Well, this helped me understand the problem, but not solve it. The "advanced" recommended reading explained why this will never work for me. It explains that there are 3 things that uploading Calendar to iCloud does not like.
(1) duplicate events. They tell how to find and kill duplicate events. However, I'm not going to go back and look for all duplicate events 2005-2013. Not gonna happen. They did suggest software for this, but there are more problems.
(2) Lots of past events. Well, I have thousands and thousands of events in 2005-2013 and since I have them backed up, I'd be willing to part with them to make iCloud work for the future. This document is out of date as it tells to search with a ".", but now that only gets events with periods in them. I can work around this. It tells to use the date to sort things, but there is no option for that. However, search result items are put out in chronological order, so, in principle, I should be able to delete them in huge batches, something I hadn't been able to find out how to do anywhere else. However, vast quantities of events would not delete like this. They would not delete if I went back and tried to delete all in a month or in several other ways. They only way I could delete certain (thousands) of events was one at a time. Sorry, not going to do that. So, gave up on this.
(3) Indefinite recurring events. Hold it! This is a calendar program! And it doesn't like indefinite recurring events? The only ones it likes are in its birthday calendar, and that is made from your contacts. I don't use contacts much because I have a rolodex unix shell program I wrote in 1986 that has everything in it. Not going to type in 577K of information (27,118 lines). I've added birthdays and anniversaries and annual events over the years since 2005 in my own birthdays calendar, but these all go under the heading of "bad" for uploading to iCloud. However, back to the point of a calendar. I have lots of annual events to be reminded of. I use the calendar to remind of things I need to do every month, every week, and at least one thing every day. This is what I use Calendar for, but these are taboo for uploading to iCloud (i.e. it will be very difficult to do). Given how easily Calendar deals with all of this, I find this more than a little strange.
The bottom line is that I am the type of very heavy Apple user that Apple has abandoned with this move to iCloud for Calendar. I can, of course, continue to use Calendar on my MacBook Pro, but calendars on my iPad and iPhone are now useless after years of full functionality.
Like many people, I find change a little irritating but I adjust. I tried hard for days to adjust to this change and it didn't work for me.
Thanks anyway,
Steve
