How to export your Outlook appointments?

Backing up your Outlook calendars offline

In absence of Outlook calendar synchronization with calendar server or services, such as CalDAV and Exchange servers, people would think about exporting their calendar entries into iCal files (.ics files), .csv files, .pst files, or Excel files. If you solely work with Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 or 2019, then it is recommended to export them into .pst files for the best import result in the future. 

However, users most likely export Outlook appointments for use on other application or database import. The .csv method is not a good choice because foreign language characters in calendar entries will be corrupted after exporting. Thus, the best and the most compatible way to export is using iCal method.

Export Outlook calendar to Excel

EVO staff has once again made some useful Outlook add-in after EVO Collaborator for Outlook. It is called Power Toys for Outlook. This collection of add-ins include a nice Outlook calendar export tool. There are 4 ways that PTO exports Outlook appointments:

1. Export appointments as vCalendars (Outlook ICal (ics)) – This is as same as Outlook’s Save As except Outlook can only save one appointment per operation. PTO is able to save the whole calendar folder at once.

2. Export appointments as vCalendars (iCal (ics); Olson Timezone UTF8) – This is the same as #1 except saving appointments in term of Olson Timezone and UTF8. Olson Timezone is the most widely used time zone system except Windows Timezone. If you export your calendar events to elsewhere such as Google Calendar or other calendar services, then the receiving party will not be able to recognize it and fail the import. Yet, deployment of UTF8 prevents foreign language characters turning into corrupted characters.

3. Export appointments into one single vCalendar (iCal (ics); Olson Timezone UTF8) – Since vCalendar protocol is able to store multiple appointments in one single file, PTO saves the hassle of managing 100s or even 1000s of iCal (ics) files.

4. Export appointments as Excel Document – PTO enables you to output all Outlook calendar events into an Excel file for better viewing purpose with forking in nearly all commonly used fields in Outlook appointments.

Here is a general guideline to export your Outlook appointments:

1. Download Power Toys for Outlook from EVO’s Official website.

2. Close Outlook and run setup.exe with administrator’s privilege.

3. Open Outlook and click on Power Toys ribbon at top.

4. Click on Export appointments.

5. Select your Outlook calendar folder.

6. Click on 1 of the 4 export types as mentioned above.

export outlook calendar to excel

7. A folder created by date will pop up showing all iCal (ics) files accordingly.

As you can see, exporting Outlook calendar becomes as easy as 1-2-3.