Calendar not importing .ics

Hi i have opened .ics in outlook and it said start time was after finish time thus failed. in ical

Hi Shandy - and others here,

I had this issues from time to time, and solved the issue with the fix suggested here, changing the version from 1.0 to 2.0 before.

But today, it happened again, on my rather new iMac with the new beta Yosemite installed on a fresh formatted HD.

The calendar invitation could be clicked on, but I could not se the invitation in my Mac Calendar!

When opening the ics file (cmd + i) I noticed that the "Open with" was set to "CalandarFileHandler" - but I could also select (use drop down menu window) to set it to "Calendar". So I changed the setting to Open With "Calendar (default)" and selected "Change all".

That did the trick for me. I assume that the ics for some reason was set to import to the Outlook/MS calendar that comes with the Office package I use for Word.

So, for those who has installed MS products this might be a possible thing to look out for.

Hi Shandly,

I have been seeing this as well. Turns out that there is an error in the .ics files I was trying to load, where the application that created the .ics files only used a single hour digit to define a time before 10am. From the looks of the ical v2 specification, all times should use 2 digit hours - i.e. they should put a leading 0 for those early times.

Looks like iCal misinterprets the start/end time if there is only a single digit for the hour (in the fields DTSTART and DTEND in the .ics file). Explains why sometimes it would work and sometimes it would be ignored (and put an error in the Apple System Log) and sometimes it would go into a totally different day (as it adds 80+ hours to today's date!) This could look even more weird if the times are in UTC format and your timezone is totally different.

I don't think this is necessarily an iCal bug but it would be helpful if it properly checked field lengths and gave an appropriate error in the log. I also see a small window flash on the screen and disappear again very quickly each time I tried to load a file with this error in it. Again, if iCal thinks there is an error, why not give me a message I can read and clear manually?

Anyway, editing the file manually (in TextEdit) and adding a leading 0 to the relevant time fields allows the files to be imported correctly. Oh - and a good way of quickly seeing whether the .ics file is valid is to look at it with the inspector (cmd-i). If it is OK, the calendar icon will show the right day and times. If it is not a good file, the icon will just show an empty grid.

Hi

I couldn't import ics invitation received by email (in Mail). When I clicked on the ics invitation iCal was opening buy the ics invitation didn't appear.

Reading a few post I realized I could drag the ics invitation from from to iCal and then the invitation appeared into the "Waiting to confirm box" - on the right of the calendar button. By default is tried to sync using the "on my mac" account.

ANSWER:

I wasn't using this account, so I DELETED all my "on my mac" calendars and iCloud calendar is my default. From now on all my ics invitation are imported into iCal AND they sync flawlessly to my other device (iPhone 5 and iPad 4).

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012)

If you are clicking on the .ics file in an email and the event does not load into Calendar, try dragging the icon onto the Calendar window.

Hi All

Nothing in any of the above posts solved my problem. In the end I ran the *.ics through an online validation tool which scored it 99/100. The single non-critical warning was that the version needs to be the first property in the file. I opened it in a text editor, moved the first line to the top, saved it, imported it, and all is perfect.

It's a little alarming that iCal syntax isn't flexible enough to accommodate this minor discrepancy (the ical appointment was originally created in a PC version of Outlook, as I expect most are) by there you go. Now to find a way of importing these without line-editing each!

J

I tried this workaround and it seems to solve it for me. It may not solve it for anyone else and admittedly it's a bit of a faf!

1. In mail, select the email with the invitation in it

2. Select View>Message>Raw Source

3. Press cmd+A (to select all the content from the raw source window)

4. Select File>Save As (save it somewhere you can find it easily for the next step)

5. Double click the file you've just saved (it will open as an email with the attachment)

6. Open the .ics file and it should now appear in calendar as an invite

7. Accept the invite

Dragging the attached ics to Calendar and dropping it on a calendar in the sidebar works consistently for me as well.

Since upgraded to 10.10.3 OSX Yosemite over the weekend, the ics calendar events are not opening in the calendar App any longer.

Interestingly enough I see the notice added to the Calendar notice bar, and when I press <OK>, it does not add the event to the calendar, it simply disappear.

We have tested it with different senders, and it behaves the same.

We have tried drag and drops, saving the message and then importing, nothing has worked so far.

Yosemite has been very challenging to deal with as we gradually updating our company computers, there have one problem after another.

Advice is greatly appreciated.

/Oliver

Agreed. 10.10.3 killed ics invites for me. None of the above suggestions seem to work. For now it's manual add or-gasp-use Outlook Calendar temporarily until this is fixed.

I'm on 10.9.5 and .ics files won't open for me either.

Snowy31's workaround works. But not the way Mr. J would have wanted.

Apple has certainly lost their way when "it just works" applies more to Windows 8 than Mac OS.

So sad.

I've been searching for 2 years trying to find the answer to this dilema; how to import an .ics calendar invite into the Apple Calendar. Obviously Apple doesn't respect business customers or this would have been solved long ago. Extremely frustrated...

Hi ZCoach - and others here,

I understand your frustration.

I have a suggestions that have worked for me in the past:

First, the calendar invitation could be clicked on, but I could not se the invitation in my Mac Calendar.

When opening the ics file (cmd + i) I noticed that the "Open with" was set to "CalandarFileHandler" - but that I could also select (use drop down menu window) to set it to "Calendar". So I changed the setting to Open With "Calendar (default)" and selected "Change all".

That did the trick for me. I assume that the ics for some reason was set to import to the Outlook/MS calendar that comes with the Office package I use for Word.

JohnnyDeluxe,

That was helpful. I am not familiar with the command-i shortcut but was able to achieve the same with ctrl- when clicking on the file. You are right about the CalendarFilerHandler setting. Though I didn't see an option to change for all, I was able to accept the one request I had in front of me. I will poke around with it some more when I have the time.

I still think it is funny how this all worked fine for me until the last update.

Anyway, cheers.

Update: I figured out what you meant. I was originally accessing the file in the email itself. Once I dragged the file to the desktop I could access the 'Get Info' dialogue and do exactly as you suggested.

I have tried *everything*. Nothing worked, however I have found something that does.

If I change an ics from METHOD:REQUST to METHOD:PUBLISH it works.