How do I find old events on my Calendar?

I bought Calvetica and Fantastical 2 , that searches 25 years past, but Week Cal is the only one that goes very far behind in the past! . Week Cal can search and view unlimited events in the past, even 100 years ago, or more, if you like to add on your calendar, historic events or biografic data of your family, for example. You can search for key words that may be in the titlle, or notes and allows changes in past events that sync immediately with your IPhone calendar and ICloud . It gives the option to choose the range of uour search . It may take minutes to find the results depending on the amount of events and number of years to search, but works perfectly!

Wow, sometimes Apple leaves me speechless. Just ran into this "bug" and found out that there is no search option for past events in Calendar.app in OS X 10.11.3 (2016).

I don't even know what to say. And I really wonder what apple was thinking when forgetting about this feature. PR probably was more important? This is ridiculous.

So please, if you are also affected by this missing feature, please head to http://www.apple.com/feedback/calendar.html and give some feedback to apple, so that they become aware that essential functionality in calendar.app was completely forgotten.

WORKAROUND: Go to a date in the past (e.g. 2007) then any event later than that will show in the search results. I guess that way, apple wants to always only show "the relevant" (TM) results. Still think this is pretty stupid behavior.

I found out how to get the old events back!

1) Open iCal

2) Go to "Calendar">Preferences>Select the "Accounts Tab

3) Check the box for "Enable this account"

4) Now just close that window and Viola! All your events you EVER entered will be back in your calendar!

Are you talking about on the iPhone? There is no "Preferences" or "Accounts Tab" that I can find.

I don't have this same problem on my Macbook. I can search my entire calendar since the beginning. However, my Mac is about 8 years old and the OS is Lion (can't upgrade to the newest) so that may be why.

I didn't read every post in this feed so maybe you are referring to something else.

The workaround you have suggested would be acceptable, but it doesn't seem to be working for me. I can go to past dates, but searches still display results straddling the current date. I'm running iOS 9 on iPhone 5s. I guess you're running OS X 10, and that works for you?

Its an old post but still a current and frustrating issue, one that seems to have come in with either the latest OS or OS update. I'm using an iMac Retina 5K (late 2014) running MacOS Sierra version 10.12 and Calendar version 9.0 (2155).

If I search for "Jury Duty" which I know I've added to my Calendar before and which is synced with my iCloud account, nothing more than 1 year old shows up. Same for "Dentist", etc. Appts that I know are on my Calendar won't appear in the Calendar's search results. Manually searching for them does show they still exist and are still associated with the same iCloud calendar.

Here's my simple workaround:

Search for your past events using Spotlight. The Spotlight search results are categorized by type (pdfs, emails, and yes calendar events too). I can find the calendar event I'm looking for (only Day and Month displayed with no Year so a little tricky) but when I double-click the calendar result I want from Spotlight, the event is opened directly in my Calendar.

Ex: Spotlight search for "Jury Duty" pulls up a 2012 calendar event (4 yrs ago) and "Dentist" pulls up a cleaning I had scheduled around 2 years ago.

I have researched this & I can tell you that the iPhone & iPad CALENDAR SEARCH goes back a bit more than a year- approximately 1 year 6 weeks. Unfortunately, when Apple designed Sierra the SEARCH on the CALENDAR will only go back 2 years. This is NOT your devices- it is by Apple design. One should not install Sierra if you wish to maintain the functionality of the CALENDAR SEARCH that goes back. There may be a calendar app that searches as far as your Calendar, but I have no answer for the Calendar on iMac. Hopefully Apple will get enough pressure to make the Calendar a full-functioning one.

IF THE SPOTLIGHT SEARCH IN CALENDAR WILL NOT GO BACK OVER 2 YEARS, WHAT SPOTLIGHT DOES?

On my iMac, Spotlight goes back all the way to the beginning. Ex: I found a 4 yr old "Dentist" appt with Spotlight but I'm fairly certain it will go further back.

What's interesting is I also have a MBP that is still running iCal 5.0 and there the calendar displays ALL matching search results as far back as 2011 in a panel that opens up at the bottom of the calendar window. So this is definitely something in that was not considered (or worse was considered and just not a concern to Apple's devs or sales teams) for Calendar 9.0

As a small business owner with clients that come back every 2 yrs (I teach CPR), it is very useful/helpful to be able to find past appts so that they can be duplicated as current events. The address, event info, and even the list of students added to the Notes section tends to stay more or less the same from training to training.

Bottom line, by limiting the search functionality, Apple has also eliminated the usefulness of its native calendar app.

Thank you.

I agree that Apple has greatly diminished the usefulness of the Calendar app.

YES! Same problem...I thought I was going nuts when I couldn't find an event I KNOW happened 2 years ago....then I scrolled through the calendar and there it was...so irritating and seemingly stupid.

Yes, I've already moved to Fantastical.....it's very expensive though, to use on Mac/iPhone/iPad.....but it is by far superior to the Apple calendars.

very helpful thread. I too have come across the limitations of search on the calendar iOS app.