Importing data into Google Calendar

Entering data into Google calendar can be tedious, but it turns out that there is a relatively easy way to perform a bulk import of data. At the bottom left corner of the calendar page, there is an "Add" button. Click on this, and one of the options is "Import Calendar". The Google Calendar import function is expecting a comma-separated values (CSV) file. Apparently if you export your Outlook calendar information using CSV format, Google will accept it. (I don't use Outlook, but I'm told it works.) However, you can also create the data manually. In this post I will provide an example of what such a file looks like, and then tell you how I created it.

To enter my son's baseball games, I used a file with the following format (what you see below is the first three lines of the file. You can have as many lines of data/events as you want.):

"Subject","Start Date","Start time","End Date","End time","All day event","Description","Location"
"Game at KWN (Away)",06/27/07,06:00:00 PM,06/27/07,08:00:00 PM,0,"Kenilworth North","Sears School 542 Abbotsford Rd, Kenilworth, IL"
" Game at J1 ( Away)",07/07/07,11:00:00 AM,07/07/07,01:00:00 PM,0,"James #1","James Park, Evanston IL"

The "subject" item shows up under "What" in Google Calendar (the event title), the date and time information under "When", "location" under "Where", and "Description" under "Description".

I haven't done a lot of experimenting, but I tried various things and the format above did work correctly. I haven't been able to find documentation of the import function, so this was based on trial and error and experimenting with a Perl script from this very useful page.

Note that Google calendar automatically creates a map link based on the "location" field.

You can create the example above with a text editor, or in theory, with any program that writes CSV files. I tried to use Excel, but Excel CSV files don't work since Excel doesn't put quotes around text. There is no option to format the files differently. The program that did work is the spreadsheet in OpenOffice, which provides CSV formatting options. Perhaps Excel works, but it didn't work for me when I tried it.