Generate calendar based on approximate dates

June 13, 2018 9:13 AM

I've got a table of events and dates, used for planning in an annual cycle. Some of these dates are explicit, like "May 15." Some are in the form of "third Saturday of October." And some are approximate, like "mid-month of April."--the exact date doesn't matter, it just needs to happen around a certain time. I'd like to be able to produce a calendar for a specific year based on these criteria, and I'm wondering if there's a tool that can do that.

Mac/Unix/web-based all OK. Ideally the output would be an .ics file or anything I could sync to Google Calendar.

I realize that online calendars don't deal with approximate dates; something that could generate a 10-day event based on early/mid/late month would suffice.

posted by adamrice to Technology (3 answers total)

I'm not aware of any off-the-shelf tools, but I have a side project where I've used this icalendar gem to generate .ics files. If you don't find anything better, I'd be happy to collaborate on a little script to do what you need.
posted by Cogito at 12:07 PM on June 13, 2018

Are you proficient in Excel or any other spreadsheet application? If so, here's a .csv to iCal Calendar Converter that showed up in Google results. I would think that a spreadsheet and its date-handling capabilities might be an ideal interface for batch creation of these events.
posted by XMLicious at 12:15 PM on June 13, 2018

Response by poster: Well, doing a little more poking around, it seems that if I massage my data a little, I can upload a csv directly to gCal, and there are a number of csv to ics converters. It's not perfect, but it's not bad for a start.
posted by adamrice at 1:50 PM on June 13, 2018