How To Import Excel Data Into Outlook Calendar

Preparing the Excel data

In older versions of Outlook, you can import directly from an Excel workbook file, but that’s no longer the case in the most recent versions. Before you can import Excel data into Outlook using Microsoft 365, you must save that data to comma-separated (delimited) format, or .csv.

To illustrate this process, we’ll use the simple data set shown in Figure A. You’ll see that there’s meaningful text to identify the appointment, the appointment date and time values. The dates and times can be strings or Date/Time values because Outlook is very flexible.

The demonstration .xlsx file contains only one sheet because that’s all the .csv feature supports. Excel won’t allow you to save a multiple-sheet workbook to .csv format. If you try, Excel will display an error message.

The demonstration sheet uses a Table object to organize the data, but you could also use a normal data range. Even though the records are sorted by date, Outlook doesn’t require a sorted data set for this technique to work.

Now, let’s save this sheet to .csv format as follows:

1.Click the File tab and choose Save As in the left pane.

2.Change the file name, if necessary, but Excel won’t write over your Excel workbook file — it will instead create a new .csv file.

3.From the File Type dropdown, choose the CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv) option (Figure B). The import task will fail if the .csv file is open. Use the UTF-8 version if you’re importing special characters.

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4.Click Save. You can ignore the possible data loss error if shown. Be sure to note the location of the file if there’s any chance you won’t remember where it is.

5.Close the .csv file you just created. Outlook won’t import the data if the .csv source file is open.

With the Excel data in a .csv file, you can move on to importing that data into Outlook.

Importing the data into an Outlook calendar

Now it’s time to open Outlook and prepare to import the records in the .csv file. You will be importing them into an Outlook calendar using a wizard. During this process, you will map the Excel values to Outlook appointment fields.

By map, I mean to connect one Excel field to one Outlook field. You’re telling Outlook where to store the Excel values within Outlook. An Outlook field is similar to an Excel cell, but it’s much more involved. It has a name, a data type and other identifying features. Outlook even supports user-defined fields.

To launch the wizard, open Outlook if necessary and then click the File tab, choose Open & Export in the left pane and then click Import/Export from the Open section shown in Figure C.

Now, run the wizard as follows:

1.In the wizard’s first pane, choose Import From Another Program Or File (if necessary) and click Next.

2.Choose Comma Separated Values and click Next.

3.Click the Browse button and work through the folder structure to select the .csv file you created earlier. Figure D shows the demonstration file.

4.Click OK after selecting that file, and the wizard returns to the same pane, which also lets you determine how Outlook deals with duplicates in the .csv file. There won’t be any in our example, but when applying this to your own work, you’ll want to choose appropriately. For now, accept the default option, Allow Duplicates To Be Created, and click Next.

5.Select calendar (Figure E) and click Next. If you have more than one calendar, be sure to select the right one.

6.This next step is a bit buggy, so pay extra close attention. The wizard will show the file to import. It’s not obvious, but the square to the left of the file name is a checkbox. You must click it to display the checkmark. If you don’t see this check (Figure F), the wizard won’t go any further. Once you click it correctly, the wizard might open the mapping dialog automatically. If that happens, you don’t need to click Map Custom Fields as described in the next step.

7.Click where it says Map Custom Fields. This step may not be necessary, depending on the outcome you had during step six.

8.At this point, you must match the Excel values to an Outlook appointment field. We mentioned earlier that this process is called mapping. The left pane lists the Excel fields, while the right pane lists the calendar fields. As you can see in Figure G, Outlook maps three of the fields correctly for you: Start Date, Start Time and End Time. That’s because the Excel field names are the same as the Outlook field names.

9.There’s no equivalent to the Task field, so you must map this field manually. To map the Task field, simply drag it from the left pane to the right pane (Figure H) and map it to the Outlook Subject field. You may need to repeat this step for any other fields that did not map automatically.

10.When you’ve mapped all the fields, click OK and then Finish to trigger the import. Figure I shows the newly created appointments.

There are two things worth noting at this point. First, did you notice the phantom character in Task in the mapping dialog? If you see something like this, it will almost always be in the first field. It’s a formatting code that Excel failed to remove while converting to .csv. You can ignore it. If you do have trouble importing after mapping, try opening the .csv file and re-entering the field names.

Second, if you import the same Excel records, Outlook will duplicate the appointment. If you change the duplication option shown in step four to Do Not Import Duplicate Items, it won’t do this.

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