- School calendars are often shared as PDF files, lengthy written documents, or even images.
- I used AI to turn my school's PDF calendar into something I could add to my Google Calendar.
- As a working parent, this may be the greatest thing AI has done for me yet.
Anyone responsible for a school-aged child has dealt with the nightmare task of the school calendar. School calendars are often formatted as a PDF, image, or Word doc — and are often incredibly mobile-hostile. Trying to find it on the school's website or in your email (why do schools send everything as attachments?! ugh!) is a nightmare when you need to look up whether your kids have school on President's Day.
If you've never been caught slackjawed when your child informs you that they have a half day that day, I salute you. The rest of us, we're out here sweating and scrambling and dedicating 30% of our brain cells to juggling a school calendar along with the after-school activities calendar, the endless forms that need to be filled, making sure that the yellow shirt is washed before the color day of Spirit Week. (This work, of course, is more often done by moms).
I understand that public schools are in the business of educating, not web design. Revamping the clunky calendar formats and websites are not a top funding priority. So I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.
Well, sort of. I want AI to do this for me.
I was inspired last week by Dan Seifert, a former reporter at The Verge and now Google employee, who posted on Threads about how he used AI to take the Word doc with his child's school calendar and pop those dates into his Google cal with just a few moves.
This, to me, was the dream.
Seifert described how he did this using his Google Pixel phone. I reached out to Seifert, but he wasn't authorized to speak on the record in detail about this. Since I don't have a Pixel, his exact method wasn't going to work for me, but I am grateful for his inspiration.
After about two hours, three separate LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude), and a lot of frustration, I finally was able to get this to work. To test further, I tried out my methods for two other friends and their school calendars and got it to work for them, too. Some tweaking was required to deal with one weirdly formatted calendar, but I was still able to get it there. Triumph!
Since I have suffered, I am pleased to spare you all and tell you how I did it so you can, too.
A few caveats:
- I am not a master of AI by any means, and there may be a much better way to do this. I'm happy to hear any suggestions you might have to streamline it.
- I was using the free versions of these LLMs; its possible that the more powerful paid versions could do this better.
Here were my steps:
Step 1: Get your school calendar. This can be a PDF, a screenshot of the calendar, or a copy-and-paste of all the text from a written document.
Step 2. Use ChatGPT to read the PDF or image and turn it into plain text.
Prompt: "I have a PDF of a school calendar with a list of dates. Please take this PDF and turn it into a text list of all the dates and their descriptions."
Step 2. Turn that plain text into a Google Calendar-friendly CSV file. This might take a few tries to massage it to get it in the exact right format for Google Cal. You might have to ask it to make sure the dates go first.
Prompt: "Can you take that list and turn it into a CSV file with the dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format that's ready to import into Google Calendar?"
Step 3. Download the .txt version it provides, or copy and paste it into a text editor.
Tip: I found that Claude.ai was better at this step than ChatGPT or Gemini. Claude could also create a downloadable version, which saved me a step of having to paste and save it myself.
Step 4. In Google Calendar, create a new calendar with the + sign next to "Other calendars" (located in the left rail if you're on a desktop). Name it "School calendar" or whatever.
Tip: Share it with your partner so they can never claim they didn't know that random Tuesday was closed for "Teacher Development Day."
Step 5. Import your .txt file into Google Calendar. Go to Settings > Import & export > Import. Upload the file from your computer and select the calendar for import. If it gives an error message or says 0 events added, you'll need to go back and fiddle with the formatting again from Step 2.
Step 6. Be satisfied with yourself for being a master of efficiency. Congratulations.
A few things you should know
This wasn't as simple as I hoped. It took a little trial and error, and some of the LLMs couldn't do all of the steps on their own, which is of course, incredibly frustrating.
For some reason, Gemini fared the worst of all of these at being able to do this. It also strangely gave me the wrong information about how to use Google products. For example, it told me at first it could read a PDF in my Google Drive, but then later told me it wasn't allowed to access Google Drive files.
It also gave me bad instructions when I asked about how to add all these dates to Google Calendar (it suggested creating a single event and putting all the plain text in the description) instead of telling me how to import a file. I assumed that Google's Gemini would be better at helping with other Google products, but not quite.
I imagine that Google (and others) will be making this workflow much easier very soon. This seems like the ideal use of AI as a productivity tool: "I have a document in my Gmail or Drive with a list of dates. Please add all those dates to my calendar." That's the magic that you want AI to do.
And yes, there are companies out there specifically working to help families manage this annoying task of managing the calendar. Ohai is an app aimed at moms that acts as an assistant that can help with calendar management as well as other tasks (it's $27 a month and looks promising, although I haven't tested it myself).
There's also the Skylight calendar, a $300 digital calendar touch screen device (there's also a $600 larger wall size coming out this fall). My editor, Hayley Peterson, just got one for her family and says she loves it.
But I have a feeling that all this hassle will be moot by the start of the next school year. When the new iPhones have their fancy new Apple Intelligence and other AI models have grown even more powerful, I imagine that all this will be as simple as a few taps on our phones, with no hassle of importing a .txt file (shudder).
I know people are worried that AI might replace our jobs, swarm us with misinformation, and harm us in ways we haven't even predicted yet. I am worried, too. I don't use AI much at work (I wrote all these words with my own two fingers). But I am also really, really happy to make this tool actually do something that improves my life in this small way.