Add notifications in ICS calendar file
I can’t find a way to add a reminder to all appointments on a calendar in Outlook at once; individually it works, but it is very tedious. What now?
My municipality provides a calendar with the garbage collection dates in ICS format for download. The import into Outlook works without any problems, but a previous reminder is not set for any of the appointments. I can’t find a way to add a reminder to all appointments in Outlook at once; it only seems to work one at a time.
Outlook does not offer an obvious function for this. But it works, even with two different methods. For the first one, you manually set a reminder for an upcoming appointment. Then switch the calendar display to a list form via “View/Change view/List”.
Select the imported collection calendar on the left and then set up a grouping: “Arrange by/View Settings…/Group…”. Set the “Group elements by” field to “Reminder” and close the dialogs with “OK”. The list now consists of two groups: “Has reminder” with only one entry and “Without reminder” with the remaining appointments. Select all entries in the second list area while holding down the Shift key and drag them into the “Has memory” area while holding down the mouse button. The same reminder is now set in all entries as in the first manually edited appointment. Don’t be surprised: If you have already marked past appointments in the list, you will be reminded of them as “overdue” in one go.
A completely different method is to edit the ICS file before importing it. It is a simple text file that contains, among other things, all dates in plain text. The details of each appointment are written between the lines BEGIN:VEVENT and END:VEVENT. In between, you can include a block that adds a reminder function:
BEGIN:VALARMTRIGGER:-PT24HACTION:DISPLAYEND:VALARM
That -PT24H Behind TRIGGER stands for a reminder that is activated 24 hours before the actual date event. You can use other values and additionally add other settings.
If you know a programming or scripting language, you could customize all entries in the ICS file with a few lines of code. Alternatively, the search/replace function of a text editor is also suitable if you can use regular expressions or at least deal with paragraph marks. This works well with Notepad++, for example. So that is the term by which you END:VEVENT substitute: BEGIN:VALARM\nTRIGGER:-PT24H\nACTION:DISPLAY\nEND:VALARM\nEND:VEVENT.
To be on the safe side, save the changed ICS file under a new name. In Outlook, delete the already imported calendar without reminder and after that import the edited ICS file instead.
(swiss)
