HowTo: Merge Google Calendars Together
Colin M | March 4, 2008 | 2:11 amHere’s a quick How-To on merging two Google Calendars together, since Googling with the obvious phrases did not get me very useful results.
The Problem: Merge Two (or more) Google Calendars Into One
Let’s suppose that you, like me, have more than one calendar in your Google Calendar, and decide at some point that you want to condense those into one. I was struggling to find a single click solution for this, and then just to find any solution, for quite a while. Then I stumbled on the “Import” feature, and realized that it actually solves all my problems. Here’s how it works.
The Solution: Import one Calendar into the other
Once you see how to do it, it’s a quick task to merge two calendars together. In fact, you can even use this to merge a Google calendar from one account into another.
- Log in to your Google Calendar account, and click on the drop-down menu next to your Source calendar. Pick “Calendar Settings” from the list:
- Now, scroll down to the bottom and find the Private ICAL address link. Right click on this link and save the file to your Desktop (or other handy temporary location):
- Next, return to your calendar and click on the “Add” dropdown menu at the top of your calendar list, then click Import Calendar:
- Select the file you just saved from your Source calendar, and choose the Destination calendar you want to import into:
Then click Import, and you will soon be greeted with the cheery success message:
- And that’s it! Here’s a before-and-after of me combining two calendars to show that it works. (Take a look at Tues, February 12, for example.):
A perfectly great solution!
Thanks a bunch!
/ Simon
I’m wondering if you know a way to have a ‘group calendar’ add entries automatically to a ‘personal calendar’
ie. our group needs to add dates that the whole group has access to but it seems that then we each have to look at the ‘group calendar’ separately to our own ‘personal calendar’ which is a bit of a hassle.
Thanks in advance whether or not you have a solution.
Thanks!
Unfortunately, in practice this is pretty limited by the fact that Google calendar is very buggy. When I export one of my calendards as described above, I get a 3.6 MB ics file. When I then try to import that into another (empty) calendar, it simply stops after a while with a box that says “import cancelled”.
But of course its not really a cancellation but an import of SOME of the events. With such a large calendar, its not possible for me to say which ones are missing, but when I export the new calendar, I get a file of only 3.4 MB size. So 200kb worth of data is gone with not indication of what that might be and how to solve the problem.
Overall, I would never entrust Google calendar any corporate or mission critical information. And I gave up the attempt to merge my calendars.
When I carried out all of the actions to merge a number of calendars into one it stated that I had processed zero events. If I can see one calendar with different events in different colours have I merged them together already and if this is the case how can I find out the embed code. Your advise has been excellent so far. Thank you very much
Thanks for the great tip. Wondering why Google doesn’t have this!
Worked perfect thank you.
Took me a few reads to understand that the source calender was the calender to have data taken from and the destination calender was the one to be kept. Yes I know, how dumb of me.
Anyway, import circa 300 events without problem.
Worked great for me. THANKS!!!!!!!!!
En français c’était : Importer l’agenda Exporter les agendas
Faut dézipper le fichier ical créé.
[...] them out. Can you combine all your calendars, to do lists, and emails into one? Outlook, Google, and iCal all have combination [...]
Nice tip. Too bad it wouldn’t work with dynamically updated calendars :(
I followed your instructions but when I got to #3 where it says to click “add”, then Import Calendar, I don’t get an option to import. The only option I have is to create new calendar! Am I looking in the wrong place, is there another “add” somewhere hidden on the page? I’m looking under My Calendars where it lists the name of my calendar with Tasks directly under the calendar name. The 2 options I have there is Add and Settings.
Greetings. I’m a top contributor at the Google Help Forum.
To note, the instructions have changed slightly. The pull-down is no longer at the top of the calendars list, it is at the bottom of Other Calendars. You can also find the import feature inside of My Calendars -> Settings.
Other than that, the instructions are the same.
Hey, I’m checking this site out for obvious reasons. However, out of curiosity I check what kind of error was being thrown by my browser, since it’s saying there is one.
This page is 3 years old so I don’t know if the author reads the comments but I was getting similar errors on a page I worked on a little while ago. I spent days trying to figure out different ways to load the script and etc. but my lightbox would just not work! I was trying to use one based on prototype. Apparently, if you use jQuery and Prototype together they clash pretty bad. It has to be one or the other. There is a jQuery lightbox which works great that fixed this error for me.
Later!
Problem is IT DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE if you make changes to any of the other calendars!!!!
You have to go through the process over and over to keep things up to date if you’ve made changes.
Any comments, suggestions on that?!
Terrific instructions! I was planning to move all of my events over manually, and at the last minute figured “Ah, what the heck… Why not try Googling to see if there’s a way to merge two calendars?” Thanks for such a simple, straightforward how-to (even with the updated Google Calendars interface). Saved me a ton of time!
Thx,
But is there a way for a HTML-calendar?
I can’t export (to ical format) my 2th calendar because it’s a html calendar..
“Google Calendar has a new look!” so it’s impossible to follow these directions are outdated, unfortunately.
Thanks for this… simple, and (contrary to previous comments) still works (Sarah – you may need to look at the *bottom* of the calendar list for the “add” button)
I keep getting this error message after following all the steps: Failed to import events: Unable to process your iCal/CSV file..
Thank you–I just had to trust that the basic.ics file in the download folder was in fact my precious calendar.
If you have more that one calendar in your acount, then click on the “name” of the calendars that you want to show. All the calendars that are highlighted will be showing their schedules.
It’s works like an on/off button.
Thanks. Works perfectly!
Amazing, worked like a charm, thanks :D
Thanks this worked great – Google should hire you for answering what they appear to have been unwilling to answer in such a simple and straight forward manner. :-)
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!
A set-and-forget solution to the problem: http://ifttt.com/recipes/4927
Thanks for that – very handy.
will the merged calendar automaticly update with both old calendar events?
didn’t work
Thank you! Is this a one time import, or after this is done, and you update one calendar, will it automatically update the other. Thanks in advance!
The “set-and-forget solution to the problem: http://ifttt.com/recipes/4927 by Alessandro” did not work well for me as it would just add all the calendars records as an RSS feed into one day.
But this on-line calendar: http://www.hipcal.com joins iCal feeds into one calendar that can then be shared, so I would see this as the best “set-and-forget solution”. It might be a bit twitchy with old Google calendar records that were imported from “Nokia OVI suite”, but after a cleanup it seems to be doing a decent job. Outlook sees hipcal feed without a glitch. A slight drawback could be the fact that hipcal syncs its feed once every 24 hours, but I can live with hat…