173562 - Need to import Outlook CSV exported data

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Calendar :: Import and Export, defect)

Description

[rjf]

Need the ability to import a CSV (comma separated values) file which was
previously exported from Outlook via the export calendar function.

Should just appear as a new type of file to import from.

Comment 1

[rjf]

Just a quick update on this. I have the basic code working, importing a limited
number of fields into the calendar from an outlook csv file.

I am currently adding some UI to let the user decide what to do with duplicates,
etc. When finished with that, I will attach a patch to this bug for people to
try out.

Comment 2

[Mike Potter]

Can you please attach what you have to this bug?

Comment 3

[Mike Potter]

*** Bug 168402 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Mike Potter]

This is now in the builds available now.
Ron is still working on it though, to try and spiff it up a bit.

Comment 5

[rjf]

Note, if you are going to try this, you need to take special care of the order
and format of the data imported. When you export the data to CSV from outlook,
there is a page on the outlook export wizard that gives you a button you click
to set which fields, and their order -- the patch is currently very sensitive to
this. Export the following fields in the following order:

Subject
Start Date
Start Time
End Date
End Time
All Day Event

just those fields, in that order. And you will be fine.

I will be fixing this so that it can at least deal with more varied input
without freaking out like it will now. cheers.

Comment 6

[Mike Young]

attaching some depending bugs.

Is anyone attached to this bug still working on it? Last update was 1 year ago.
This is something that Calendar should have, if anyone is interested in picking
up where this bug stopped, they should feel free to do so.

Comment 7

[Jussi Kukkonen]

I'll give this a try.

The plan is this:
- use a regexp to read data from csv -- current method is more prone to errors
if one tries to read the 'description'-section. I've got this pretty much
covered already.
- support default fields in default order
- support following fields (in addition to current ones):
   allDay (bool)
   description (string)
   privateEvent (bool)
   alarm (bool)
   alarmLength, alarmUnit & ICAL_RELATED_PARAMETER
   categories (string)
   
unresolved issues
- Recurrence. The Outlook-csv-format just does not have that information. 
- A quick test showed problems with loadCalendarEventDialog. Using the "edit new
event" mode means that some event data (at least allDay and alarm data) will be
assigned a default value even though we have a real value...
- Need to check that the default fields have stayed the same in different
outlook versions

Comment 8

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Attachment: patch to spice up Outlook CSV import

The patch is pretty much what comment 7 says. Some things to note:
- I'm not a real expert on regular expressions, so the mother-of-all-regexps
used is probably not as efficient as it could be. Didn't see a problem with
~100 events though.
- the changes in 'returns' from loadEventsFromFile() fix what should maybe be
another bug: if

Comment 9

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Dammit, managed to send before I was ready. This is what I wanted to say:

- I'm not a real expert on regular expressions, so the mother-of-all-regexps
used is probably not as efficient as it could be. Didn't see a problem with
~100 events though.
- The changes in 'returns' from loadEventsFromFile() fix what should maybe be
another bug: if any normal events were imported, the possible duplicates would
never be imported.
- The import works on files imported with default fields (default=all). I
haven't had a chance to test files from Outlook versions other than Outlook2000. 

Comment 10

[Mostafa Hosseini]

Comment on attachment 142147 [details] [diff] [review]
patch to spice up Outlook CSV import

Checked into CVS.

Comment 11

[Jussi Kukkonen]

(In reply to comment #9)
> - The import works on files imported with default fields (default=all). I
> haven't had a chance to test files from Outlook versions other than Outlook2000. 
> 

I received an OutlookXP generated file from a friend,, and I have bad news...

1. The fields from Outlook XP are in slightly different default order
2. The values of fields depend on the language of the software!
   In a file from my english-language Outlook "All day event" 
   is either "True" or "False", but in the test file the value is
   "Tosi" or "Epätosi".

I think I can manage number one, but two is going to be really tricky.

