CorelCentral 9 Calendar to Apple iCal or Outlook

[Guest LilBambi]

I have been beating my head up side the wall trying to get this to work righr. The CorelCentral 9 Calendar (WordPerfect Office 2000) has nearly 8K records.

 

The date conventions when you export to the "My Calendar.txt" is all wrong and the file is not set properly with columns and records. What should be column headers is interdispersed in each record between data and header.

 

They also don't correspond correctly to any normal calendar data files.

 

Supposedly PalmDesktop can import the data, so I downloaded it, and it only imports, dba and vcs files.

 

BTW: Transposing the table, even if I had enough memory to do so would not yield the correct format either because of the weird way they laid out the data.

 

Does anyone have any idea how to make this data correctly import. Many of the dates are repeating since 1998!

 

Groan! LOL!

[Guest LilBambi]

Hi Temmu,

 

Unfortunately, there is only one way it will export and it's a text comma delimited file. One way only.

 

The problem is not the type of exporting though. I was able to use Excel to import the data and saved it as a .csv file but nothing could import the data and understand the fields.

 

The problem is the manner in which the data is exported. Instead of columns being for the field type, each row has both field type and fields for each record.

 

Secondary problem, the way they do the date and time. The date and time is incorporated into a single field value that is a solid line of numbers some of which makes sense, some of which doesn't. The alarms intervals are also strange.

 

No import function works for it. Even if I create a new row with column headers matching the 'header' field entry on the rows, and moving all the data from the column for the field data to be under that new header, and so on for all the headers and data fields on each row. I was able to just pick up data field column for each header for the rows and move them under the column header I created. But nothing could understand the data for date, time, recurring, etc. only the subject which was plain text. Even though I was able to save this resulting file as a .csv to use to import. I even changed the names of the Subject to Summary for Outlook, and no go. Tried both ways with Thunderbird Lightning too. No go.

 

And a simple transposition of the data doesn't work either because both header data and field data are alternating rows, not columns and rows.

 

In addition to those issues, there are nearly 8,000 records.

 

I even saved all data as HTML as it allows you to do that as well. Problem there? Single items only; first time only on recurring items. And each HTML is for a month and no way to search all the files directly. even though you could search within the single HTML file no problem using Firefox which is the only way for the client to find individual ones. It gives him a static image of his old data.

 

I gave the client the text delimited file and the .csv file, and offered a copy of the HTML files, but he liked my alternate solution much better.

 

He has an iPad and has been using the Calendar on his iPad for new items, and I showed him how he can use iCloud in a browser to login to iCloud to add, change, delete entries in his iCloud calendar and for his contacts too. He loves it!

 

And he will continue to use Corel Central 9 on his Windows XP till he can get to his old entries for historical purpose which is all he wanted it for in the first place.

 

I know in time, there could be a way to do the Corel conversion, but at what cost? You would first need to know their cryptic way of doing dates, separate out the time from the string to move it to a new field, same with the alarms, and then figure out how to get the recurring data broken out correctly for each item that makes use of recurring information.

 

Corel screwed up big time with this. It's no wonder they moved to Thunderbird with Lightning Extension built in for WordPerfect Office X5!