darryl ramm’s blog

This year’s Soaring Society of America (SSA) Convention is in Albuquerque, NM, with main sessions running Thursday February 14th to Saturday February 17th.

I was working on what I wanted to see at the convention and arranging some side meetings and I ended up taking the convention schedule from the SSA Web site and reformatting it into an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet can generate a tab separated text file suitable for importing into Microsoft Outlook or to be printed or saved as a PDF. I’ve attached all formats here. In my case all I care about is having the schedule in my iPhone, I import the tab separated file into Outlook and then synch my iPhone to Outlook.

SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.xls (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet)
SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.pdf (One page schedule printed from spreadsheet)
SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.txt (Tab delimited text file saved from spreadsheet)

An example of how to import the tab delimited text file into Microsoft Outlook using the Import and Export Wizard is show below. This was tested with Outlook 2003 but other Outlook versions should work similarly.

Select File > “Import and Export…”

Select “Import from another program or file”
Click [Next]

Select “Tab Separated Values (Windows)”
Click [Next]

Browse for the SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_*.txt that was downloaded using the link above
Check the radio button for “Replace duplicates with items imported”
Click [Next]

Select Calendar as the destination folder
Click [Next]

There should be no need to map fields or do anything else
Just click [Finish]

Note: the speakers names are repeated in the talk subject fields in the spreadsheet, so they will appear in the appointment title in Outlook. This is done to work around a bug in several verisons of Microsoft Outlook, including Outlook 2003, where meeting organizer or attendee fields are not imported from a tab delimited, CSV or similar files (so speaker names can’t show up as the meeting organizer or attendee names).