How to export events from the legacy calendar and import them into the new calendar

Get set up as an Event Administrator first! This article assumes you have already registered as an Event Administrator in the new calendar, and your Department or Group has been set up on calendar.mit.edu. If you have not done so, follow the instructions at MIT Events Calendar - Register a Student Group, Organization or DLC.

Introduction

The new Events Calendar product at calendar.mit.edu has many more features to showcase and promote events than our legacy calendar. Posting to the new calendar requires event administrators to register themselves and their group or department on the new platform, and events were not automatically migrated.

If you only have a few events that you need to re-post on the new calendar, it is easier to just re-post them one by one, which will also give you a chance to update the enhanced categorization, photos, and other promotional links as needed. However, if you have a lot of future events posted in the legacy calendar, it may be more efficient to export them from the old calendar, and import them into the new calendar.

Part 1: Find and export your events from the legacy calendar

1. Visit the legacy calendar search page by going directly to events.mit.edu/search.html
2. Search for your events by Sponsor and Date Range
3. Once you have your list of future events in the search results, use the link at the top of the search results titled "save search results as a tab-delimited file" to save your events as a tab-delimited text file

• Tips
  • We recommend always filtering your search results by Sponsor, so you do not accidentally export another group's events
  • On some browsers, clicking on the "save search results as a tab-delimited file" will open the file in a browser window; you can instead Right-Click or Ctrl-Click on the link and choose "Save link as..." to save it to your computer as a file

Part 2: Data wrangling

Now that you have the export file, you need to wrangle it into a format that can be imported by the Localist platform that powers the new Events Calendar. These instructions are for users of Excel, but the process will be very similar for users of other spreadsheet software.

1. Make sure you start from a blank Workbook or without an open Workbook
2. Open the file in Excel using File > Open...
3. Excel will open the Text Import Wizard
   1. Select Delimited on the first page
   2. Select Tab as the delimiter on the second page
   3. Leave columns set to General on the third page and click Finish
4. The export will now appear in your Excel workbook and is ready for updating

File format and needed changes

The rest of this process is just using Excel to "fix" the spreadsheet to confirm to Localist's import guidelines. Here is a summary of the main things that need to be changed.

Format of the file as exported by events.mit.edu

 1. Date             2. Start Time      3. End Time        4. Recurring   
 5. Title            6. Description     7. Bldg-Room       8. Location Detail
 9. Categories      10. Sponsor        11. Sponsor        12. Ticket URL
13. Cost            14. Open To        15. Speaker        16. Contact
17. Event Web Page  18. Contact Email  19. Contact Phone

Note that the export from events.mit.edu does not include column headings at the top of columns, so the above list comes in handy as a reference.

Format of the file as expected by calendar.mit.edu

* Title               * Description         * Date From              * Date To
* Recurrence          * Start Time          * End Time               * Location
* Address             * City                * State                  * Event Website
* Room                * Keywords            * Tags                   * Photo URL
* Ticket URL          * Cost                * Hashtag                * Facebook URL
* Group               * Department          * Allow User Activity    * Allow User Attendance
* Visibility          * Venue Page Only     * Exclude From Trending  * Event Types
* Events By Interest  * Events By Audience  * Events By School

The import file accepted by calendar.mit.edu and the Localist platform if fairly flexible, and allows column headings. The above table is just for reference. You can download a template spreadsheet of the import file, Bulk Add Events.csv, if you like and don't need to manually enter the above columns.

Important tips Columns can appear in any order as long as you include the correct column title Most columns are optional, you only have to include Start From, Start Time, End Time, Title, and one of Group or Department

How to reformat

The important steps in reformatting the file are:

1. Title the columns you want to keep appropriately
2. Combine multiple fields into the Description column if you need to (for example, the speaker information and URL which are in separate fields)
3. Split the Bldg-Room column into separate Location and Room columns
4. Localist Places (Locations) for MIT buildings are of the form "Building N", not just "N", so you will need to reformat the Location column to include the "Building " part in front of the building number
5. The Department or Group column needs to include your Department or Group name, as it appears in calendar.mit.edu
6. Remove any unused columns
7. Double check your file to make sure there isn't any extraneous data in it, such as numbers in URL fields, which might lead to unpredicatable results
8. Save the file as a CSV or XLS/XLSX spreadsheet file; Localist can handle Excel files directly

Part 3: Import your events into the new calendar

• Send your file to the Events Calendar admin team at calendar@mit.edu for upload

See also

• MIT Events Calendar Landing Page