ICS to CSV

Calendars hold a lot of useful data that is hard to reach: hours spent with clients, the meeting load of a team, a season’s schedule, a year of appointments. Every calendar app can export .ics files, but you cannot sort, sum or print them easily. This tool converts .ics files into a table with one row per event, ready for Excel, Google Sheets or an import into another calendar.

Getting an .ics file

Google Calendar: Settings › Import & export › Export, which gives a ZIP with one .ics per calendar; unzip it with the ZIP Extractor. Apple Calendar: File › Export. Outlook: File › Save Calendar. Many booking systems and school portals also offer .ics downloads or subscription links you can save.

Time zones

Events store their times with a time zone, in UTC, or as floating local times. “Convert to a time zone” shows every event in the zone you pick, which is what you want for timesheets and schedules. “As written in the file” keeps each event in its own zone and adds a Time zone column. Outlook exports use Windows zone names such as “W. Europe Standard Time”; common ones are translated to standard zones automatically.

Repeating events

A weekly meeting is stored once with a rule like “every week on Monday”. Switch on “List each repeat as its own row” to get one row per date up to the end date you set, which is essential for counting hours. Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rules with intervals, counts, end dates, specific weekdays such as the last Friday of the month, and excluded dates are expanded. Occurrences that were moved or changed appear with their new details. Rarer rules are listed once with their description.

All-day events

Calendar files mark the end of an all-day event as the following day. The table shows the last day the event covers instead, so a two-day offsite on 12 and 13 November reads 12 to 13 November, not 12 to 14.

Column layouts

“Detailed” gives the most information: start and end date and time, all-day flag, time zone, location, description, repeat rule, organizer, attendees, categories, status, link and UID. “Google Calendar” and “Outlook” use the column names and US date formats those apps expect when you import a CSV, which is useful for moving events between calendar systems.

Billing hours

With repeats expanded and times converted, add a column in Excel for duration (end minus start) and sum it per client or category with the CSV Pivot Table. Filter by the Subject column or by attendees to isolate one project.

Privacy

Calendars reveal a lot about a person. The file is read only in your browser and never uploaded.

Large calendars

A calendar with years of history can hold thousands of events and, with repeats expanded, many more rows. Set the “Up to” date to the period you need, such as the end of the current year, to keep the table focused. Very long expansions are capped and a notice tells you when that happens.

Related tools

To go the other way and create events from a spreadsheet, use CSV to ICS. For contact files, see vCard to CSV; the Online Calendar imports .ics files too.