To sum it up, the patch in comment 7 does not work for any file from OutlookXP
or from any non-english Outlook. That's frustrating :/

Comment 12

[Mostafa Hosseini]

Playing with non-standards, these kinds of problems are inevitable. There is
still room for improvement though:
For english OutlookXP at least, the order of fields can be extracted from the
first line of the file.

Comment 13

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Attachment: changes per previous comment and a little more

Did as you suggested. Since I had to rewrite the regexps anyway I put some
thought on them, and there is now only one regexp per event - hope it makes the
code a bit more clear.

But I didn't stop there. I have a proposal for a new dialog (I'll attach it in
a second). It's a dialog for mapping the CSV fields to Calendar equivalents,
and it only comes up if the headers are not recognised - you can try it out by
misspelling one of the headers in a CSV.

The dialog is fully functional, but the strings are all hard-coded. I'd like a
comment on this (adding a dialog, the approach taken) before I start teaching
myself Mozilla localizability.

Comment 14

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Attachment: outlookImportDialog.js described in previous comment

Comment 15

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Attachment: outlookImportDialog.xul described in comment #13

Comment 16

[Mostafa Hosseini]

The dialog looks fine and is indeed needed.
The change to take into account other combinations also look good.
I've checked all three patches into CVS.
Way to go Jussie!

Comment 17

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Attachment: added localizability to Outlook import (also improved dupe management)

This patch makes outlookImportDialog.xul localizable.

Since this already means work for the localizers, I also did another UI change:

- dupe management dialog is now only opened if needed
- dupe import dialog is now consistent with normal import dialog
- dupe management now works for all formats (fixes bug 209648)
- importDuplicatesDialog.xul and importDuplicatesDialog.js are now obsolete
 
I haven't done localized xul or js before, hope I got it right.

Comment 18

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Attachment: the patch I was supposed to send last time...

This is the real patch

Comment 19

[Graeme Hilton]

Couple of points on the Outlook CSV import:
1. The date format is US based (mm/dd/yyyy).  My Outlook exported the dates in
UK format (dd/mm/yyyy).
2. I manually fixed the date format in the csv file, but this seemed to break
the field detection in the importer.  The whole row appeared as the title of the
event, including all the commas.

I'm using Thunderbird 0.5 and the latest version (20040209) for Windows from
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/xpi/windows/calendar_windows_20040109.xpi

(This is my first bug report/comment so be gentle on me!)

Comment 20

[Mostafa Hosseini]

Thanks for the great improvements.
Attachment #143180 [details] [diff] checked into CVS
importDuplicatesDialog files removed from CVS.

Comment 21

[matsuba]

I received an generated CSV file by "japanese Outlook" from my friend.
In Japanese CSV file, some field names use "The Kana set of JIS X 0201".

ie.
[1] "event" of "All day event"
[2] Alarm
[3] on
[4] off
[5] Private
[6] Resource

As far as I know, The Kana set of JIS X 0201 is not used  in ISO-2022-JP
messages. (RFC1468)
However, if the headers in the CSV fiels are recognised by values in calendar.dtd,
I should be translated word to word.

In the future, if anyone use this field-entry in calendar.dtd (ie, maybe, when these
 fileld-entry convert UTF-8 to ISO-2022-JP), he needs to pay sufficient attention.

Comment 22

[matsuba]

Attachment: screenshot

I am not native english speaker. ...

Comment 23

[Jussi Kukkonen]

Matsuba, I'm not sure that I understood everything, but just to make sure we're
talking about the same thing here: (non-english) headers are not recognised
automatically. Instead they're shown to the user to let him/her select the
correct headers.

The reason it says "should be translated word to word" in the dtd is that it's
easy to end up with confusing header names (example: outlook has both "privacy"
and "private" headers and we don't want those mixed up). So an approximate
translation is not going to break anything, it might just be a little more
difficult for the user.

Comment 24

[matsuba]

Thanks for your replying.

(In reply to comment #23)
> Matsuba, I'm not sure that I understood everything, but just to make sure we're
> talking about the same thing here: (non-english) headers are not recognised
> automatically. Instead they're shown to the user to let him/her select the
> correct headers.

I misunderstood it.
I should update patch for Bug 220860. again.

