Re: using org-mode with MS Outlook

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com> writes:

> David Ellis <ddellis914@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> After I sent this email, I found ical2org.el. I saved a month of my
>> calendar from Outlook to an iCalendar file. Then, I used
>> ical2org/convert-file to convert it to an org file. All of the times
>> were off by 6 hours. Since I live in the Central time zone in the US
>> that is GMT-6, I wondered if this was the issue. When I used
>> icalendar-import-file to convert the iCalendar file to a diary file,
>> the times were okay.
>> 
>
> Where did you get ical2org.el? Does it use icalendar.el as distributed
> with emacs? IME, the latter has a lot of problems with timezones
> (based on a very cursory examination - I mean to go back to that but
> haven't had the time), so if the former uses it, I wouldn't be
> surprised to see timezone problems cropping up.
>
> I bet you would have better luck with the awk script, if only because
> the two people who have worked on it (Eric Fraga who originated it and
> Arun Persaud who has added functionality recently and has taken over
> its care and feeding [fn:1]) are both regulars on this ML and *very*
> responsive.
>
> Nick
>
> Footnotes: [fn:1] I hope this description is accurate but the
> principals involved might have different ideas - this is just my
> reading of the situation.

Nick, yes, I think you got the summary about right.

David, with respect to your original query, if you have a look at my
original script, you'll see that the times should be adjusted for your
time zone.  Can you please have a look at the file exported by Google to
see if the times are actually in your time zone or whether they have
already been converted to UTC?  Google does provide both options, as
far as I remember (but Google does not really document much of these
aspects and things do change).

If you want, send me an extract of the ical formatted file and I will
check it out.

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.50.1
: using Org-mode version 7.4 (release_7.4.639.g1a03c.dirty)