Importing LARGE amounts of calendar entries into Airtable Calendar

[Matt_Meadows]

Good day all! New Airtable user here.

I’m experimenting with Airtable Pro to gain some functionality over Google Calendar for planning complex jobs across multiple manufacturing departments within our facility.

I’m using it as a glorified calendar and I’m trying to get over a couple hurdles I cannot figure out.

I need to export about 12 different Google Calendars into Airtable, which I’m able to do by exporting each Calendar as an .ics file, and importing that file into Airtable. Here’s where I run into two MAJOR hurdles.

1. I need to be sure I maintain the NAME of each Google Calendar as it’s imported into Airtable, into a field titled “Department”. For example, I have a Google Calendar named “Material Arrival”, and I have a department in the drop-down menu titled the same. However, when I import the .ics file, I do not get an option to map the Google Calendar’s name to any field. Nor do I seem to have an easy option to automatically set the Airtable field to say “Material Arrival” for all the new entries. They just all import with that field blank. There are THOUSANDS of entries, there’s no way I can go manually click each one to say “Material Arrival”.

2. I only want to import .ics calendar entries that are applicable to 2021. These calendar entries go back to 2014, the only ones that matter are 2021. I have only been able to export ALL of the Google Calendar’s entries rather than just a selected date range. How can I get them from Google Calendar into Airtable?

[ScottWorld]

For #1, if you import one calendar at a time, then after you do the import, you might find the Batch Update app useful for changing the contents of your field to the right Calendar name.

For #2, you could just delete all previous years after you import them into Airtable.

[Bill.French]

Hi @Matt_Meadows, and welcome to the community!

@ScottWorld

For #1, if you import one calendar at a time, then after you do the import, you might find the Batch Update app useful for changing the contents of your field to the right Calendar name.

For #2, you could just delete all previous years after you import them into Airtable.

Kludge-a-PALOOZA!

Um, @Matt_Meadows - three letters - API.

@Matt_Meadows

for planning complex jobs across multiple manufacturing departments within our facility.

This sounds important to your company. Do the right thing - spend the bucks; design it carefully; create a sustainable approach and integrate it.

If you don’t, please remember this advice when you are struggling to fix the mess that you’ll inevitably encounter and will need to urgently remedy on a Saturday morning when you’d rather be skiing.

[ScottWorld]

As @Bill.French mentioned, the API is probably your best bet! Postman is a great tool for accessing API’s.

If you’re scared to dive into coding yourself, I highly recommend Integromat as a low-code/no-code way of accessing both Google Calendar’s API and Airtable’s API, and communicating between the two of them.

Note that I am a professional Airtable consultant and a Registered Integromat Partner, and the Integromat link contains my personal referral code. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert to help you with this, please feel free to contact me through my website at ScottWorld.com.

[Matt_Meadows]

Gents, thanks for the information. I’m just now (as in, today and yesterday) learning how to use Airtable and I have no familiarity writing API’s but I won’t rule them out as an option.

For the first few months I will be the only user of Airtable, I just manage the throughput of some complex jobs through multiple departments here at the facility. I absolutely MUST have the database-style accessibility to each calendar entry that Airtable gives me and Google Cal lacks.

Once I’ve used this for a while (6 months or so) we may consider going company-wide with it, but we’ll have to explore Airtable far beyond simple calendar entries. We’re currently using Asana for job information tracking/planning among other “side projects” (building/machinery upgrades, discussions) and Airtable might have functionality we need that Asana doesn’t have.

Doing API’s will probably be part of this whole discussion company-wide.

[Matt_Meadows]

OK Gents, thank you again for your help. I ended up doing what Scott suggested, most of it was just simply my lack of understanding of how to do those things with Airtable. I have all our events copied over now and a few Zaps set up to automatically import new entries from Google Calendar into Airtable. Maybe eventually we get the whole company onto Airtable.