Importing Windows Live Calendar to Google Calendar

1 minute read

Windows Live is a great calendar, but it is good to know you have the option to migrate to Google Calender, should you desire to do so. The process is quite simple:

  1. Navigate to your Windows Live Calendar account
  2. Click Share and select the calendar you want to import
  3. In the left pane, click get a link 
  4. Under Show event details click Create
  5. Copy the link under Import into other calendar applications (ICS)
  6. Change webcals:// to https:// and paste the link in your browser to download it
  7. Save the ICS file to some location on your computer as calendar.ics
  8. If you have non-ASCII characters in your events (in my case I have Hebrew characters) you must mark the ICS file as UTF:
    1. Open _calendar.ics _in Notepad++
    2. In the top menu click Encoding -> Encode in UTF-8-BOM
    3. Save the file and exit Notepad++
  9. Navigate to your Google Calendar account
  10. Click the dropdown next to My calendars and select Create new calendar
  11. Fill out the calendar fields for the new calendar and click Create Calendar
  12. Click the dropdown next to Other calendars and select Import Calendar
  13. Click Choose File and select the ICS file you downloaded above (calendar.ics)
  14. In the Calendar dropdown select the name of the calendar you just created
  15. Click Import

You’re all done!

Note however that event reminders are not imported 🙁

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