How can I move calendar events from outlook personal folder to the iCloud calendar?

Hello Herve,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft community and we will be glad to assist you with your concern.

I would assist on how to move/copy the invitations received to Outlook Personal Folder Calendar into Icloud Calendar.

You can do this by two ways, either export it from Outlook personal calendar and import into Icloud calendar or you may copy the invitations from Outlook personal calendar into Icloud calendar.

To copy the invitations, change the calendar view to ‘List’ then use ctrl key to select the entries to be copied > use ctrl C to copy > go to Icloud calendar and use ctrl P to paste the entries.

To move the invitation entries, drag and drop the entries from Outlook personal calendar into Icloud calendar.

 For further queries, reply and we are happy to assist.

Thank You.

You can do this by two ways, either export it from Outlook personal calendar and import into Icloud calendar or you may copy the invitations from Outlook personal calendar into Icloud calendar.

To copy the invitations, change the calendar view to ‘List’ then use ctrl key to select the entries to be copied > use ctrl C to copy > go to Icloud calendar and use ctrl P to paste the entries.

To move the invitation entries, drag and drop the entries from Outlook personal calendar into Icloud calendar.

This is completely impractical if every time you get an event from others it gets placed in "My calendars" and you need to move it to the "iCloud" calendar in order to sync it with your phone. 

If would be best if there were a feature in Outlook 2013 to let you choose the default of which calendar gets events received by email from others.  But failing that, there should be a right-click option for transferring an event to another calendar immediately as you accept an event.

Does Microsoft really expect us to go through the kludgy procedures listed by Nayana every time we accept an event by email?  Is there really no better way to do this than the procedure outlined above?  Both of these options require leaving the email message in which you received the event, opening the calendar, finding the event, and moving it manually.  One of the suggested solutions requires you to use the completely impractical List view and the other requires you to get rid of the overlay so the two calendars are side by side, making every calendar item half as wide as it would have been otherwise.

This wouldn't be such a big deal if USB syncing worked well between Outlook and an iPhone, because one could avoid iCloud.  But there are huge numbers of reports of people for whom iPhone-Outlook USB syncing fails.  To get things to work properly, do we really have to choose between the Google universe, the Apple universe or the Microsoft universe to get syncing to work properly?  Are companies using their market power in one area to push consumers into using their products in another area?

One of the suggested solutions requires you to use the completely impractical List view and the other requires you to get rid of the overlay so the two calendars are side by side, making every calendar item half as wide as it would have been otherwise.

Is there even a way to adjust the proportions in the side by side calendar view so that the iCloud calendar is 75% of the width and the default calendar is 25% of the width so we only lose 25% visibility instead of 50% visibility? 

This problem is even worse than I realized at the beginning.  When one receives a meeting request by email, one doesn't see any of the meetings in the iCloud calendar, so one can't tell whether the slot is really free.  One needs to open up the calendar manually and find the correct day manually in order to decide, and then one needs to go through the kludgy manual step of moving the appointment as described above.

Is this really as bad as it looks? 

There is a product "CodeTwo Sync for iCloud" meant to deal with synchronizing the default Outlook calendar and the iCloud calendar in Outlook.  But various reports say that it send duplicate notifications to others involved in the same event, presumably because CodeTwo duplicates the events in each calendar and copies them into the other calendar.  This seems worse than the problem it is designed to solve.  If it automatically moved events from the default calendar into the iCloud calendar it would be helpful, though it wouldn't be a complete solution since when you get an event by email you still can't tell whether you are busy then without opening a copy of the calendar separately. 

It is remarkable that a maneuver that is so basic to workflow is so broken in platforms used by millions.  One would be able to laugh off such problems if USB syncing worked reliably, but for many of us, USB syncing fails.

I continue to discover ways in which this is worse that what I'd imagined earlier. 

If you create an event in the default calendar and drag it to the iCloud calendar (overlay mode off) it is copied, not moved.  You then need to delete the original.

If an event arrives by email, it gets placed in the default calendar, and then when you move it to the iCloud calendar, it gets labeled as copy.  You then need to delete the original, and if you care , edit out "Copy of" from the event.

But even if you delete the original event, when an event reminder arrives you need to click "Dismiss all" instead of Dismiss, as you could with only one calendar.

There are several ways Microsoft could make this work, assuming its goal is to accommodate iCloud, not get people to abandon iOS:

1.  There could be a right click option on an event to move it to another calendar, allowing you to use Overlay for the 2 calendars.

2.  There could be an option to choose whether events received by email go to the default calendar or the iCloud calendar, thus effectively bypassing the default calendar.

It is hard to tell whether either Microsoft or Apple care about solving the problem.  It seems that Microsoft could solve the problem itself if it chose to do so.  It is not clear whether Apple could.  My fear is that no one in either company sees a career benefit by accommodating the other company, and the situation will move towards forcing users to choose Outlook + Windows phone versus MacOS + iOS (or Gmail + Android).

Another problem.  If you build up a contact from an email address in a message, it gets put into the default Outlook contacts, and you have to move it manually into the iCloud contacts for it to get synced. 

This is all pretty primitive.  It is not what one would expect from a leading email/calendar/contacts program interfacing with a leading smartphone, except for the fact that the two companies are on unfriendly terms.

Yet another problem.  If you agree to an event such as a WebEx meeting, the iCloud events in Outlook take what was a clickable URL and turn it into non-clickable text.  And if you try to copy the URL to paste it into a browser, you get error messages that you have to work around. 

There are no such problems with events in the default calendar.  I don't know whether the iCloud limitation is imposed by Apple or Microsoft, but it is yet another example of how kludgy and unsatisfactory the Outlook + iCloud integration is.  And the whole thing is all the more irritating because one is forced into using iCloud by the nonfunctioning for many users of USB syncing between iOS and Outlook.

It would be good to get comments from Apple and Microsoft as to whether they have any plans to fix these multiple problems.