macOS: Merging Calendars

Back in the long long ago, I wrote a tip about how to merge calendars on your Mac if you want to clean stuff up. That was all fine and good, but now there’s an easier way to do it! So if you’ve got a long list of duplicate or outdated calendars to sort through, this’ll make it much simpler.

As always, please make sure you back up your calendars before you do any major clean-ups, all right? You can do this by either backing up the individual calendars one at a time or by choosing File > Export > Calendar Archive, which’ll back up everything in one big lump. I actually suggest doing both things; I’m a fan of redundancy, as you probably know if you’ve read pretty much anything I’ve written.

Once you’re finished backing up, then, all you have to do is click on the “Calendars” button in the program’s toolbar to reveal the sidebar list if it’s not already showing…

…and then right- or Control-click on the calendar you’d like to merge into another.

As you can see, that’ll bring up a “Merge” choice for you to pick which calendar you’d like to move the original’s events into, so be sure to choose the right one! The Calendar app will then warn you of what’s about to happen.

So, pay attention! The calendar you right-clicked on will have all of its events moved into the second one you chose, and then the original calendar will be deleted. As that dialog box notes, you can’t undo this, so be sure that’s what you want. (And if you ignored my backup warnings, you can pick “Export” here to make a copy of the soon-to-be-deleted calendar if necessary.)

When you’re sure you’re ready, click “Merge” from that dialog box, and all of the old calendar’s events will be moved. This is just so much faster and easier than the previous steps we had to walk through! I’m a little more jazzed than the situation probably warrants. I, uh, think I need to sit down now.

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