Anyone responsible for a school-age child knows the nightmare task of the school calendar. School calendars are often formatted as a PDF, image, or Word document—and are often incredibly mobile-unfriendly. Trying to find it on the school website or in your email (why do schools send everything as attachments?! Yuck!) is a nightmare when you need to check to see if your kids are in school on President’s Day.
If you’ve never been speechless when your child tells you they only have half the day off today, you deserve my respect. The rest of us are out here sweating and struggling and devoting 30% of our brain cells to juggling a school calendar and the extracurricular activities calendar, the endless forms that need to be filled out, and making sure the yellow shirt gets washed before Spirit Week color day. (This job is more often done by moms, of course.)
I understand that public schools are in the education business, not web design, and overhauling the cumbersome calendar formats and websites is not a high priority for funding, so I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and take it into my own hands.
Well, sort of. I want the AI to do it for me.
Last week, I was inspired by Dan Seifert, a former reporter for The Verge and current Google employee, who posted on Threads about how he used artificial intelligence to take his child’s school calendar Word document and insert the data into his Google Calendar with just a few clicks.
That was the dream for me.
Seifert described how he did this with his Google Pixel phone. I reached out to Seifert, but he wasn’t authorized to officially speak about it in detail. Since I don’t have a Pixel, his exact method wouldn’t work for me, but I’m grateful for his inspiration.
After about two hours, three separate LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and a lot of frustration, I finally managed to get it working. To test it further, I tried my methods on two other friends and their school calendars and got it working on them too. It took some tweaking with a weirdly formatted calendar, but I got it to work anyway. Triumph!
Having suffered myself, I am happy to spare you all from it and tell you how I got through it so you can, too.
Some reservations:
- I’m by no means an AI expert and there may be a much better way to do this. I welcome any suggestions you have to streamline it.
- I have used the free versions of these LLMs. It is possible that the more powerful paid versions do this better.
Here were my steps:
Step 1: Get your school calendar. This can be a PDF file, a screenshot of the calendar, or a copy of the entire text from a written document.
Step 2. Use ChatGPT to read the PDF or image and convert it into plain text.
Prompt: “I have a PDF of a school calendar with a list of appointments. Please take this PDF and convert it into a text list with all the appointments and their descriptions.”
Step 2. Convert this plain text into a Google Calendar-friendly CSV file. It may take several tries to get the format right for Google Calendar, so you may need to make sure the dates come first.
Prompt: “Can you take this list and convert it into a CSV file with the dates in YYYY-MM-DD format, ready for import into Google Calendar?”
Step 3. Download the provided TXT version or copy and paste it into a text editor.
Tip: I have found that Claude.ai was better than ChatGPT or Gemini at this step. Claude was also able to create a downloadable version, saving me the step of pasting and saving myself.
Step 4. In Google Calendar, create a new calendar using the + sign next to “Other Calendars” (in the left bar if you’re using a desktop). Name it “School Calendar” or whatever.
Tip: Tell your partner so they can never claim they didn’t know that the school was closed on a random Tuesday for “Teacher Training 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 to import. If you get an error message or 0 events were added, you’ll need to go back and change the formatting again from step 2.
Step 6. Be pleased with yourself because you are a master of efficiency. Congratulations.
A few things you should know
This wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. It required a bit of trial and error and some of the LLMs were unable to complete all the steps on their own, which is of course incredibly frustrating.
For some reason, Gemini performed the worst in this regard. It also strangely gave me incorrect information about using Google products. For example, it first told me it could read a PDF file in my Google Drive, but later said it was not allowed to access Google Drive files.
Also, I was given poor instructions when I asked how to add all this data to Google Calendar (it suggested creating a single event and putting all the plain text in the description) rather than telling me how to import a file. I assumed Google Gemini would help better with other Google products, but that’s not entirely true.
I imagine Google (and others) will soon make this workflow much easier. 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 appointments. Please add all of these appointments to my calendar.” This is the magic AI is supposed to do.
And yes, there are companies that specifically aim to help families with this tedious task of calendar management. Ohai is an app for moms that acts as an assistant and can help with both calendar management and other tasks (it costs $27 a month and looks promising, though I haven’t tested it myself).
There’s also the Skylight Calendar, a touchscreen digital calendar device for $300 (a larger wall-sized one is also coming out this fall for $600). My editor, Hayley Peterson, just bought one for her family and says she loves it.
But I have a feeling that all this effort will be moot by the time next school year starts. When the new iPhones have their fancy new Apple Intelligence and other AI models have become even more powerful, I imagine all of this will be as easy as a few taps on our phones, with no need to import a .txt file (shudder).
I know people are worried that AI will replace our jobs, flood us with misinformation, and harm us in ways we haven’t even anticipated. I’m worried too. I don’t use AI at work much (I wrote all of those words with my own two fingers). But I’m also really, really happy that this tool is actually doing something that improves my life in this small way.
