CaliBrate - Make batch iCal changes

Jul 07, '08 06:50:00AM

Contributed by: robg

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

If you've ever wanted to modify a number of events in iCal, you'll soon find it's basically not possible. That's where CaliBrate comes in, which I discovered last week when it was written up as a Mac Gem on macworld.com. I'd never heard of the program before, so I downloaded it and gave it a trial run.

Over the years, my iCal calendars have become something of a mess. There were near-duplicate calendars (Personal and Home, for instance), as well as calendars that contained events that I'd originally placed on one calendar but really wanted to have on another. CaliBrate made short work of all these changes. It's got an intuitive interface with four tabs, one of which is the About tab.

You start by specifying a Search, to find the events you'd like to modify. After running the search, click on Results to see which events were selected (as well as unselected events, and you can drag between the two types to create the ideal set of events to modify). You then click on the Act tab to choose the action to apply to the selected events. There are many different actions, including Delete, move or copy to a new or existing calendar, changing the events' dates and/or times, searching and replacing in title and notes, adding attendees, and much more. Click Perform Action, and the changes are made.

In my testing, CaliBrate worked perfectly, and helped me clean up a mess of calendars and events in a hurry. It may not be a utility you need every day, but when you do need it, it seems well worth the $8.00 asking price.

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