Cannot import .ics file into Outlook (new) app

Same for me ....

The first post is from January and we are just in October ! What the efficiency here ;-)

This is what worked. Not right-clicking on the .ics file and selecting "open with", that did nothing. Emailing myself would have probably worked, but this is not a solution, but a workaround. Ok, this is also a workaround, but at least it uses the intended functionality.

The strange thing is that it says "Add calendar" which is not what I want to do, I just want to Add an appointment.

New Outlook is so frustrating. I am on this thread for the same issue. I did the workaround of emailing the ics to myself and that did work but I should not have to do this. Simple things like importing/exporting or the File menu are gone. I'm not sure which genius product owner decided that by making New Outlook worse, it will be a much better user experience.

I found a solution for this:

Save the iCal Attachment (.ics File)

• When you receive an email with an iCal attachment, save the attachment to a location on your computer where you can easily find it (e.g., Downloads folder or Desktop).

Open Outlook Calendar

• Open New Outlook on your desktop.
• Click on the calendar icon located at the bottom left corner to switch to the calendar view.

Import the iCal (.ics) File

• • In the Outlook Calendar view, click on the “Add Calendar” option in the left-hand pane.
    • From the dropdown menu, select “Upload from file.”
    • Click on “Browse,” locate your saved .ics file, and select it.
    • Choose the calendar where you want the events to be imported. If you have multiple calendars, select the appropriate one.
    • Click “Import” to add the events to your calendar
    • Go to your calendar and confirm you can see the meeting that was imported

Neither the TheThirdSpy's online nor Fabio's within-Outlook solutions worked for me. I also tried emailing the .ics file to myself. In all cases, I get an error trying to import my GCal .ics file. The error message says "Couldn't import calendar. Try again later."

Anyone else having the same issue I am, and any workarounds for it? Could it be that my .ics file is simply too big? It contains over 14k events, according to the MS message when I try to import it.

In my experience, Outlook does not handle well .ics files with too many events in them.
I had an .ics file with about 11k events in it. I always got the "Couldn't import calendar. Try again later." error.

I edited the file (any text editor works as it's just a text file) and reduce it to about 1.8k events.
Just delete any number of rows as long as you start with: BEGIN:VEVENT and end with: END:VEVENT.

To my surprise, the smaller file was imported (into a new, empty calendar), although it took quite a lot of time with no progress indicator.

It also seems to be a two step process... First it seems to parse the file and load it somewhere. Then, you have to "Save" it, and then it will take again some time... until you see the events in your calendar.

I hope this helps!

PS My guess is that the same applies for "Add calendar \ Subscribe from web" option. Which fails for me with the url from where I downloaded the 11k ics file. It's probably too big to handle and the error messages are not helping at all.

Thank you!!! Yours is the first I have seen to address the specific problem I've been having, and I really appreciate it, though sadly your tips aren't working for me either.

I used TextEdit to delete a huge number of old calendar events and tried again. Unfortunately, though it seemed to successfully import using the browser version of Outlook in Chrome, I do not see any new calendar nor do my events seem to be populating in my existing default, "Calendar." (I was forced to choose "Calendar" as the destination, I was not given any other options in the drop-down)

I tried using the desktop version of New Outlook as well, and simply got the error message "Sorry we couldn’t import some of your file(s). Please try again later." This time, however, New Outlook did not report how many events the .ics file contains, but simply says "preview not available," which is curious.

For good measure, I also tried emailing the downsized .ics file to myself, and that did not work either. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Honestly, I am probably giving up on viewing my calendar via Outlook. I can import and view all my calendars just fine in using my 3rd-party task management software, Sunsama, so I am just using that exclusively.