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How do I find old events on my Calendar?

I have several years worth of events in my calendar. iOS seems utterly incapible of doing a basic search system-wide to find content that's older than, apparently, one year.

Today I got a jury duty notice, and I tried to search for the last time I had jury duty. iOS tells me there's no occurance of "jury" in my device. This is 200% BS. I went to my old Palm Z22, did the same search, and got four hits. When I manually hunted for them on my iPod Touch, I found them.

How do I find old events in iOS? Apparently Apple hasn't bothered to make this possible. Anyone know of any 3rd-party apps that correct this seeming oversight?

iPod touch, iOS 4.3.3, iOS 4.3.5

Posted on Sep 30, 2011 12:57 AM

Best reply

100 Watt Walrus Author

Level 1

74 points

Posted on Jan 18, 2017 3:39 AM

Original poster here, writing in reply to the most recent activity.

My current solution for all of this is Fantastical. The iOS app, by default, searches all dates no matter how far back. I don't even remember the last time I opened the supremely inferior native calendar.

The Mac app, while pricey is very much worth it to me for several features not offered elsewhere — #1 being that it's easy to quickly switch between set of calendars, so you don't have to always be looking at one cluttered UI splattered with the colors of multiple schedules. (Hey Apple, where are the "tabs everywhere" in the Calendar app?)

Having said that, I just opened my Mac's Calendar.app for the first time in at least a year or two, and I was able to search for older events. (Screenie below.)

Running 10.11.6. Your mileage may vary.

View in context

58 replies

Oct 7, 2011 1:43 PM in response to Ingo2711

@Ingo

Yes, I've had to resort to using iCal to find older events. That's a workaround, but of course, it doesn't do me any good when I'm not at my Mac. I use my iPod for everything calendar-related, and only open iCal when I need to do something that Apple hasn't bothered to make possible in iOS — usually basic things my 10-year-old Palm did just fine, like the problem at hand, and setting an alarm for 12 hours before an event, or 5 hours before an event, or 3 hours before an event, or at any other interval that Apple hasn't hard-wired into the Calendar on iOS (instead of simply offering an "Other..." option). I'll be interested to see if Apple allows users better flexibility and access to their own data in iOS 5. 🙂

@kevin

I don't think you read my issue clearly. Your method does no good when trying to find old events for which you don't already know the date. My question to my iPod calendar is this: "When was the last time I had jury duty?" I have at least four or five events in my Calendar with "jury duty" in the name from years past. It is impossible to find these events in iOS. Nor can I find, say, which Xmas was the year my sister gave me a blender. Each Xmas, I attach a note to an event on Dec. 25 that lists all the gifts given and received. On my Palm, all I had to do was search the device for the word "blender," and up it pops: December 25, 2004. This is impossible in iOS. Instead, I have to go to each Dec. 25, open the note, and read it manually, looking for the word "blender" myself, because iOS doesn't bother looking at events more than a year old.

Oct 7, 2011 2:08 PM in response to 100 Watt Walrus

if you click on list this should list all calendars on the ipod touch i tried itwith my 2nd gen ipod touch and its listing all events back to 2005 where my first event was entered, it works on mine but hopefully the ios 5 will fix this and let you type in words to find them

Oct 7, 2011 5:02 PM in response to kevin buick

Hmmm. That's a thought. It would involve a lot of scrolling! But when I use List view, I can only scroll back ~13 months, to September 18, 2010.

I went to Settings > Calendars > Sync and changed the setting to "All Events," then synced again, and that got me further back, but only in one calendar — my google calendar for work.

The events on all my local calendars still only go back to Sept. 18, 2010 in List View.

But thanks for the notion, Kevin.

Nov 1, 2011 11:20 AM in response to 100 Watt Walrus

Thanks for raising this topic again; I see it has been raised numerous times over the years.

There is no change in IOS5.

This week I ditched my old Windows smartphone and now have an iPhone 4S. into which I imported my entire calendar successfully.

I'm mostly delighted with the new phone, my first Apple experience, but I am greatly disappointed that I cannot search for events older than a year or more than a year ahead.

I'm a pilot and my rosters are all in the calendar. If I want to find out on which dates I flew to a particular destination or with a particular colleague, my very old windows phone or my 10 year old Sony Clié PDA could list the relevant events easily. When was my last dentist check up? When did I get the boiler serviced last and by whom etc etc. With all other phones this is easy. I have sent feedback to Apple requesting an enhancement.

In the meantime, any suggestions anyone?

Nov 8, 2011 3:39 AM in response to G from Holywood

Hey G. I still haven't found a way to do this very basic and obvious search that was a standard feature on Palm devices 10 years ago.

But since you have a 4S, have you tried Siri?

Nov 9, 2011 7:00 AM in response to 100 Watt Walrus

Thanks for the suggestion, which have now tried.

Siri works astonishingly well, recognising some very esoteric words and rare names.

Perhaps not surprisingly however, it seems to use the same search function which would otherwise be accessed from the screen.

Today, I wanted to know when I last worked with a colleague by the name of Nash. I asked Siri, "Find Nash in my calendar." Siri dutifully replies, " I don't see any appointments about 'Nash.'" Yet there are several apointments over a year ago with that name, so no change I'm afraid.

Keep trying!

Nov 9, 2011 1:13 PM in response to G from Holywood

Well, no surprise there, I guess. I've just started keeping records of things I need to track over multiple years in SimpleNote instead of in the Calendar.

