ICS to CSV

Can you convert ICS to CSV?

You can, and the whole job takes about four seconds. Hand over the file, tick the fields you want as columns, and a table appears that you can paste into a spreadsheet or save as a download. Six events or six hundred, the work is identical; the count in the receipt tells you which you are holding.

The reason to bother is that a calendar file is a terrible thing to read and a spreadsheet is a good one. Once the appointments are rows you can sort them by date, filter out the canceled ones, count how many hours a conference actually runs, or hand the lot to somebody in accounts who has never heard of iCalendar and never needs to.

An .ics file and a CSV file, in brief

ICS

Full name	iCalendar
Extension	.ics, .ical, .ifb
Format type	Plain text calendar events, RFC 5545
MIME type	text/calendar

CSV

Full name	Comma-Separated Values
Extension	.csv
Format type	Plain text table, one record per line
MIME type	text/csv

Choosing what ends up in the columns

A single appointment in one of these files carries close to twenty useful fields, and almost nobody wants all of them. So the picker lists every one, ticks the useful populated fields to start with, and shows how many of your appointments genuinely have something in each — four out of six with a location, one out of six with a repeat rule, none at all with a web address.

That last figure matters more than it sounds. Most converters emit a fixed set of headings whether or not there is anything underneath them, and you end up scrolling past four blank columns forever. Here a field that is empty in every appointment is marked as empty and left unticked, though you can tick it anyway if you want the heading present for a later import.

The timezone question, which is where these go wrong

A spreadsheet cell holds one thing. A calendar file can record a start in four different ways, and only two of them survive being flattened without losing their meaning.

An hour ending in Z is universal time — a fixed point on the world clock. An hour tagged with a city is anchored too, just expressed on that city's clock. Both of those can be restated in whatever zone suits you, and the tool will do it per appointment, so a summer date and a winter date get the offsets they each deserve rather than one blanket adjustment.

The third kind names no zone whatsoever. Such an entry means the hour written, read on whichever clock the reader happens to own, so it lands at a different instant for a person in Denver than for a person in Dublin. There is no point of reference in it, which means there is nothing to recalculate, and these values are copied across untouched no matter which option you choose. Anything else would be fabrication. The fourth kind is a bare date for something lasting all day, and the same applies.

Because a plain spreadsheet cell cannot say any of that on its own, Start basis and End basis come ticked by default. Each names the basis of the exported cell: UTC after a UTC conversion, the selected city after a city conversion, or floating when the source could not be converted. That is the distinction a spreadsheet destroys silently and nobody notices until a meeting is missed. Files exported from Outlook get the same treatment when they use Microsoft's own zone vocabulary, which browsers have no rules for: the hour is left as written and the column says the name was not recognized.

The all-day trap, and why the End column disagrees with the file

Something occupying only the 14th is recorded as finishing on the 15th, because the closing boundary marks where it stops rather than the final day it fills. Copy that number straight into a spreadsheet and every one-day fixture looks like a two-day one, which is precisely what the converters ranking above this page do.

So the End column gives the last day genuinely covered, and if you would rather have the file's own boundary there is a separate End as written field holding the original untouched. Same for the start: tick Start as written and you get the compressed original alongside the readable version, which is handy when you are debugging a booking system rather than planning a week.

Some files write a DURATION instead of DTEND. In that case the readable End is calculated from the start, while a separate Duration column preserves the file's own value beside it.

How do I convert an ICS file to Excel?

Convert to CSV here, then open the CSV — Excel treats one as a workbook from the moment it opens, and there is no separate step. Two settings are worth a glance before you download. Leave the byte order mark ticked, or accented place names arrive as mojibake. And if your copy of Excel runs in a European locale, switch the separator to a semicolon, otherwise every row lands in a single column and looks broken.

The date format picker matters here too. The spreadsheet option writes the plain 2026-08-12 12:00 shape that Excel and Google Sheets recognize as a real date-and-time value you can subtract one from another. The ISO option is stricter and carries the offset inside the cell, which is better for archiving and worse for arithmetic. Sheets users take the same route through File, then Import.

Can I export a Microsoft calendar to a CSV file?

Outlook exports your own calendar to CSV directly, under File, then Open & Export. What it will not do is turn one invitation somebody emailed you into a table, and that is the situation this page exists for — you have a file, not a mailbox. Save the attachment, drop it here, and nothing touches the calendar you actually live in.

The same holds for a feed you have subscribed to. Download it once through your browser and the result is an ordinary file this page reads like any other.

How to convert an .ics file to another format

CSV is the format worth having, because it is the one everything else reads: spreadsheets, databases, Python, R, whatever the person you are sending it to happens to use. Getting from there to JSON or a database table is a step somebody else's tool already handles well.

What this page will not produce is an .xlsx workbook. That is a real difference rather than an oversight — a workbook can hold formatting and column types, and pretending a renamed CSV is one causes more trouble than it saves. Nor does it expand a repeat rule into individual dates; the rule is translated into a sentence and kept in its original form beside it. Excluded dates and replacement occurrences have their own columns, and the receipt says explicitly that a series remains one rule row. Generating every occurrence is a different job, and a list that is almost right is worse than the rule.

Both of those limits come straight from how the format is put together, and they make more sense once you have seen one of these files from the inside. The structure of an ICS file walks through the components and properties in order — which is also the quickest way to work out whether a field you were expecting is missing from the file or merely missing from the export.

Spreadsheet to calendar, the other direction

Going back the other way is a real need, and it has its own page: Excel to Calendar takes a table of dates and produces a calendar file from it. There is deliberately no separate CSV-to-ICS page here, because it would be the same job with a narrower door — schedules tend to live in spreadsheets rather than in hand-written comma-separated files, and one good page beats two thin ones.

If you only want to look at what you were sent, converting is more machinery than you need. The ICS viewer lays out the same file as readable appointments with no table involved. Building a file from scratch is the ICS file generator, and if you would like the format itself explained, start with what an .ics file is.

Nothing leaves this tab

One of the results above this page in Google announces a fifteen-megabyte ceiling on the files it will accept, which tells you the file is going to their machine. Ours has no ceiling because there is no machine to send it to: the reading, the table and the download are all built by your own browser, and you can watch the Network panel stay empty while it happens.

That is not a small thing for this particular format. Calendar exports carry the email addresses of everyone invited, conference numbers, access codes, and the plain fact of where a named individual will be at a stated hour. It is an odd thing to post to a stranger in exchange for a table. Large files are handled by warning you what your own machine is in for and then getting on with it, rather than by refusing.

The output is written with the carriage returns that the CSV convention asks for, so a Windows spreadsheet opens it without complaint. What the file you handed over used is a separate matter, and one this page makes no claim about — text pasted into a box on a web page has already had its line breaks rewritten by the browser, so any answer would be a guess dressed as a fact.