Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

does anyone know of a converter file that would enable me to use an exported .ics calendar file (from my mac) and convert it something I could use with OO spreadsheet? Maybe CSV??

Export csv instead of ics.

Apple calendar only allows to export the calendar with .ics files. I somehow have to convert .ics to a file that could be used with Calc in OpenOffice.

Hi,

what's about opening them with the CSV Filter of Calc?

*.ics files are in fact simple text files. I've tried it with one, set the column separator to ':' (of course without the quotes) in the Text Import Wizard and it opened fine.

Frank

fst wrote:*.ics files are in fact simple text files.

I wouldn't go that far to call .ics formatted files as simple text files. It is right, they are plain text files, but HTML files are plain text, as well. And most people won't be happy if they would have to view them as source code.

The .ics format specification requires commas to be escaped with a backslash. And a similar escaping method is needed for other punctuation, linebreaks, etc. A data record is delimited by BEGIN and END, with one field per line and the colon as the separator between the field name and the field's content. In other words is more like LDIF then like csv.

If you have Thunderbird with the Lightning extensions you can import the .ics files into a calendar of Lightning and export it as an (Outlook) .csv file. Of course there is no such thing as Outlook .csv, it is just plain and simple .csv. Outlook .csv is more like a working title with that the developers try to say that the resulting .csv can be imported into MS Outlook.

The last time I used this was 2 years ago with Mozilla' standalone calendar application Sunbird. At that time the process was anything but stable. Because quite often it wasn't possible to re-import the exported .csv back again into Sunbird/Lightning. But hopefully this has improved since then.
(Sunbird is a dead project since 1 or 2 years, so you will have to install Thunderbird even if you have no plans to use it for mail. But without Thunderbird it is impossible to run Lightning.

I use Thunderbird with its calendar extension. It can export and import csv and ics files. So I think that this software can be used as a converter. Apart from that it is a very good mail client for private use.

I recently received an invitation for an interview. However the file was a ics file and my Windows 7/OpenOffice 4 system does not know what program to use to open the file. I tried opening using the Writer but it was a mess. Any ideas how I should open it?
Thanks

This depends on what you exactly mean with received? If you received the .ics file by mail the most natural way to process it is with the mail reader client. MS Outlook does this automatically, but as Villeroy mentioned you can also use Thunderbird and its Lightning extension to open the .ics files. And of course iCal on the Mac.
If you received it as a file or you downloaded it from some webserver, you need to load the stored .ics file into a new calendar in Thunderbird/Lightning (create a new calendar, give it a name, locate the .ics file, open it and copy the invitation event from this new calendar into your default calender, save and optionally delete the original .ics file otherwise you may end with a lof of small ics files that are not easy to backup.

Don't know if this will be of any help, but I found the foollowing converter to be VERY helpful in the above regard...

http://projectwizards.net/en/support/?f=ics2csv

Hope it helps you too

Hey,

I know this post is old, but since I found this first when searching for a solution, I thought this info might help someone.

This may be a more full-featured option to create a spreadsheet from a google calendar:
http://blog.cloudbakers.com/blog/export ... preadsheet
As long as you don't have anything against Google's privacy policy or against putting your document online.

Then you can of course download a google spreadsheet as xls or csv if you want or continue to use it through google drive.

I'm also thinking about creating another column in the sheet to calculate distances from the appointments to my office. Kind of a workaround for tracking mileage =\ but it's useful for some purposes. I'll probably be using a mileage tracking app in the future.