Times wrong after ical import

Hey folks,

I'm trying to import the church calendar into my google calendar. It imports alright, I get all the events, but all the times are wrong... They are all listed as being in Mountain time, but I'm way over on the east coast... is there a simple way to adjust this so it shows up as local time for me?

Thanks,
Jeremy

jgmaceachern wrote:Hey folks,

I'm trying to import the church calendar into my google calendar. It imports alright, I get all the events, but all the times are wrong... They are all listed as being in Mountain time, but I'm way over on the east coast... is there a simple way to adjust this so it shows up as local time for me?

Thanks,
Jeremy

Jeremy,
What times are you referring to? Remember that the times for Church-Wide events - those entered by CHQ (church headquarters) - will always be in mountain time. Those entered by the stake or ward should - if entered correctly - be in your own time zone.

Followup: I just attempted the same thing by exporting a calendar from the LUWS in ICAL format. If you check the top few lines of the saved ICAL file you'll notice the following;

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:luws-1.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:US/PACIFIC

Change the time zone to whatever zone you're in and then import it and it's all correct. Someone else may have a better work-a-round, but this worked for me.

Techgy wrote:Jeremy,
What times are you referring to? Remember that the times for Church-Wide events - those entered by CHQ (church headquarters) - will always be in mountain time. Those entered by the stake or ward should - if entered correctly - be in your own time zone.

I was specifically referring to the time for our district meetings... for instance, a meeting this Saturday was showing up as starting at 1pm, when in actuality, it started at 10am. So it showed up properly on lds.org, but when I imported it, it would show up in Mountain time, instead of Atlantic time.

I managed to fix it shortly after I posted the question though. I went into the ics file that was created when I exported the calendar, and simply removed the VTIMEZONE section. After I did that, the import worked fine.

Thanks,

I am puzzled. I am in Central time. The iCal export from LUWS had the TZID:US/MOUNTAIN header. Importing that (unmodified) export into the a new test Google calendar yielded events with the same times as on the LUWS (i.e. correct for my time zone). I can only guess that there is something about the way you are exporting the iCal file or importing it into your Google calendar that is introducing a glitch.

FWIW, my method for exporting the iCal file from LUWS is simply to right-click the iCal link and save the file to the desktop.

My method for importing the iCal file into Google Calendars is detailed in this post.

jbh001 wrote:I am puzzled. I am in Central time. The iCal export from LUWS had the TZID:US/MOUNTAIN header. Importing that (unmodified) export into the a new test Google calendar yielded events with the same times as on the LUWS (i.e. correct for my time zone). I can only guess that there is something about the way you are exporting the iCal file or importing it into your Google calendar that is introducing a glitch.

FWIW, my method for exporting the iCal file from LUWS is simply to right-click the iCal link and save the file to the desktop.

My method for importing the iCal file into Google Calendars is detailed in this post.

Yes, that is exactly what I did, I even messed around with the time zone info in Gcalendar for that particular calendar... setting it to Mountain time, then atlantic time and vise versa. Either way, if all I have to do it remove that section of the export, it's not a big deal, doesn't make sense as to why it is happening though. I agree that it should just work.

I've done my best to change the timezone info, but it's not working. I don't actually know what to enter.

Here's the line from the LUWS export: TZID:US/Mountain

My timezone is Sydney, NSW, Australia....so what do I enter instead of "US/Mountain"?

Thanks,

Ian

bibnib wrote:I've done my best to change the timezone info, but it's not working. I don't actually know what to enter.

Here's the line from the LUWS export: TZID:US/Mountain

My timezone is Sydney, NSW, Australia....so what do I enter instead of "US/Mountain"?

Thanks,

Ian

The original poster said he got the import to be successful if you removed the two lines that say "BEGIN:VTIMEZONE" and "TZID:XX/XXXXXX".

Also, if there is an END:VTIMEZONE", remove that as well I would say.

Just for information the tz database has the following time zones for Australia:
Australia/ACT
Australia/Adelaide
Australia/Brisbane
Australia/Broken_Hill
Australia/Canberra
Australia/Currie
Australia/Darwin
Australia/Eucla
Australia/Hobart
Australia/LHI
Australia/Lindeman
Australia/Lord_Howe
Australia/Melbourne
Australia/North
Australia/NSW
Australia/Perth
Australia/Queensland
Australia/South
Australia/Sydney
Australia/Tasmania
Australia/Victoria
Australia/West
Australia/Yancowinna

You know in the scriptures how we read about patience...well, I still don't get it.

