windows version is the worst POS software I’ve ever come across) and bunches of other things. No go. Finally I stumbled on vcal.py by Mark Bucciarelli. This almost worked, except for a few bugs (empty field handling, a.o.) which I fixed, and the fact that it doesn’t handle RRULEs at all. After reading the vcal standard, I implemented a really ugly RRULE transformation that seems to do the trick, mostly.
I’ve packaged all of this ugliness in a simple CGI that you can now use to convert Google Calendar iCal version 2.0 files to vCal version 1.0 files for consumption by your Palm Desktop. Use this entirely at your own risk of course, but let me know in a comment on this post (see below) if it works, or if it doesn’t.
(if you’re interested in the patch source, go to the ical2vcal site on googlecode.)
Related posts:
Didn’t work, I’m sorry. Using a Palm Treo
Thank you, works well.
I´ve worried a long time how to view my sunbird calendar files on palm.
Now I´m exporting to ics, and importing as vcs via the palm desktop.
All the best!
Hallo Johannes,
Do you know how to convert google calendar files to dba or vcs files for importing to Palm Desktop 4.2 by any chance?
If you copy the output into Notepad, then save as a .vcs, it works for some reason.
I tried this just now using an ics I made from my google calendar and Palm Desktop version 4.1.2 (for my palm Tungsten T3) and it did not work. I also tried the “workaround” that you listed and as you said, it also did not work.
Never Mind … I got it to work ! I had saved the HTML source (which obviously didn’t work). I had to “select all” off of the web page and then past into notepad++ and that worked. Good Job ! I’ll post about this on my blog.
Abe posted this:
3) Export from google calender into an ics file
4) use this utility to convert to vcs file
5) THEN cut an paste into text file change the extension to vcs and save ( I tried saving the output as is in changing it to vcs and it did not work)
6) import to Palm
How do I do #3??
…Lisa
I figured out how to Export from google calender into an ics file. (right click, save link as)
I cut and paste the resulting text file into Notepad, saved it with a vcs extension then tried to import it into Palm Desktop…3 lone events out of 80 imported
My file starts like this:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:1.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
CREATED:20080719T000203Z
DTEND:20080923
DTSTAMP:20080901T205214Z
DTSTART:20080922
DURATION_SECONDS:86400
CLASS:PUBLIC
LAST-MODIFIED:20080722T144544Z
SEQUENCE:0
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:Pre-season
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
UID:otavpjslqlf48iu5i4od6d5aq4@google.com
Any suggestions?
…Lisa
@Lisa:
Under “My calendars” on the left, click on “Settings”, then click on the calendar you want to export, then click on the little “ICAL” button right at the bottom under “Private address”.
Thanks cpbotha.
The 2 calendars I am trying to import to my Palm are public sports calendars. They don’t have a Private Address. I right-clicked on the ICAL button under Calendar Address and then Save As to save the calendar to my Desktop and then did the conversion.
Will Calendar Address not work? Does the calendar need a Private Address in order to save, do the conversion and import?
@Lisa:
Calendar address works just fine. It does not need a Private Address.
It is not working for me and I am not sure why.
I saved, converted and imported.
Palm Desktop says `reading file`and then just 1 or a few items get imported out of 80.
I am using PD 6.2.1 and Vista
…Lisa
Thanks for the app, it works great with the exception on one thing. Maybe you have an idea…
Repeatable events do not seem to show up in the palm calendar.
Let me know your thoughts please. Thanks again, this saved me a lot of manual editing.
Tres cute!
Using this to convert Rainlander csv to palm desktop. Usual issue re repeating events but that is ok. Can now continue to use Rainlander – vastly better than Outlook – while syncing with the T3.
Ta muchly.
Thank you!!
Thanks a lot! Worked a lot better than manually entering everything.
Worked like a charm – even recurring events!
Thank you!
It worked, thank you! I’m trying to convert old calendar data from my old Psion to my new Nokia N810, and as there is no decent calendar PIM available that runs natively on this machine, I will make do with the old Palm datebook using the garnet vm for maemo, it is simple but very quick and useful. Now I still have the problem of ä,ö,é etc. letters that are not exported correctly from Google calendar…
worked enough for my satisfaction. many of the dates were off by one day though. thanks.
I am exporting to .ics from Groupwise, then using your utility. However, I get the “may not be a valid vCal file” when I try to import the resulting file into Palm Desktop. I tried saving it as a .vcs file and also tried the cut-and-paste method, but neither method worked. Any ideas?
