Android ICS File Viewer – Calendar file View in Exce;

.ics File Format (ICalendar)

Events like meeting requests, tasks, alarms, to do list etc., are stored in Calendar application.

This Calendar application could be a part of Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, Android Phone, IPhone, Yahoo Calendar etc.,.

There are lot more version of Calendars than what is listed here.

Other Uses of ICAL File

Most of them support .ics file format, used to share Meeting and Tasks requests over email or file sharing over Internet.

This format is also referred as iCalendar format.

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If you already have an .ics file exported from available calendar application, proceed to last section of this article to download a free version of the viewer.

In case if you want to know how to generate ics file from Google Calendar then read further.

Export Google calendar to ical

This ics file could be exported from any of the calendar application present in your system. But this section explains about how to download it from Google Calendar. In case you are using different software, then check whether it support this file format.

Login to your Google account and go to https://www.google.com/calendar. This page will display the calendars and current month schedules. On the right hand side top of Calendar, click on settings setting icon and open settings page.

The resulting page will have options as “General”, “Calendars”, “Mobile Setup”, “Labs”. Click on Calendars to view list of all Calendars in your account and also scroll down to see the option “Export Calendars”. Click on this option and it will download a ZIP file containing data in ics.

If you want to export only specific Calendar, then click on it to see the settings specific to it. Scroll down till you see Calendar Address and against it there will be option to download the data in XML, ICAL or HTML. Click on ICAL to get the ics file.

Now that, we have the Data file, let’s learn something about the file format.

ICS File Format – Example

The ics file download from any source can be opened using a Notepad, TextPad or any text editor, because it is not encoded.

Note: Do not edit or save this file from Notepad. Sometimes, it results in loss of data and corrupts the file. It advised to use Textpad, if you intend to edit this type of file.

The ICS files will start with BEGIN:VCALENDAR & terminates with END:VCALENDAR. Between these 2 tags there are tags to differentiate each setting in calendar. A simple example for ICS file is given below. To know further details of each component, refer this link.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:officetricks123@gmail.com
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20150411T143000Z
DTEND:20150411T153000Z
DESCRIPTION:Officetricks.com Testing ICS File
SUMMARY:Officetricks.com
LOCATION:Officetricks.com
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:This is an event reminder
TRIGGER:-P0DT1H0M0S
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Convert ICS to Excel – ICS

SO now, we know bit of technical details about an ICS file. To view these files in a neat format download the ICS Viewer. Input the File path and file name in the Excel app and click on Convert Button. The app will do an ICS parse and will display results in ICSData sheet.

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This ICS Viewer is built using Excel VBA Macro’s basic text file operations and does not use any special API to parse the ICS file.