Outlook agenda in Obsidian

Hi guys,

Perhaps not a plug-in, but a script, I’m wondering if anyone has worked on something along the lines of creating a note for each meeting / appointment in an Outlook calendar?

Apologies of this is posted on the wrong sub

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@tallguyjenks has done some work on this with Obsidian for Business.

I found it a little tricky to setup, but I got there.

This kind of stuff is more niche within the community, so consider giving it a bit of support if you like it.

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Hey there,

I am also interested in a solution for this. Obsidian for Business seems interesting but I am running Obsidian on my Mac which makes this solution impossible. What I have done so far is at least import my daily agenda into my daily notes.

I use Templater for this and a little helper program called icalbuddy.

But I still work on the goal to create a meeting note for each entry.

Hey all,

Obsidian for business is not really well supported because I don’t like VBA much but its what I had when I was on my work machine

iCalBuddy I’ve used and scripted with on my Mac and that is by far a much easier way to doing things. highly recommend :slight_smile:

Hey @jonaswanninger - I’m exactly in the same situation (working on a Mac that is).

I too came across icalbuddy and was considering having my work calendar sync to ical and then take things from there with the use of Keyboard Maestro.

How are you getting your agenda from icalbuddy → Obsidian?

As an alternative to icalbuddy I was wondering if it would be easy to write an AppleScript to get the appointments directly from Outlook - but honestly I have no experience with that.

I’ll just flail about over here on my Windows work machine :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I added a system command to Templater. The command looks like the following:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy -npc -iep "title,datetime,attendees" -b -\ -po "datetime,title" -ps "|: |\\n |" eventsToday

This gets me the agenda for the day:

and for my weekly overview I use this command:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy -npc -nrd -iep "title,datetime" -b -\ -po "datetime,title" -ps "|: |\\n |" eventsFrom:"date -v+monday '+%F 00:00:00 %z’" to:"date -v+1w ‘+%F 00:00:00 %z’"

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Thanks. I’m not using Templater myself, but will have a look next weekend.

I do wish there would be a solution that could interact directly with Outlook. If I do end up doing something with icalbuddy and Keyboard Maestro I’ll be sure to share it here

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I mean it would be totally possible to build something like that with the microsoft graph api.
Maybe I am starting a project for that because I also would love to see that. Project Management is a huge point for using obsidian. I can customise about anything and have things my way.

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Hey, I tried to get that to work, but it turns out that Obsidian doesn’t have the permissions necessary to access the calendars on my mac. If you’re using a mac as well - how did you fix that?

Hi there,

I’ve been using icalbuddy to populate my weekly Kanban, and in principle it works fine, but it HAS to be run on a Monday or all the dates are out…I was wondering if you’re weekly overview allows for a more dynamic interpretation of which dates to choose, but it gives me the entire month of October

Is this supposed to be a ‘relative’ Monday? As in the closest to now?

I’d like to be able to run the common on a Sunday or Monday or Tuesday, but still get this weeks dates. Any ideas?

icalBuddyFixed.zip (54.1 KB)

Hi there,

I also struggled to get this to work. And I found a “fixed” version of iCalBuddy that seems to work when you call it from automation. I don’t know what’s different there but it works.

Maybe one step in the troubleshooting process cloud also be to just rund the command on the console without obsidian in between.

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Yes this -v+monday should theoretically work just like you want it. At least for me it works. But I know that the dates Command works different on macOS and Linux. Are you also on macOS?

“fixed” makes me a bit nervous - this is a company laptop…
Do you have a source for that? Preferably with the source code…

Edit: If it’s the same version as here, that seems fine.

Yes it is exactly that. I just could not find the source any more and directly uploaded it.

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Hi again,

I am - and unfortunately it didn’t - I get the entire month!

I just tried it again, and this simplified version seems to work (have to try it tomorrow to see…)

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy -npc -nrd -iep “title,datetime” -b “-” eventsFrom:“date -v+monday” to:“date -v+1w”

Hey,

no worries. Maybe we can figure it out together. Can you post the output of the following two commands?

date -v+monday

and

date -v+1w

Thanks! Both of those are working just fine!

And the simplified version I pasted above, also works today - yay! It’s all I need, though I may fiddle with a per day version:

Wednesday:
/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy -npc -nrd -iep “title,datetime” -b “-” eventsFrom:“date -v+wednesday” to:“date -v+wednesday”

and for all those coming here as noobs like I did, make sure there are no curly quotes in your terminal command! :slight_smile:

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I get the output in one line – any guesses as to what I’m doing wrong?

can you post the command you are using?