Hi,

After I had spent some time with importing my csv file, and I had the error message

"Oops, we\47re sorry, Calendar is temporarily unavailable. You can cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes, or take a look at our help center for more information.\47

I figured that it was about the FORMAT of the csv file. The error message could be more specific about the source of the problem.

So here are some ideas what can go wrong with the csv file FORMAT, and you might like to check them out:

• Outlook, Excel (or whatever program) makes the csv file, but can happen that it uses quotes "" around the \47cells\47, so remove those,
• The date format is really important - I\47m using English version Windows XP with Dutch local settings, here comes the what date it is problem: 20-06-08 or 08-06-20 or 06-20-08 (see my csv file example what worked beIow)
• The commas - my Excel made a csv with semi-colon ";" (ask Microsoft why!) so that\47s something you should also check out with opening your csv with a text editor (preferably where you can also replace the damn thing)
• Encoding - I happen to be Hungarian, and the characters like: á, í, ó, and especially ő and ű are ALWAYS giving me a headache, so take care of those too.

Here is a sample of the csv file that worked for my Google Calendar import (using Explorer 7):

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject,StartDate,StartTime,Alldayevent,Reminderonoff,ReminderDate,ReminderTime,Description,Priority
Fruzsina,1-1-2008,9:00,TRUE,FALSE,,,Névnap!,Normal
Ábel,2-1-2008,9:00,TRUE,FALSE,,,Névnap!,Normal
Benjámin - Genovéva,3-1-2008,9:00,TRUE,FALSE,,,Névnap!,Normal
Anneke szülinapja,6-1-2008,9:00,TRUE,TRUE,1-1-2008,9:00,Szülinap!,High
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I get no reminders for the namedays (Névnap) but in case of the birthdays I get e-mail reminders on the given date.
I used no recurrence yet as I saw it got some problems for others.

I hope this helps the ones looking for the possible answers, and also that Google includes these tips in the help documentation. The error message needs a good brush I guess (that must be just the hell of the job), although I did try the log in - log out, cache cleaning and different browsers steps. Not sure where to post this that you Google Guys can consider to put it next to the possible solutions page, but this is a start :-)

Regards,

Ildikó