Comment 25

[jofish]

I'm having problems with this too.  I needed to import from Palm Desktop, so 
installed Yahoo Intellisync to sync to Yahoo, and then exported from there to an 
"Outlook CSV" file.  Tried to import that, and I got

Unable to read from file...

[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)
[nsiScriptableUnicodeConverter.ConvertToUnicode]" nsresult:"0x80004005
(NS_ERROR_FAILURE)"location "JS frame :: chrome://calendar/content/importExport.
js :: 
convertToUnicode :: line 93" data:no ]

Clicking OK gives "No events to Import" and then clicking OK dumps you back in 
calendar.


I looked at the csv file in excel, and it showed up as having a final, 
invariably blank "DESCRIPTION" field, which I confirmed in TextPad. Following 
the advice below, I deleted that field and saved and tried again, with the same 
result.

I happened to look at the file again, and noticed that in the Yahoo version, it 
had ""ed every line, so the first line read "Subject","Start Date","Start Time", 
etc.  When resaving in Excel, it killed all the ""s.  Not that there's a any 
difference in the end result, just something for whoever's doing text parsing to 
be aware of.

Any hints?  (It'd be great if someone worked on importing direct from Palm 
Desktop... perhaps I'll find that and vote for it too.. Fighting with 
intellysink has made for an exhausting evening.)

Thanks
j

Comment 26

[Jussi Kukkonen]

jofish, could you attach your csv file?

FYI, the error message is bug 218962. There is something else that's wrong here
also, since that bug shouldn't stop the import...

Comment 27

[Mårten]

Tryed to import form an Outlook export from a webcalander (Yahoo like). Dont
know if the format from that service is standard though, but its look like below:

"Subject","Start Date","Start Time","End Date","End Time","All day
event","Description"
"Booked","09/07/2004","04:00 PM","09/07/2004","11:55 PM","False",""

The import fails, and you get the promt that no events is found. Lookang at the
code it seem like te regexp (var headerRegExp) finding the file header fails, it
seems depending of 21 fields, could this be changed to just use the first row?
Adding some extra fields to the import the events are recognised.

While importing, the date is parsed wrong. Im using swedish date settings that
might be causing this, and the import therefore expects the format of
yyyy/mm/dd, but the file is in US format.

Comment 28

[Jan Ruzicka]

Can anybody attach a test case CSV files?

interresting basic cases are
  - Outlook
  - OutlookXP
  - "japanese Outlook"
  - some other localization (Rusian, Arabic, ... )

Smaller files are prefered.

Comment 29

[Mostafa Hosseini]

Just a note that Outlook can save to the .ics file format which is a better way
to import data from Outlook rather than using the csv format
From http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP052434121033.aspx :

"Note  Exporting to iCalendar, vCalendar, or vCard file format is done by saving
the information into the file format, not by using the Import/Export Wizard."

Comment 30

[mike]

Attachment: small test case from Outlook 2k on winxp

Seems to work for me using Sunbird/0.2a on Winxp sp2.  The attached file is
from Outlook 2000 running on winxp.  Note the file was edited to make it small
and protect the guilty.  Before editing the import produced two nasty looking
warnings; clicked okay and 87 events imported very nicely (some events had Huge
comments in the original).

Comment 31

[Justin Wood (:Callek)]

*** Bug 261080 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 32

[john percy]

"Subject","Start Date","Start Time","End Date","End Time","All day
event","Description"
"Danny's Birthday '54,","1/3/2002","","","","true",""
"Edgar's Birthday '77,","1/7/2002","","","","true","general information"
"Inay's Birthday,","1/12/2002","","","","true","##c"
<!-- csvExport.html -->
above is an example of the outlook csv that yahoo generates (exports) from there
calendar.  Please note it is only 7 fields (not the 13 plus fields) that outlook
generates.

Comment 33

[Michael]

Attachment: Outlook 2003 exported Calendar events.

FYI, I am using Outlook 2003 and it has imported the file perfectly! I attached
the file so you can use it too!

