Managing the google calendar …

I use a tool called Google Calendar Toolkit (“GCT”) (here). It’s a great tool and Neil is a most charming and service minded person.

I had an issue there I had data visible in online calendar but where GTC didn’t read but a subset – most irritating. The problem was actually mot really found but some learning from working with Google Calendars.

The idea for mitigating the error was to export the data of my calendar, delete it, and then recreate it from the exported data.

1) Export the calendar to an iCal file. On the picture you can see the option to select .

* From here you can select to export all the calendars (export – give you all of them in a ZIP file) or you can select a specific calendar (just click on one) and selecting the calendar address, and download it from there as iCal. The result should be the same

My issue was that I wanted to delete all content of my main calendar, and there was a presumed error that would be rectified if I exported and re-imported the data.

2) Delete the main calendar.

This cannot be done for the main calendar. If you select delete in the calendar menu, there is a trashcan option but using it deletes all entries in the calendar but doesn’t delete the calendar itself. It was basically what I wanted so it was OK but far from obvious

3) Import the data from the file.

Now this is where it got tricky. I did upload the data to the calendar (selecting import from the same location you enter when doing as the picture shows) but the requester gave me the very non-obvious reply that I didn’t have sufficient access rights to do the upload. On my calendar. Huh???

The reason this happens is that there is an UID collision of the data in the file and the data in the calendar (still there. only not visible as it’s deleted and hence hidden). So what you need to do is to remove the UID from the events, and upload the file in this form.

The hint was found here (thanks to Neil for the pointer of course).

1) I installed notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/).
2) I opened the backed up .ics file (old calendar)
3) I did the following:
—– menu – “Search”
———- choose “Find”
————— click “Mark” tab
——————– search for UID
——————– tick “Bookmark line”
——————– press “Mark All” –> all rows you want to delete received a bookmark
—– menu – “Search”
———- choose “Bookmark”
————— click “Remove Bookmarked lines” –> all lines containing “UID” are removed
4) Save new ics file
5) Import new ics file