oweynge

On my Windows laptop, I used Outlook to manage (well, strictly speaking, store) my calendar and contact data. This is for two simple reas0ns:

• every device and most software you buy syncs with Outlook. Palms, Clies, all kinds of phones, iTunes, you name it. It was easy to have several devices (japan phone, roaming phone, web calendar) synced.
• Office 2003 personal came with the Laptop. It was there.

It’s hard to get data out of Outlook unless you use some third party tools. Here’s how I tried migrating my Calendar and Contact data from Outlook 2003. I eventually used my iPhone  to transfer the data because of the issues with Contacts, but for those without an iPhone, read on:.

Calendar

This is made easy by Google Calendar Sync.

1. You just need to install a tool from Google that neatly syncs the data from Outlook to Google Calendar. This works for Outlook 2003 and 2007, for Windows XP and Windows Vista (WinXP64 not supported).
2. From here, you export your calendar from google. Click the “Settings” button in the calendar list, select the appropriate calendar and click the “ICAL” button in the Private Address section. Save the ical file to your mac. Detailed instructions here.
3. Fire up iCal, and import the file we got in step2. Done!
4. Alternatively, you can setup CalDAV to keep iCal in sync with Google Calendar. 

Contacts

There’s two ways:

A. From Outlook.

1. Select all your contacts.
2. Action menu, select Forward as vCard. Your PC now processes all your contacts and attaches it to a mail. 
3. Send it to yourself, then open the mail in your Mac.
4. Add your contacts. 

This is a bit tedious, though. Also, since a lot of my contacts have japanese names, the text got messed up. This probably due to encoding issues.

B. Using Thunderbird

1. Go to Address Book
2. Tools –> Import. Import your Outlook address book.
3. Now, Tools–>Export. Save your contacts to an LDIF file
4. Import in your Mac’s Address Book

This lost some data such as Birthdays. So I looked for another solution:

Via an iPhone

1. Sync iPhone to your PC, just to be sure all data is up to date
2. Connect iPhone to your Mac. Fire up iTunes. The iPhone will appear under devices as usual.
3. In the setting for the iPhone, sync Contacts and Calendar. 
4. Sync. iTunes will ask you whether to replace the info on the iPhone or to Merge the information. Choose Merge.
5. Done!

For those looking to move your mail from Outlook, sorry. I’ve had the good sense NOT to use Outlook for mail. Used Thunderbird. Copied the folders. Done.