Importing .ics event into specific Outlook (gmail) calendar. How?

Question

In Outlook I have 3 calendars, the first two from corporate Exchange (O365) accounts, and the third is imported (subscribed) from Gmail. When I open ICS event and press save it always appeared in the first calendar (by order they located in account list), but I want to import the event into the last one (Gmail). How to do that? I don't see any option to select calendar while importing.

Answer 1

It appears at this time, it is not a supported feature between Microsoft and Google:

• Microsoft Outlook does not support signing into a calendar account with OAuth2
• Google requires OAuth2 to sign in to the account and grant permissions to access and modify things like calendars, mail etc

This looks like it might be changing however, as a recent (though undated) Microsoft Support Article shows that OAuth2 is being rolled out in updates to Outlook to sign into Gmail accounts. The article only discusses it's use for email at this stage, and the screenshots for the process on Windows only show permissions for mail being configured. The screenshots for Outlook for Mac, however, show read and write permissions being granted for Calendar as well (alongside Contacts and Google Drive), though from the documentation it is not clear on whether those are actually supported.

With any luck, this means that such support could be coming in future Outlook updates, since most of the hard work for this should have been implementing OAuth2 in Outlook. Once the app has a credential from following the OAuth2 sign in flow, there isn't a lot more to do other than to connect to Google's CalDAV server with those credentials, according to Google's developer docs. When or if that ever happens, however, is really up to Microsoft at this stage. If they have a way to submit feature requests, and you want this feature added, I'd suggest going to let them know so that they can get an idea of what demand there is to make it worth spending development time on :-)

Answer 2

As you mentioned in your comment it appears you don't have permissions to create new items on the subscribed gmail calendar. Try to create a new appointment/meeting manually, you'll run into the same error confirming its not the ICS or import steps causing your issue. As @FreelancerJ comment pointed out subscribed calendars are read only. Microsoft seems to confirm this in their gmail-subscribe article at the bottom of Subscribe to your Google Calendar:

Answer 3

As a workaround, what about directly adding your .ics event to your Gmail calendar?

1. Open Google Calendar.
2. In the top right, click Settings Settings.
3. Click Import & Export.
4. Click Select file from your computer and select the file you exported. The file should end in "ics" or "csv".
5. Choose which calendar to add the imported events to. By default, events will be imported into your primary calendar.
6. Click Import.

Reference link:https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/3231927?hl=en

Answer 4

A (too?) simple idea :

Go to Calendar view and uncheck all the other calendars under My Calendars. This will hide the other calendars and only leave the one to import into.

Now import the .ics file, which should go into the only enabled calendar.

Finally, re-enable the other calendars again.

Answer 5

I got this to work by opening File->Account Settings and going to the Data Files tab. I selected the data file that includes the calendar I want to import the items into, and clicked Set As Default.

Now when I import .ics items, they go into that calendar.

Answer 6

When you open up the ICS file, go to "file" on the far left top and click. Select "Move to Folder", then "Copy to Folder", scroll down to the Calendar Account you want to save it to, then select its calendar box. Select "OK".

It should save in that specific calendar. Close. (It will ask if you would like to save changes, but say no. If you say yes, it will also save this appointment to your default calendar as well).