Firefox 1.0PR
SunBird 0.2a
Mozilla Calendar 2004110411-cal

Comment 34

[gekacheka]

Attachment: importExport+ patch: enable any number of headers, localization, maybe detect date format mismatch ( checked in )

Thanks to the three who contributed sample files
(Outlook2000, Yahoo, Outlook2003).

Here's a patch to update parseOutlookCSVEvents.

Behavior Changes:

 + ANY NUMBER OF HEADERS now accepted, so will accept the Yahoo file.
   Only displays matching dialog if some header is not recognized.

 + ONLY MATCHING FIELDS SELECTED in matching dialog, the rest of
   the fields default to unmatched.  This is appropriate when not
   all fields are present.  (Previously it defaulted unmatched fields
   to their outlook 2000 position.)  If no fields matched and has
   22 fields, then it still defaults to outlook 2000 field positions.

 + HEADER STRINGS ARE LOCALIZABLE, so it will be possible to import
   localized outlook csv files.  (If more than one locale is
   installed, it should be possible to switch calendar into another
   -UILocale to import from that locale.) 

 + TRUE/FALSE VALUES ARE LOCALIZABLE.  Only displays the sample value
   True/False dialog if the sample boolean value is not recognized.

 + TRUE/FALSE HAS OWN DIALOG.  The sample value True/False choice has
   been removed from the matching dialog and separated into its own
   dialog, because it depends on the matching dialog to determine in
   which fields to look for the sample value.  Only displayed if
   unmatched. 

 + DATE FORMAT MISMATCH MAY BE DETECTED.  If the date format does not
   match the operating system date format, some dates will display
   differently, so it will detect the difference, display the dates,
   and ask for confirmation before continuing.	(The difference may be
   acceptable, such as different separator 1.2.2003 versus 1/2/2003.
   The confirmation dialog suggests changing the date format if the
   parse is not acceptable.)  For example, if the csv date format is
   M/D/YYYY and the OS format is D/M/YYYY, then 3/14/2005 will be
   parsed into 3/2/2006.  However, 3/4/2005 will be parsed into
   3/4/2005 with either format, so it may not detect the problem when
   a numeral does not overflow the date or month range.

 + DOUBLED QUOTES ACCEPTED IN VALUES.  Values may have quotes within
   them, but they must be doubled.  Two double-quotes within a value
   are converted to a single double quote.
    ...,"An ""All Hands"" Mtg",... --> An "All Hands" Mtg

 + ALARM INTERVAL MAY USE LARGER UNITS.  If the alarm interval is an
   integral number of days or hours, it is converted to the larger
   unit rather than minutes.

Code notes:

importExport.js
  parseOutlookCSVEvents:
   + now parses header by splitting instead of matching, so it can
     handle any number of header fields.  Requires that
     header fields be quoted, as before.
   + aborts by breaking out of the parse: block. Always returns an
     empty array if aborted.  (If some events were parsed, abort only
     occurs if the date format was found to be parsing wrong, so the
     earlier event dates are invalid.)
   + looks in multiple fields for sample boolean value, since not all
     fields may be present.
   + If header is not matched or selected, then its args.xxxIndex will
     not be defined, so tests for presence of this property
     ("xxxIndex" in args) before accessing args.xxxIndex to avoid
     strict javascript warnings.
outlookImportDialog.js
  loadOutlookImportDialog
   + declared one var k and reused it to avoid strict javascript
     warnings (scope of a javascript local var is the function body).
outlookImportBooleanDialog.xul (new)
  contains boolean menulist, separated from outlookImportDialog.xul
outlookImportBooleanDialog.js (new)
  contains boolean menulist code, separated from outlookImportDialog.js

locale/*/calendar.properties
  + adds names for outlook CSV headers and true/false values.  Note
    that these are for matching CSV files only, they are not displayed
    in the UI.	(The headers parsed from the file are displayed in the
    matching dialog UI.)  For best Outlook compatibility, they should
    match spelling and case exactly with headers in a csv file
    produced by exporting events from a localized Outlook.
    (JavaScript does not contain full case info for characters outside
    US-ASCII, so toUpperCase or toLowerCase are not used on headers.)
  + adds format mismatch confirmation query.