Pity Apple seems to not care about including simple, basic functionality like this — and in fact go out of their way to limit such functionality. I mean, they had to actively and deliberately limit iOS search capability. What's the point?

Oh well, I guess Apple knows better than I do what's important for me to access and how I should be using my own device to read my own content. Thanks guys for relieving me of the burden of being able to find information on my iPod.

MGimenez

Level 1

4 points

Aug 2, 2012 2:17 PM in response to 100 Watt Walrus

I completely understand some people's frustration with the half-baked Apple search function that is limited to one year's worth of information. A little over 12 years ago, since the glory days of the PDA, I have used my calendar like a diary. The search function on my Palm was flawless. I moved to a Treo and the search function was flawless. Then I migrated to a BlackBerry and the search function was flawless. I took a leap of faith and switched to an iPhone and $&#*! Why can't I search the way I always did? I was so angry that even went so far as to switch back to my BlackBerry for a while since I could not deal with this aggravating calendar "problem."

After an extensive google search, I finally found an app called calvetica 4.0. It allows the iPhone to "limit" the calendar search to within 3 months, 6 months, one year, five years, and EVERYTHING. Voila! Success! Well, almost. The search function is slowwww. It can take up to 10 minutes to search for an item that is 12 years old. Clearly, it's not perfect and it's not comparable to the ease of the Palm, Treo, or BlackBerry, but at least it's better than the native calendar in the iPhone. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the iPhone 5 will incorporate this simple search feature. Please. Pretty please.

Aug 2, 2012 5:11 PM in response to MGimenez

I also discovered Calvetica while trying to just find a better calendar in general. This was a feature I hadn't even explored yet, and I'm tickled pink to hear about it. You're right, it is slow to search old data. But it's faster than going to my computer, opening it up, launching iCal, and searching there. And it's a lot nicer reading notes in Calvetica than in iCal anyway.

I've switched over 100% to Calvetica because of all the other things it does infinitely better than the native calendar app:

- The UI is much nicer

- You can read more of the names of events

- You can see the first few words of the notes on events (or the Location, your choice)

- You can see which events have notes and alarms

- You can delete events right from the list-like view

- You can set and change alarms right from the list-like view

- You can set just about any alarm period you want, not just the 5 or 6 periods Apple thinks you need

- (my default alarms are 2 days before and 2 hours before — can't do that on Apple software!)

- You can customize what fields you see in Event Creation, and what order

- There's a quick-add feature where you can bang out a quick, alarmed event in about 5 seconds

- You can have it ask at the end of creating an event which calendar to put it in (something I always forgot to do)

My only beefs:

- In Detail Week view (similar to List in the native app, but not continuous), today's date isn't highlighted

- There's no continuous scrolling option

But that second issue I've pretty much realized I don't need as much as I thought, since you can just swipe between weeks and months.

I've tried about 15 calendar apps, and Calvetica is the best by leaps and bounds.

Oct 4, 2013 7:46 AM in response to 100 Watt Walrus

Looks like this is still an issue with iOS 7. We still can't search the calendar more than a year back. Unbelievable that something so basic as searching ALL past events is beyond Apple's capabilities.

I really do miss the DateBk application from my old Handspring Visor and Palm devices. It was the perfect combination of a calendar/reminder/ToDo app. When I moved from the Palm world to Apple with my first iPhone so many years ago, I contacted Pimlico Software to see if they were going to port the DateBk application to iOS. I was SO disappointed when they said it just was not doable.

Oct 4, 2013 8:20 AM in response to JohnnyDawg

Just posted this feedback to Apple:

I just discovered that when searching the calendar for old events, the search function will not find anything more than a year old. After doing some research on this issue, it would appear this has been a limitation of the Calendar application on the iPhone/iPad for years. Using iCal on my Mac, it will find everything I'm searching for, no matter how old.

I can understand that this limitation may have been in place due to the time it would take to perform a search on a heavily populated calendar going back 10 or more years. However, with today's hardware, that should not be a valid reason any more. At least give us the option to search more than a year back, even if you have to show a warning that the search may take a few minutes.

Oct 4, 2013 11:00 AM in response to JohnnyDawg

BTW, I found an app called weekcal, which will allow you to set the date range to search. I changed that range to 1/1/2000 - 12/31/2013 and did a search. It did take 2-3 minutes, but it found all those old events.

Oct 4, 2013 12:07 PM in response to JohnnyDawg

I agree that it is ridiculous that this is still not possible in the Calendar app from Apple. I discovered however that also the app Fantastical does search back in the past years: when I do a search it finds back events etc. dating back to 2003 (which is I believe the year I started to use iCal), and this all within seconds (I have an iPhone 4s).

So I suggest you all switch to Fantastical or Weekcal, these are better Apps than the Apple app anyways.

Oct 4, 2013 12:09 PM in response to JohnnyDawg

Thanks for the pointer to weekcal. I've been using cavetica, which can also do this. The Pocket Informant (PI) guys have said they might implement the same work-around in the future.

Maybe some day Apple will even implement "duplicate event" which I use all the time in PI. And, heaven forbid, "duplicate card" in Contacts!

Oct 4, 2013 12:12 PM in response to Ruud Kalberg

Just looked them all up on iTunes. If you just want to use one to look up old events, and not as your main cal app, then you can go by price:

Calvetica: $3

Fantastical: $5

WeekCal: $2

How do I find old events on my Calendar?