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New Outlook can't import ics files

Anonymous
2024-03-13T22:59:39+00:00

It seems a common issue, I googled and I found several posts on this bug.

The issue is simple: in the new outlook desktop, if I import an ics file, the process ends with a successful message, but the calendar view doesn't update. There's no meeting at all. I tried several methods, even sending the ics file as an attachment to an email to myself and using the "Add To Calendar" button: same success message and same result, no meeting in the calendar. I also tried different ics files.

Outlook | Windows | New Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-03-05T09:09:57+00:00

    Any updates on this issue ?

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-02-20T15:21:48+00:00

    "Open the email in Outlook and click on the attachment icon."

    What "attachment icon?" I swear the people answering these things have no idea how the software even works or what it looks like. What do you gain out of leading users through wild goose chases looking for options that don't even exist?

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-08-30T10:05:53+00:00

    Dear Eleni Constantinou,

    Many many thanks for sharing this workaround! I have been struggling with opening events sent from people outside of my organisation, this worked brilliantly.

    Only thing I did differently is rather than opening the file in Notepad I just sent the ics file as an attachment in an email to myself and selected the "Add to calendar" from the drop down menu then.

    Kind regards,

    Katrin Djapanova

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-04-23T20:42:09+00:00

    We have found the same issue. As it turns out, an old system we have that makes .ICS files via ASP Mail is saving the files out in UTF-16 Little Endian and not UFT-8 encoding. This was never an issue with "OLD" Outlook. But New Outlook gives you a success message but does not import the calendar entry.

    If you open your .ICS file in Notepad++ check the encoding - if it does not say UTF-8, switch it to UTF-8 and save the file. Then try to import. This works for us. This is not meant to be a solution, but an explanation.

    New Outlook needs to be able to take in all the .ICS files in all the different encoded formats that Old Outlook supported.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-03-18T23:13:46+00:00

    I think it's a new bug. It started to happen in old Outlook as well.

    I created a test ICS url with Google Calendar and it didn't load and generates a generic error message - "Something went wrong. You may want to try again."

    The iCal object is:

    BEGIN:VCALENDAR 

PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN 

VERSION:2.0 

CALSCALE:GREGORIAN 

METHOD:PUBLISH 

X-WR-CALNAME:My Test Calendar 

X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York 

X-WR-CALDESC:This is a test calenar 

END:VCALENDAR

    As far as I can tell - that is a valid RFC 2445 iCalendar object.

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