Here's what I'm doing:
1) Export iCal file from LUWS (name the file "Stake Calendar").
2) Open Stake Calendar in Excel.
3) See below...I've tried variations of deleting lines 5, 6, and 22; or renaming line 6 to "Australia/Sydney".
4) Import the calendar into my Google calendar.

Nothing is working for me. Google gives me error: "Failed to import events: Unable to process your iCal/CSV file. The file is not properly formatted."

I notice that lines 11-22 also look like they have timezone info in them...could that be the problem.

1 BEGIN:VCALENDAR
2 VERSION:2.0
3 PRODID:luws-1.0
4 METHOD:PUBLISH
5 BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
6 TZID:US/Mountain
7 LAST-MODIFIED:20060203
8 BEGIN:STANDARD
9 DTSTART:19671029T020000
10 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10
11 TZOFFSETFROM:-0600
12 TZOFFSETTO:-0700
13 TZNAME:MST
14 END:STANDARD
15 BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
16 DTSTART:19870405T020000
17 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=1SU;BYMONTH=4
18 TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
19 TZOFFSETTO:-0600
20 TZNAME:MDT
21 END:DAYLIGHT
22 END:VTIMEZONE

Am I doing something dumb? I appreciate your help.

Ian

bibnib wrote:You know in the scriptures how we read about patience...well, I still don't get it.

Here's what I'm doing:
1) Export iCal file from LUWS (name the file "Stake Calendar").
2) Open Stake Calendar in Excel.
3) See below...I've tried variations of deleting lines 5, 6, and 22; or renaming line 6 to "Australia/Sydney".
4) Import the calendar into my Google calendar.

Nothing is working for me. Google gives me error: "Failed to import events: Unable to process your iCal/CSV file. The file is not properly formatted."

I notice that lines 11-22 also look like they have timezone info in them...could that be the problem.

1 BEGIN:VCALENDAR
2 VERSION:2.0
3 PRODID:luws-1.0
4 METHOD:PUBLISH
5 BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
6 TZID:US/Mountain
7 LAST-MODIFIED:20060203
8 BEGIN:STANDARD
9 DTSTART:19671029T020000
10 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10
11 TZOFFSETFROM:-0600
12 TZOFFSETTO:-0700
13 TZNAME:MST
14 END:STANDARD
15 BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
16 DTSTART:19870405T020000
17 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=1SU;BYMONTH=4
18 TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
19 TZOFFSETTO:-0600
20 TZNAME:MDT
21 END:DAYLIGHT
22 END:VTIMEZONE

Am I doing something dumb? I appreciate your help.

Ian

Actually the whole last half looks like it has time zone stuff in it. Especially anything that has "TZ" in it.

We should probably hope the original poster will clarify how he/she did it with a little more detail.

bibnib wrote:Here's what I'm doing:
1) Export iCal file from LUWS (name the file "Stake Calendar").
2) Open Stake Calendar in Excel.
3) See below...I've tried variations of deleting lines 5, 6, and 22; or renaming line 6 to "Australia/Sydney".
4) Import the calendar into my Google calendar.

Nothing is working for me. Google gives me error: "Failed to import events: Unable to process your iCal/CSV file. The file is not properly formatted."

I'm curious why you are opening the calendar into Excel (step 2 above). The iCal file is a text file, not particularly friendly to Excel. If you had saved it as a CSV file, I might be able to understand why you would import it into Excel, but with iCal, that makes no sense to me.

I simply did steps 1 and 4 (export the iCal file and then import into Google Calendar) and it worked fine.

mkmurray wrote:Actually the whole last half looks like it has time zone stuff in it. Especially anything that has "TZ" in it.

We should probably hope the original poster will clarify how he/she did it with a little more detail.

The original poster said the he/she removed the entire VTIMEZONE section. So remove the whole set of lines starting with BEGIN:VTIMEZONE through the line END:VTIMEZONE.

bibnib wrote:2) Open Stake Calendar in Excel.

Excel has a tendency to trash the formatting of text files. Try using Notepad instead.

