Dynamic Link to Internet Calendars

I’m really not sure how I missed this little trick all these years. Sometimes I spend significant bits of time doing something the hard way before I just take 20 minutes out of my day to ask or research the easy way.

I’ve known about .ics internet calendards for a long time. I’ve clicked on many. I have chosen to open them and that’s been fine, but only today I learned that I can add a reference to an .ics file in Outlook and from that point forward have a dynamic link to that internet calendar instead of a one-shot static view of those events.

I used this trick to bring all of my Meetup groups into my Outlook as a calendar that I can overlay with my Exchange and Live calendars. Now I’m sittin’ pretty.

Here are the steps…

1. Get the URL to your online .ics file on your clipboard
2. In Outlook right click on Other Calendards and Add Calendar
3. Choose From Internet…
4. Now just paste in your URL and the rest should be self-explanitory

Ready, go!