Comment 35

[gekacheka]

Comment on attachment 165084 [details] [diff] [review]
importExport+ patch: enable any number of headers, localization, maybe detect date format mismatch ( checked in )

Tested on sample files.

Comment 36

[Mostafa Hosseini]

Comment on attachment 165084 [details] [diff] [review]
importExport+ patch: enable any number of headers, localization, maybe detect date format mismatch ( checked in )

Aside from indenting problems, great patch. 
Checked in. Thanks

Comment 37

[gekacheka]

Attachment: fix to replace all "" with ", not just first instance.

Replace using regex with global flag to replace all.

Comment 38

[Mostafa Hosseini]

Comment on attachment 165913 [details] [diff] [review]
fix to replace all "" with ", not just first instance.

Checked in. Thanks

Comment 39

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

(In reply to bug 167102 comment #23)

> Are you using Calendar with the fr-FR UI Locale?

   I'm not.  I'm using FF/TB/SB all in English GUI.  I don't care about user
interface language, as long as I can input any language in them.

> (It should match those column names in the fr-FR locale.  If it doesn't, there
> may be a character encoding issue.)

   I don't know.  I just wanted to point out that there's a potential l10n
problem if one uses CSV file format.

Comment 40

[Lars Huttar]

Confusing empty dialog box during input

This "Import Outlook CSV data" issue hasn't been "resolved" yet, so maybe it's
pointless for me to log a bug report on it. :-)
But in case it isn't, here's my experience with Calendar 2004121718-cal (used
with Thunderbird 1.0).

Bug in Mozilla Calendar (used in Thunderbird):
I tried to import a .csv file of tasks which had been exported from Outlook.
(attach sample)
When I clicked "Finish", I got a dialog saying that one of the tasks had a date
of "(null)", and that the OS was set to interpret this as Oct 18, 2004. The
dialog asked something like, "Is this OK? If not, change settings so the formats
are compatible, then start this application again." [ok] [cancel]
I clicked Cancel. Calendar gave the message, "No tasks to import." Then I got a
dialog with nothing but a title bar, and a rather short one at that. (No title).
I tried pressing Enter and Space but no result. All I could do was click the [x]
on the right end of the title bar. This allowed me to return to the main
Calendar window, which responds to user input but continues to show an hourglass
many minutes later. (Is the import process still hanging around??)
I tried File - Import again, but this time after I selected the file, it simply
said "No tasks to import" and closed the dialog.
Not long after, I tried File - Import a third time. This time (like the first
time) I got the field mapping dialog (map Subject to Subject, etc.) As soon as I
clicked OK on this dialog, I again got the dialog with no title and no content,
only a title bar. This time I tried resizing the window, which I was able to do,
but no contents appeared in the enlarged window; it simply didn't draw anything
over the background (the window behind showed through).
This time when I clicked on the [x] to close it, I got the "date is formatted as
'(null)' message afterward. This time I clicked OK instead of Cancel... with
some trepidation. The import seemed to begin running. (I eventually cancelled it
because it was taking a long time ... probably my fault b/c I exported tasks
from Outlook over a 3-year period, in which there were daily recurring tasks
that probably got translated to 1000s of individual non-recurring tasks. :-p )

That's all for now... the main issue was the appearance of this confusing blank
dialog box. Platform WinXP SP2.
Please keep up the good work... I agree this is an important feature! especially
if you want people to migrate from MS software.

Comment 41

[Mike J.]

I can second the information provided by Lars. Using the latest Calendar release
(2005011112-cal) I tried some simple imports of Events and Tasks from Outlook
2002 SP3 using CSV files. The Events imported perfectly (nice job) but the Tasks
were mistakenly imported as Events and I experienced some of the same strange
behavior, specifically the little "empty dialog". I just started using it and
have not been tracking the feature development, but it appears that there simply
isn't any code to import Tasks yet(?) in which case the bug is primarily just
the odd behavior.

