Q: cannot add icloud public calendar to outlook

I asked the IT department in our company if they know about this problem. They didn't, but they said they have a bunch of patches to install anyway. they don't know if these will fix anything, though.

I spent about an hour with apple on the phone and they had no idea what the issue might be.  So I have now uninstalled Office 2010 and installed 2013 and everything seems to be working.  Just for fun, I also tried re installing 2010 and it now works as well.  So my advice, try doing a clean install of office.  It is not really an answer, but it is working for me for now.

chad

I do not believe this is an apple issue.  Where I work we seem to be having this issue with all icloud calendars, google calendars and other subscription based calendars.    So I believe this is an issue with Outlook and MS needs to fix it.

I am only having the issue with iCloud and not other subscribed internet calendars from a variety of sources.

Debbie - I'd love to know the name of the Sr. Tech Advisor at Apple if s/he is helpful. The "Senior Advisor" who attempted to help me has been slow and  unable to answer even the most elementary of questions, i.e., "Is iCloud Control Panel spec'd to interface icloud email with Outlook 2013 supporting full IMAP functionality, e.g., filing email to folders and subfolders and renaming said folders."  Answer: blank stare and 3 weeks of no email reply.

As posted recently in this forum, I have just been told that "no, icloud control panel" does not support icloud email in Outlook.  I wonder if anyone in this thread has experience of it working?

I'm an icloud email/calendar/contacts user who has recently and with catastrophic results attempted to operate dual systems (MacBook and Windows Surface running Office 365).

I did some more tests with Outlook 2013 (still missing some of the newer patches) on Windows 7.

Test 1: I created a new calendar on iCloud with only 1 simple appointment in it. I shared it publicly and subscribed to it in Outlook. Initially this worked, but whenever Outlook tries to update it, Outlook crashes.

Test 2: I downloaded the .ics file for my normal calendar (containing 1200 appointments) and put it on a private webserver. After subscribing to that copy in Outlook, it works without problems, for 2 days in a row now. When subscribing to the original on iCloud, Outlook crashes while loading it from the server for the first time.

So it looks like Outlook has a problem with iCloud, not with the number of appointments or the content or encoding of the .ics file. There seems to be a difference depending on the size of the file, though.

I'm having the same issue on my work computer.

You state that you somehow managed to export your iCloud calendar to a private webserver - was that a one-time export or is it possible to have iCloud somehow keep such a kind of export updated? For me, this would be a viable workaround...

I was wrong.  It was indeed a public calendar that is crashing outlook,  When I reloaded the software It looked like it was working, but it was not actually updating, when I reloaded the public calendar it started crashing.  The next band-aid that seems to be working is that I changed the public calendar to private and that seems to be working for the few PCs that are crashing because of it.  

You can't tell iCloud to export the calendar. Exporting means calling the public URL for your calendar e.g. in a browser. I did it with curl one-time, but you could write a cronjob for that.

The command for curl would be "curl -L --compressed -O <url>"

-L follows redirects

--compressed un-gzips the channel compression

-O writes a file with the same filename as in the url. You could use "-o <somefilename>" instead.

Will try this out, curl already gets the file, but Outlook has its own schedule for updates...