Anti-Credit

So, in contrast to my recent Apple praise related to iTunes, there are some distinctly rough edges in iCal (version 5.0.2 on Mac OS X version 10.7.3).

My task? Merge a few calendars that didn't really make sense anymore. For example, I had a calendar for Iowa (where I went to school) and a calendar for Madison (where I live). I didn't want to get rid of the events on the Iowa calendar, but I didn't plan to add anything new to it. Additionally, although the Madison calendar is fine now, it is unlikely that I'll live in Madison for my entire life. So, I wanted to combine those calendars into a single Home calendar that would be applicable regardless of where I happen to be living.

Attempt 1: Drag one calendar onto the other. Unfortunately, drag and drop fails here. You can drag the calendars into a new order, but you can't drag one into another.

Attempt 2: Use 'Select All' to select all the events in one calendar, and drag them onto the other calendar. I had some luck with this, but there wasn't a good way to truly select all of the events for a given calendar. I could select all for a month, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do more than that. Since I'm talking about more than 10 years worth of calendar data, that wasn't really practical. I did find some indications online that you used to be able to use View > Show Search Results with no search term to get a full event list. This doesn't seem to work today.

Attempt 3: Export one calendar and re-import that to the other calendar. I thought for sure this was going to work, and it looked very promising. However, I'm glad I was slow to delete the exported calendar. I have all of my calendars in iCloud, and it seems that importing one exported calendar into another calendar in iCloud just doesn't work. The imported events appear, but then all slowly disappear until none of the imported events remain.

Attempt 4: Export both calendars. Create new non-iCloud calendars. Import the exported calendars to the new local calendar. Delete the exported iCloud calendars. This worked, but it left me with local calendars where I wanted iCloud calendars. That should be easy to fix, right?

It turns out there is actually a decent support article for moving local calendars to iCloud after the initial setup, but I didn't know that until I was done. What I was hoping for was the ability to drag a calendar from the 'On My Mac' section of the list to the iCloud section of this list. Unfortunately that isn't possible. What I ended up doing was turning iCloud calendar syncing off and then back on. This was a bit unnerving (because I hadn't read the above article - and because during the process my calendars disappeared for a few minutes), but it did work.