Can I do anything right?
This time I’ve messed up a Google Calendar.
An organization I belong to uses Google Calendar and I was going to help by filling it out for the whole of next year.
There was to be a one-hour meeting every week for the year. But I put the end date in the wrong place on the form. I made a meeting that lasts one YEAR and recurs once a week indefinitely.
I innocently saved the form and watched as the meeting proliferated all over the calendar. The meeting showed up every day in the week. And in the second week there were two meetings every day. And for each successive week there was one more meeting every day, until after a year each day had 52 year-long meetings scheduled. And it didn’t stop there, but continued for as long as you cared to look into the future.
So I corrected the form and saved it. Nothing changed on the calendar. I tried editing it again and again and each time it just reverted back to the way it was.
I tried deleting the entry. “Oops, we couldn’t delete this event, please try again later.” I tried later and still it couldn’t be deleted.
I checked their “help” and discovered quite a few people with the same problem but not much help. Their best “solution” seemed to be to abandon the calendar and start over. If this were my personal calendar I would probably just do that, but it is a public calendar and I have no way to know who looks at it.
Okay, I’m not the most technological geek in the world, but I figure I can fix this. You are supposed to be able to upload and download the data for the calendar using a file in something called the “iCal” format. So I download a file and change the entry using a text editor and send it right back up. No change.
Maybe I don’t know the right way to change the file. Perhaps if I change it using another application instead of editing it manually. I don’t use a desktop calendar or a PDA ordinarily but I download and install Sunbird (because it’s free and uses the iCal format). Good news. In Sunbird I can modify the entry. But when I upload the modified file back to Google, my calendar still has not changed.
By now I have spent hours on this, and the calendar is still messed up.
Comments (4)
Only an hour? It would take me much longer to have worked through the same set of circumstances.
Maybe the calendar HAS updated but you’re seeing an old version in your cache. Have you tried clearing your cache on the off chance that the corrected version is really up there.
Keeping my fingers crossed for you.
I have no clue how to fix your problem, but I have to tell you that I was reading this entry to my husband, and started laughing so hard that I was crying! It took me several minutes to read each sentence, because I couldn’t *stop* laughing. I think it struck me as so funny because (a) it sounds exactly like something I would do, and (b) I have attended meetings in the past that seemed to last a year!
MSS: Oh no I worked on it for half the night. And I did try deleting the cache. Google suggested that in their help pages, along with suggesting that something about Firefox might be causing the problem. I tried working on it with IE and with Opera and worked on two different machines.
Since I wrote the post I have had limited success. I discovered that I can delete individual occurrences of the event but not the whole series. So I deleted all the occurrences for the first few months. Most people will only look at the current month anyway. But since the event recurs indefinitely, in theory one could spend the rest of one’s life deleting individual occurrences!
Rurality: I’m glad my life can at least provide comic relief. Actually I think I have been in those year-long meetings myself.
The only thing I can think of is maybe next time try Yahoo!