If you’re like me, you’ve got tons of color-coded calendars for organizing different types of events. I like separating my work and home life as much as possible, and the Calendar program provides a neat way to do that. If you want to have fewer calendars, though—or you’d just like to merge the existing events from one calendar onto another—there’s a really easy way to clean things up.
I strongly suggest that you make a backup of your calendars before you get started with this process. If something goes horribly, horribly wrong, you’ll at least have a way to recover your stuff if you do that first. I am nothing if not paranoid about your data, dear readers!
Anyway, here are the steps for merging calendars:
1. Open the Calendar program. From the list on the left, select the calendar you’d like to export the events from.
2. From the menus at the top, choose File> Export> Export.
3. Save the resulting file out somewhere on your Mac.
4. Within Calendar, choose File> Import, and then pick the .ics file that you just saved out.
5. A pop-up window will appear, asking you which calendar you’d like to import the events to.
Select “OK” afterward, and you’re done! The events from your exported calendar will merge with whichever one you chose in step 5, and then you can safely delete the original calendar by selecting it from the sidebar and pressing Command-Delete.
One important note, though—in older versions of OS X, this process would duplicate events onto the calendar you imported them to. Under Yosemite with iCloud, however, this now moves the events to the new calendar, so you’ll see them disappear from the original. To make sure you’ve gotten the events where you want them to go, you can deselect all but one calendar from your sidebar and examine them each in turn.
Again, I’m paranoid! But sometimes (such as when you don’t want to lose precious event info), paranoia is a good thing.