My AI Diary: One day at a time with AI #10
Jeffrey Shaffer
Director, Applied AI Lab, Kirk and Jacki Perry Professor of Analytics, Assistant Professor-Educator, University of Cincinnati; Tableau Visionary Hall of Fame; Author of The Big Book of Dashboards; Host of Chart Chat.
Gather events and dates from a website
Every year, the University of Cincinnati publishes the dates for the academic year (Fall, Spring and Summer semesters). There is a UC website that lists these dates; the start and end of the semester, exam weeks, reading days, holidays, etc. I always create calendar appointments for all of these events, and years ago this was a manual task, creating them one by one. Today, I will show you how I use GenAI to do this using last year's academic calendar (2024-2025).
Prompt (ChatGPT-4o with Search enabled): Get all of the events and dates from this website.
ChatGPT-4o response:
After a quick review, we can see that it gathered everything correctly. Score: A+
Creating an ICS file
Now we need to get these on our Outlook calendar. First, I am going to create a dummy calendar (because these events are already on my main calendar). I use Office 365, so it's simple. I go to my calendar in Outlook and select "Add Calendar." This could be a separate calendar labeled "2024-2025 Academic Year" if that's the goal, but I want the events on my main calendar, so I typically skip this step entirely.
Back to ChatGPT-4o in the same thread and turn "Search" off for one more prompt. I found that if you leave the Search option selected it will not use Python to perform this task (Note - I did not try adding "using Python" to the ICS prompt).
Prompt (ChatGPT-4o with Search): Create an ICS file for all of these.
The response states that I can download my ICS file, but unfortunately there is nothing to download. Score: F
So we'll turn the search off, and use the same prompt. Notice that ChatGPT uses Python to create an ICS file.
Prompt (ChatGPT-4o without Search): Create an ICS file for all of these.
ChatGPT now provides a link to download the ICS file. Once you download this file, you can import it into Google, Outlook or Apple calendars. For me, it's a simple drag and drop onto my calendar in Outlook using Office 365.
Voilà! All of the events are added to my calendar.
In previous ChatGPT models, I would find that dates could be missing, so as always, review the output. Additionally, you could add additional instructions to the prompt to modify the events as needed. For example, "mark reading days and holidays as busy, but keep the other semester dates marked free". If this were a regular task, then it would be easy to create a CustomGPT, but I'll save that for another post.
I have used this technique a number of times and it's been a great time saver for an otherwise annoying task. Score: A+
Tableau Developer | #DataFam | Passion for Designing Dashboards with a Social Flair 🌎💃
1moI tried using this feature to get all the TUG events. But the results were missing a lot of events. Any thoughts on why ChatGPT is not doing this task correctly https://usergroups.tableau.com/events/#/calendar
Let’s forecast a better future—together | Adjunct Prof - UBC | Advisory - UCW | President - Plaid Analytics
2moGood use case, and thanks for sharing the methods you used. I find myself using this constantly for conference schedules too. All this said, it bothers that this kind of information isn’t just provided as a calendar download or feed - and that’s been true of dozens and dozens of universities and colleges I’ve worked with and nearly every conference I’ve attended.
MBA, CPCU, Divisional Assistant Vice President- Enterprise Analytics at Great American Insurance Group
2moThis is a great use of the tool! Here is my experience doing similar with different inputs and different tools: Input: https://cliftonculturalarts.org/events/wednesdays-in-the-woods/ Model: Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview 04-17 Interface: Google AI Studio The input website is more complex than your input, but the model handled it well. I asked it to add it directly to my Google Calendar instead of creating an ICS. Unfortunately, it informed me that it does not have direct access to my calendar but gave me instructions on adding each entry individually (not great). I then asked it to create the ICS. What I found to be impressive was that it created the ICS file without creating the Python script (seemingly). It simply created the ICS in a Code window, which allowed me to download it from the chat and import into Google Calendar.