Comment 42

[reid spice]

I will attach a csv file from outlook 2003 that is erroring on import to sunbird alpha 1.  Exported only events for the last ~5 months through Feb 2006 to CSV (Windows) format.  

The error I see (in pop-up window) is:

Unable to read from file:C:\[path]

[Exception... "Cannot modify properties of a WrappedNative" nsresult: "0x80570034 (NS_ERROR_XPC_CANT_MODIFY_PROP_ON_WN)" location: "JS frame :: file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/[user]/Desktop/sunbird/components/calOutlookCSVImportExport.js :: csv_importFromStream :: line 269" data: no]

This is on WinXP SP2 with all of the latest patches.

Would love to get all of the folks in my office using Thunderbird/Sunbird (they have already been converted to Firefox) but need to get the calendar migration working from Outlook before I can move them over.

Let me know if you need any more info.

Thanks for you work on this.

Comment 43

[reid spice]

Attachment: Outlook 2003 CSV export

this is the attachment for comment #42

Comment 44

[Josh Goldfoot]

In Sunbird 0.3a1, when I attempt to import a CSV that I exported from Outlook 2003, it does nothing -- no crash, no error message, no import.

I suspect the problem is multi-line "Description" fields, but I don't know.

I am uploading my CSV file, which is huge, but probably typical of what brand-new users would try to import before they decide to switch from Outlook or some other app.  I've scrambled descriptive fields for obvious reasons.

Comment 45

[Joey Minta]

(In reply to comment #44)
> In Sunbird 0.3a1, when I attempt to import a CSV that I exported from Outlook
> 2003, it does nothing -- no crash, no error message, no import.
> 
> I suspect the problem is multi-line "Description" fields, but I don't know.
> 
> I am uploading my CSV file, which is huge, but probably typical of what
> brand-new users would try to import before they decide to switch from Outlook
> or some other app.  I've scrambled descriptive fields for obvious reasons.
> 
Don't upload huge files, this just makes things harder on developers.  Instead, upload clear, small testcases of single things that go wrong, so that each can be tracked down and fixed individually.

Comment 46

[Josh Goldfoot]

Attachment: Outlook 2003 CSV export (WinXP, USA/English)

Comment 47

[Josh Goldfoot]

Got it.  Sorry I didn't read your message soon enough.

Comment 48

[Josh Goldfoot]

Attachment: Fixes the "does nothing after import" problem and the all-day-event problem

My first patch.  Please be gentle.

Comment 49

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

Josh: It's better to file a new bug. This one is pretty long, hard to read. For example, it's not clear to me what the latests patch fixes.

Comment 50

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

Comment on attachment 221233 [details] [diff] [review]
Fixes the "does nothing after import" problem and the all-day-event problem

There is bug 337377 for this patch now.

Comment 51

[Adam Guthrie]

*** Bug 356551 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 52

[Pierre WARGNIER]

I tried to import a CSV, nothing imported and no errors emited.
Is it possible to have more feed-back when import fails ?

Comment 53

[psuedonym]

Tried to import my exported Outlook file.

Some idiot forgot localisation settings when parsing dates and now a two day event covers a month.

Add localisation (ie dd/mm/yy etc.) to start/end date parsing when importing. 

Comment 54

[Finn]

My first bug report.
I'm unable to import any csv intries into Sunbird 0.3. 

First I was trying to import my girlfriends outlook calendar but as someone else mentioned this doesn't do anything no errors no calendar entries. I've tried creating a couple of entries in a new sunbird calendar and then exporting the calendar to csv. This thows an error but succeeds. If I try to import the csv file into a blank calendar I get an error and no entries. I opened this csv in OO Calc and re-saved it. Importing this file doesn't throw any errors but doesn't create any entries in the calendar.

"Subject","Start Date","Start Time","End Date","End Time","All day event","Reminder on/off","Reminder Date","Reminder Time","Categories","Description","Location","Private"
"test event",01/01/07,00:00:00,01/01/07,01:00:00,FALSE,,,,"null","null","null",FALSE
"test5",01/02/07,00:00:00,01/03/07,00:00:00,TRUE,,,,"null","blimey","living room",FALSE

Comment 55

[David Taber]

Using Lightning 0.5 on TBird 2.0.0.6 with Penelope on WinXP SP-2.