Great job !
From Firefox I needed to copy/paste – not Save As – and
it imported without error.
What a timesaver !
Thankyou !
Thanks, this tool rocks, adding my google calenders to my treo saves me so much time and unduplicated work.
Thanks.
bob
Thank you for the awesomely easy solution to a problem that’s been aggravating me for months! This was the first time I’d gone looking for a real solution and I found your site right away.
Your script worked fine and now I can sync my windows and google calendars to my palm device.
Thanks again!
It worked!
Here’s what I did:
1) Received ics file for a Webex meeting.
2) Used this utility to convert and Save AS txt file
3) Renamed file extension to vcs
6) imported to Palm desktop.
Good job and thanks.
Super!
This worked great!!! Until I found this, i thought I would have to do some strange kind of work-around to get the google calendar stuff into my palm pilot (tungston e) Note – there is a thing called GooSync that you can install on the palm (or a phone) and it synchronizes with your calendar directly – but one glitch- palm doesn’t support ip connections over usb, so there is yet another little app to do that (ppp software from softick.com) but that is a 21 day trial, so after that, you’re hosed, unless you want to pay $21 or whatever it is. Also, the nice thing about this web app is that I can export my wife’s calendar, convert it, and import it directly into the palm pilot (for free) Thank-You.
Thanks bunches. Your little script worked a charm for me. Would love to see you get that M Graves patch integrated. Save one more little step. But really, that would be icing. Thanks again!
@Kristin, @Mark Graves:
I’ve integrated Mark’s patch, see http://code.google.com/p/ical2vcal/source/detail?r=5
awesome!! works fantastic! thank you!!
I found your project the same way you started it. By doing something other than work that had to be done. The migration into my palm desktop went off like a hitch. Thanks for your time spent on it.
WOW and thanks!!!!
Searched and tried other types of converters NO GOOD!
retried with yours…perfectly simple!
ONLY Problem was once converted I had to manually change file name to .vcs
Then the Icon changed and the file became usable, Thanks again you saved me a huge headache!!!!
I used your converter to get my windows calendar items into Palm Desktop. Thanks so much
Worked great to import those pesky MSOutlook *.ics meeting reminders into my Palm Desktop 4.2. Using Eudora as my email client and had no good way to deal with these files. Now I have options until I find some other alternative for the Palm/Eudora combination.
Yep! Found this by Google search, used it to convert 3 files which I had constructed mainly by hand (wonderful what you can do with vi). CGI barfed on 2 lines of one file. Guess what, they really were invalid. Imported 2 files to Palm Tungsten T3 with no problems. The 3rd file gives an error (something like “not a valid VCS file”). I haven’t diagnosed that yet, but I expect it will turn out to be another problem with my hand-editing.
Thanks. Great tool.
Great tool! A lot of the alternatives for syncing with Palm are costly.
One issue I noticed: “All day” events in GCal end up as “12am-12am” events in Palm Desktop, as opposed to all-day events.
The conversion worked great from ics to vcal, except all my events are off by 1 day. everything is day early. any suggestions?
Hi.
I get different errors to those above and I’m hoping you might help.
I’ve right-clicked on my Google calendar and saved as a 289Kb Google.ics
Opening this in Notepad looks ok – good “calendar type” stuff… e,g
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
and lots of…
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20090106T133000Z
DTEND:20090106T150000Z
DTSTAMP:20090116T145158Z
UID:CSVConvertd6c854a1dcb2b4bfd83d3520dc1fc23c
CLASS:PRIVATE
CREATED:19000101T120000Z
DESCRIPTION:
LAST-MODIFIED:20090116T143726Z
LOCATION:Pod
SEQUENCE:0
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:Training program meeting
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT
I browse to and load this file and click Convert to vcs.
I get an “Opening Google” alert box…
“You have chosen to open Google which is a text/x-calendar from http://visualisation.tudelft.ni
I can save or open. Opening with notepad produces this …
“content-type: text/plain Error parsing your upload: need more than 1 value to unpack”.
Saving has no file extension and file is only 80Kb.
Can you advise please? I’m using Vista Ultimate and Firefox 3.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot!
If there weren’t these double records it would be superb.
Is there a good solution to thios problem?
Hein
It worked on an iCalendar that a classmate made for the class. I have a TX with Palm desktop version 6.2.2 Thanks a lot.
