Lightening Import CSV fails

[jtgostars]

I have the Lightening extension added to Thunderbird and when I use the Calendar-Import option with a CSV, absolutely nothing happens, I don't get any mapping prompts, or error messages. Here are some sample formats I have tried:

Subject,StartDate,StartTime,EndDate,EndTime,Alldayevent,Description,Location,Showtimeas
Dallas Stars @ Colorado Avalanche,11/4/2006,9:00:00 PM,11/4/2006,11:50:00 PM,FALSE,Versus ,Away,2

"Subject","Start Date","Start Time","End Date","End Time","Event Type","Reminder on/off","Reminder Date","Reminder Time","Description","Location","Show time as"
"Dallas Stars @ Colorado Avalanche","11/4/2006","9:00:00 PM","11/4/2006","11:50:00 PM","Sports Event","TRUE","10/4/2006","8:45:00 PM","Versus","Away","2"

Thnx
jtgostars

[Daifne]

Moving to the Calendar Forum.

[freema22]

Have you found an answer yet? I am having the same problem.

Thanks,
Mike

[bobwool]

Using Thunderbird version 2 beta 1 (20061206) with Lightning extension and also seeing the same thing.

I exported from Lightning to CSV to get the right format/fields, then filled in the fields for several events. When I import the CSV file nothing happens. I'd really love to put Outlook in my rear-view mirror, and was hoping to easily import my current calendar events.

[cejai]

Have tried nearly all - to import csv file from Outlook - but absolutely nothing happends! ics import works OK but!! Do anyone have a solution! Or are the import-csv fake?

[mbolbroe]

I am a heavy Outlook user and I thought I would give this Thunderbird a try. But I NEED my calendar so I see these good people who apparently speaks so good about the fantastic promised land called Firefox and Thunderbird have given a little opportunity to move people over from the evil empire software solutions. BUT can they deliver NO THEY CAN NOT!!!

I can't import my calendar appointments from Outlook 2003 (the best office user productive application EVER!) using a simple CSV-format files! And it SUCKS! I receive an even longer error message than seen in any Microsoft application, stating something about a java error somewhere!!!

Yeah I've got latest stable versions of TB, Lightning plugin and Sun java Runtime. I have even tried stand alone Sunbird application. And yes I use Windows XP SP2 of course - why shouldn't I?

Can anybody pose a solution for this mess - and no I won't try to fiddle around with nightly builds of any kind. I work as a professional so give me something I can use.

[google1]

deleted by author - addressed import of contacts, not events - oops.

[metaph]

I have a workaround for this. A little cumborsome, but works. Export your Outlook calender as CSV. Import that into your google calender (you must have a gmail account). Then either export the ical file from the new google calender you created or just use the iCal URL to link it directly from Lightning. Hope this helps.

[google1]

Ok - i've finally found a way to do this.
I'm using sunbird 0.3.1
Firstly your outlook calendar must be set to US date format, ie mm/dd/yy.
If it isn't, then go to control panel & change it in your regional settings - you can customize this without having to change your country setting.
Now, go to Oultook and choose File/Import & Export/Export to a File
Choose "next"
Select "Comma Separated Values (DOS)" - this is important as "CSV (Windows)" does not appear to work.
Save the csv file somewhere you can find it again.
With Sunbird, import the csv file - this should work.

Don't edit the csv file with Excel - this will render it useless for import into Sunbird.
Good luck.

ps - the same works with Lightning 0.3.1

[w.rogner]

I did some experiments and found that Outlook, when exporting to CSV, does not honor the separator character. If the body tag contains ";" and separator is ";" then the import breaks.

Also some special characters need escaping.

Finally, the ics-File is only allowed a max line length of 75. A line longer than this requires a line break and a space as continuation character on the next line.

I have not looked into the import of Lightning yet, but maybe the line length is limited.

However. I have written an export utility in C# that allows the bulk export of Outlook 2007 calendar items. If there is demand for a OL2003 version, I can provide that.
The utility is called FreeMiCal and can be downloaded from SourceForge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemical

Its alpha and I need your input to make it better.

Wolf

[Old ssiter]

Hi Wolf, don't get confused: It seems that you are talking about csv export and ics files in the same context.

Csv export/import works on *.csv files in comma-separated values format, while Ics export/import works on *.ics files in iCalendar format. The iCalendar standard doesn't note that the max allowed line length is 75, the standard only notes the line should not be longer than 75. Lightning has no problems to import iCalendar files with lines much longer than 75 characters.

[w.rogner]

Thanks for the reminder to separate the two file formats.
But as I stated above, I found this strange behaviour in CSV (comma separated values) files.

I want to make my tool stable first before getting into Lightning. It seems that progress could speed up a little and I have one or two things I would like to see in the product.
- Direct connection to MS Exchange server for calendaring and tasks
- Nice, Outlook/Evolution style calendar item shading (ok, this is not crucial but I like neat GUIs)
- Access to MS Exchange public folders (including setting special item settings like duration, etc.)

[bvdbos]

@w.rogner: what data is exported when you export to csv, could you post the first line of your csv-file? As for the escaping, most likely the charset of the exported csv in windows is ISO8xxx or something like this while ics-files require UTF8. There are some bugs for this.

[terriz]

Ok - i've finally found a way to do this.
I'm using sunbird 0.3.1
Firstly your outlook calendar must be set to US date format, ie mm/dd/yy.
If it isn't, then go to control panel & change it in your regional settings - you can customize this without having to change your country setting.
Now, go to Oultook and choose File/Import & Export/Export to a File
Choose "next"
Select "Comma Separated Values (DOS)" - this is important as "CSV (Windows)" does not appear to work.
Save the csv file somewhere you can find it again.
With Sunbird, import the csv file - this should work.

Brilliant, google1! Thank you!

[OFnow]

Just FYI:
The original csv examples did not work because the first did not "" things and the second
had only 12 fields. The .js code insists you have at least 13 fields.

Workable example of having enough fields:
"Subject","Start Date","Start Time","End Date","End Time","All day event","Reminder on/off","Reminder Date","Reminder Time","Meeting Organizer","Required Attendees","Optional Attendees","Meeting Resources","Billing Information","Categories","Description","Location","Mileage","Priority","Private","Sensitivity"
"my-event-descr","5/6/2007","4:00:00 PM","5/6/2007","5:00:00 PM","False","False","5/6/2007","4:00:00 PM",,,,,,,"Appointment",,,"Normal","False","Normal"

(there are just two lines there, line folding in this post makes it hard to read).
When there are 'mistakes' in the input you get no clue what they are from Sunbird import.
I had no choice to follow the nice outlook instrs given above
as my data was in old Palm software on Mac and
it has limited output facilities. (which I had to post-process to get to the example here).