Ummm...I only used Excel because I thought it would be fine...I'm not a IT guy. But the good news is I deleted lines 5, 6, and 22 using Notepad and the import into Google calendar worked fine. So, thanks...all sorted now.

Thanks,

Ian

I tried this with a couple of different scenarios and keep getting the same (correct) results for my time zone regardless of the setting I use in Google Calendar. This leads me to believe that there is something coded somewhere in LUWS that is automatically compensating for the time differential between the unit's time zone, and US/Mountain time zone, at the time the export is done.

Here is how I exported the file:
Log in to LUWS.
Navigate to the Ward/Stake calendar (it didn't matter which).
Right-click the iCal link to export the calendar and save it to the desktop.

(Note: I did all this using Mac OS 10.4.11 and Firefox 3.0.5. Perhaps that makes a difference.)

To import the file I did this:
Log in to Google Calendars.
Click the Create link, under "My Calendars."
Typed a name for the calendar (i.e. Test, Test 2, Test 3)
Selected a time zone and then clicked the Create Calendar button.
Click the Add link, then select Import Calendar, navigate to my exported file, select the Google calendar I want the events imported into, click the Import button, then click the Back to Calendar link when the import is done.

Note: I tried various timezone/country combinations. Each time the events imported to the US/Central time slot properly adjusted to what ever timezone Google was set to display. That is, importing the events with Google set to US/Central Time on one iteration yielded the same event at the same time when the Google time zone was adjusted before, or after, regardless of whether the timezone was set at the user account level, global calendar level, or individual calendar level. I tried it several different ways, and each time the same event appeared next to the previous event regardless of my manipulation of the various Google timezone settings.

I must conclude that if Google is importing the calendar correctly, then the timezone offset is being exported by LUWS. Thus I believe that if this is in error for your unit, then there is some setting within LUWS that needs to be adjusted. However, I cannot find anywhere within LUWS where an administrator could set/adjust the LUWS timezone settings.

danpass wrote:The original poster said the he/she removed the entire VTIMEZONE section. So remove the whole set of lines starting with BEGIN:VTIMEZONE through the line END:VTIMEZONE.

If you do that, there's nothing left. I almost suggested this as well, but all you would be left with would be the following:

1 BEGIN:VCALENDAR
2 VERSION:2.0
3 PRODID:luws-1.0
4 METHOD:PUBLISH

mkmurray wrote:If you do that, there's nothing left. I almost suggested this as well, but all you would be left with would be the following:

1 BEGIN:VCALENDAR
2 VERSION:2.0
3 PRODID:luws-1.0
4 METHOD:PUBLISH

There would be only those four lines left of the header, but there would still be all the VEVENT records, which contain the actual events and make up the bulk of the iCal file. That's the important information that needs to be imported.

Alan_Brown wrote:There would be only those four lines left of the header, but there would still be all the VEVENT records, which contain the actual events and make up the bulk of the iCal file. That's the important information that needs to be imported.

Oh, thanks for the clarification...I was only going off of the 22 lines posted by bibnib.

On a somewhat related note to this thread, is it at all possible to change the timezone settings of the LUWS? Our stake is located in Western Australia (GMT+8). Mucking around with the VTIMEZONE header in the exported iCal file is OK, but a little bit of a pain. Some of our users (including my stake president) could handle the basic export/import operations well enough, but would most likely balk a little at having to open the file in a text editor and modify or remove any of what they see there.

Unlike jbh001, I found that importing the unmodified iCal file into Google Calendars regarded the event times to be in MT (as you would expect with that timezone explicitly declared in the VTIMEZONE header), and so displayed the event times as 14 hours later in my timezone - a meeting originally scheduled for 7:30PM in the LUWS calendar appears as 9:30AM the following day in my Google calendar. My Google calendar settings are correct for my timezone.

I haven't yet tested the iCal or vCal import into Outlook to see if the behaviour there is any different.

The other thing I find, is that looking at our stake or ward calendars in the browser (Firefox 3.0.7), the current date still appears to be based on Mountain time. At the time of writing this post, it is Friday 20th March, at 3:50 PM in Perth, yet my LUWS calendar has the current day highlighted as Thursday 19th March. While this may not seem to be a big thing, it would be nice to see the right day selected for this timezone.

I am the stake website administrator, and I can't seem to find any type of settings that allow me to specify our timezone. Am I missing it somewhere, or is it a case of there isn't actually any way to do this? If the latter, I will add it as an enhancement request on the LUWS Suggestion and Bug Tracking wiki.