Thanks, It work very well!
Worked perfectly for a single event export from Facebook!
I’m using Mozilla’s Seamonkey on a Macbook (osx 10.5.4), Palm Desktop 4.1 for Mac, and I took the following steps;
1) Export event invite from Facebook, download .ics file to hard drive, I called it ‘band.ics’
2) upload the file ‘band.ics’ from my hard drive and clicked convert
3) the download dialog showed up a second later and I let Palm Desktop be the app responsible for opening it (bypassing the download and import steps)
4)Palm Desktop opened and imported the file, including the event description which was converted into a handheld note attached to the event in my calendar.
5) Sync’d it!
I have wanted this for a long time :)
One wish; the newline tags appear as ‘\n’ in the text, those need to be stripped out in the conversion process.
Thanks so much!
Brian
Exported google calendar as an .ics, used script, got a .vcs file in response, it crashed palm desktop. So, it doesn’t like the .vcs file. Something about it didn’t work. Thoughts as to whether it’s because palm desktop is now in version six and looks for different files?
VCS is more or less a standard file format. If Palm Desktop claims to support VCS (which it does), it should be able to read it. :)
Without any more information concerning the crash, this is very hard for me to debug. Is it reproducible? I.e. if you go through the same process (download ics file, convert to vcs, import in Palm Desktop) does it also crash? Does Palm Desktop crash give you an error message before crashing?
These are the steps I’m taking:
In Google’s calendar settings, I’m clicking on export calendar, which downloads a zip file of my calendar in ics format. I extract it to retrieve the ics file.
Using the script provided here, I browse for that .ics file and select it. I then click the convert to vcal option. That puts a file on my desktop with the same name except for the extension.
I start Palm Desktop (by ACCESS version 6.2.2), I select File, Import and select the .vcs file. The default file type it is set to look for when the Import File dialogue box is open is .dba (if that sheds any light on the subject). I change the file format to .vcs in order to find the correct file.
When I click on Import after selecting the .vcs file, Palm Desktop appears to read the file for half a second before Windows (Vista) throws up an error saying: Palm Desktop by ACCESS Application has stopped working. Windows is checking for a solution to the problem.
It doesn’t find a solution, so it then returns: A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available. The only option is to click on the ”Close Program” button in the dialogue box. Program closes. End of story.
Hope that helped in some way.
The last thing I would do is check the generated VCS file (in a text editor) to see if it looks like the reasonable text description that it should be.
If this is the case, then we’re a bit stuck. Software should never crash even when reading a wildly-deviating input file. The only other thing I could suggest is trying the same experiment with a simpler / other calendar to see if the problem occurs always, or only with certain calendar constructs.
I neglected to mention that I am using Google Chrome as the browser.
I tried importing 4 different calendars from google calendar using chrome into my palm desktop and 2 of them worked. Thank you!
You’re my hero!
Worked perfectly and solved a problem that would have been quite daunting.
So thank you for sharing.
after i hit convert it opens with palm software but then says it is not a valid vcal file
Works fine, but I prefer stand-alone app, this web stuff won’t work always…
The source is available if you want to run it on your own computer. :)
I’m making it as easy as possible for those who don’t want to or are not sure how.
Took me a while to google my way to your site but, your converter worked like a charm.
Thanks for putting this up. I’ve been using it for about 6 months converting the miscellaneous MS outlook *.ics files that people send me to import them into my Palm Desktop. I don’t use M$ outlook, still stuck with Eudora. I don’t use your app for going between google calendar and the Palm. I use Companionlink for that and it is working pretty well. But I still need your app to deal with those pesky *.ics files from outlook.
This worked exporting from Mac OS X iCal and importing to Palm Desktop running in a Win2K virtual PC on the Mac using VirtualBox. ( I sync my Tungsten T3 via the virtual PC, not the Mac).
I just need to know how to delete all the existing Palm calendar entries first since it doesn’t sync, it just adds all the freshly exported entries to the ones I imported last time so I end up with multiples of what was there.
Thank you!!
I converted Lotus Notes .ics to Palm .vcs and it perfectly worked! You are great!
Thank you very much!
Hi, thanks for this script, it is very helpful – to an extent. It worked beautifully to import to an old palm for two smaller calendars that I have but it gave the following error for my main calendar:
Error parsing your upload: mktime argument out of range
Thanks for any tips.