Tried to import CSV files into Lightning...I make it through the wizard without any problem, but it doesn't import anything.  I even cleaned up the import file so it looks just like the Lightning CSV export file...still no soap.  See next comment for very short data file.

Maybe cockpit error on my part, but there's no FM to R.

Comment 56

[David Taber]

Attachment: importing silently fails

per comment #55

Comment 57

[David Taber]

(In reply to comment #29)
> Just a note that Outlook can save to the .ics file format which is a better way
> to import data from Outlook rather than using the csv format
> From http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP052434121033.aspx :
> 
> "Note  Exporting to iCalendar, vCalendar, or vCard file format is done by saving
> the information into the file format, not by using the Import/Export Wizard."

In Outlook 2003 this strategy doesn't work:  you can only save a single appointment in ics or other standard formats. The only operation I can see for the entire calendar is exporting to other MSFT apps and to CSV.

Comment 58

[David Taber]

(In reply to comment #55)
> Using Lightning 0.5 on TBird 2.0.0.6 with Penelope on WinXP SP-2.
> 
> Tried to import CSV files into Lightning...I make it through the wizard without
> any problem, but it doesn't import anything.  I even cleaned up the import file
> so it looks just like the Lightning CSV export file...still no soap.  See next
> comment for very short data file.
> 
> Maybe cockpit error on my part, but there's no FM to R.
> 

Actually, I should clarify here.  The wizard is *extremely* terse, I may be failing before the import process even begins.  The sequence I experience is:
<blockquote>
   - Go to main menu bar in Tbird, open the Calendar menu
   - Select Import menu item
   - File open window appears; I change file type to "Outlook CSV"
   - I select my file, and hit the "open" button
   - The open window disappears instantly, nothing else happens.  Tbird 
     operates normally, but nothing has been imported.
</blockquote>

Comment 59

[nat.machtus]

I am having exactly this problem. I choose import file in Sunbird and change the file type to CSV... then I import and NOTHING happens... no response to map fields, no appointments, nothing. I would appreciate some guidance on this as without this function the program is completely useless to me!

Comment 60

[David Taber]

As far as I know, CSV imports are still a no-op even in Lightning 0.7.  However, ics imports kind of work.  There's a plug in (actually, some VB) that you can get for free for Outlook 2003 so you can export your whole calendar (google it, I don't remember where the site is...).  That ics file will import into Lightning BUT it may crash Lightning if it's a big file.

The import does NOT properly handle meeting Categories, so it's still not very useful.

Comment 61

[Mark L. Wise]

I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to get CSV export/import to work on Lightning 0.7.

Here are the details:

1. Exporting a calendar from Lightning to CSV results in a perfectly readable .CSV file, but all of the fields have quotes around them... "01/01/08" for example.

2. If I edit the .CSV file with EXCELL and save it out to a CSV file however, the fields are not quoted... (unless there is a comma in the data) AND the dates are changed to have full four digits, i.e. 01/01/2008.

3. Importing this changed file SEEMS to do nothing, but if you export a calendar in HTML format, you may see your data duplicated... as internally the 2008 dates are actually 0008.

I would be glad to work on this problem, but I don't have a development environment set up for mozilla projects....

Comment 62

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

(In reply to comment #61)
For the two-digits-year issue (2007->0007) see also Bug 366921.

Comment 63

[:Hb]

This five year old bug should be closed. It does not reflect the current situation. In bug 359083 a patch is provided which gives an automated import of csv files from Outlook 98, 2K, XP and 2003 for the languages DE, EN, FR and NL.

Jussi made a good solution with "outlookImportDialog" which was used in Sunbird version 0.3. It is still in the code, but not used anymore.

Comment 64

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

I'll follow Hb's suggestion, and close this bug in favor of bug 359083. We should file new separate bugs for problems importing Outlook csv files.