Sorry for the long winded post, but if anyone has any additional insights into this, it would be most appreciated.

jmessinger wrote:....looking at our stake or ward calendars in the browser (Firefox 3.0.7), the current date still appears to be based on Mountain time. At the time of writing this post, it is Friday 20th March, at 3:50 PM in Perth, yet my LUWS calendar has the current day highlighted as Thursday 19th March. While this may not seem to be a big thing, it would be nice to see the right day selected for this timezone.

I am the stake website administrator, and I can't seem to find any type of settings that allow me to specify our timezone. Am I missing it somewhere, or is it a case of there isn't actually any way to do this? If the latter, I will add it as an enhancement request on the LUWS Suggestion and Bug Tracking wiki.

Sorry for the long winded post, but if anyone has any additional insights into this, it would be most appreciated.

There is a new version of the LUWS under development but no release date has yet been announced and we do not know any details as what new features may be introduced. I personally know of nothing that would resolve this in the current LUWS version aside from the editing of the output file.

jmessinger wrote:The other thing I find, is that looking at our stake or ward calendars in the browser (Firefox 3.0.7), the current date still appears to be based on Mountain time.

I wonder since timezone support is apparently functioning correctly for me in US Central Time, if perphaps this is something that has to be "turned on" or "set" for LUWS on a unit by unit basis somewhere, perhaps at the stake or CHQ level since there is no obvious way to do it at the unit level.

A second thought is that could this be defaulting to Mountain Time outside the US and Canada so that church-wide events such as general conference brodcasts show up on a particular day? For example, if you cross the international date line, might the Saturday & Sunday sessions of General Conference actually be on Sunday & Monday in some timezones? Since I am not in one of those times zones, I have no way to test this theory (without a lot of extra effort).

jbh001 wrote:I wonder since timezone support is apparently functioning correctly for me in US Central Time, if perphaps this is something that has to be "turned on" or "set" for LUWS on a unit by unit basis somewhere, perhaps at the stake or CHQ level since there is no obvious way to do it at the unit level.

A second thought is that could this be defaulting to Mountain Time outside the US and Canada so that church-wide events such as general conference brodcasts show up on a particular day? For example, if you cross the international date line, might the Saturday & Sunday sessions of General Conference actually be on Sunday & Monday in some timezones? Since I am not in one of those times zones, I have no way to test this theory (without a lot of extra effort).

As a stake LUWS administrator I know of no settings that would have any effect on the calendar time zones.

jbh001 wrote:A second thought is that could this be defaulting to Mountain Time outside the US and Canada so that church-wide events such as general conference brodcasts show up on a particular day? For example, if you cross the international date line, might the Saturday & Sunday sessions of General Conference actually be on Sunday & Monday in some timezones? Since I am not in one of those times zones, I have no way to test this theory (without a lot of extra effort).

This sounds like it could be a reasonable scenario. Living on the other side of the international date line from Utah, the Saturday night priesthood session of conference for example actually occurs on Sunday morning in our time zone (Western Australia - GMT+8). It would look kind of odd to see these calendared for Sunday/Monday instead of Saturday/Sunday.

Ah the joys of working across multiple time zones... :rolleyes:

jbh001 wrote:I wonder since timezone support is apparently functioning correctly for me in US Central Time, if perphaps this is something that has to be "turned on" or "set" for LUWS on a unit by unit basis somewhere, perhaps at the stake or CHQ level since there is no obvious way to do it at the unit level.

A second thought is that could this be defaulting to Mountain Time outside the US and Canada so that church-wide events such as general conference brodcasts show up on a particular day? For example, if you cross the international date line, might the Saturday & Sunday sessions of General Conference actually be on Sunday & Monday in some timezones? Since I am not in one of those times zones, I have no way to test this theory (without a lot of extra effort).

I am in Central and it exports as Mountain and I have to fix the output file.

After deleting the TZ information, the calendar import on lds.org would not function correctly:

>There was an error while trying to parse your ICS file. We currently support ICAL files created by Google Calendar or Outlook. If you are importing from one of these applications please report the issues to customer service.

I ended up importing the modified .ics file to a Google calendar set to my time zone. Then exported the calendar to a new ics which then did import into the LDS application properly.