My girlfriend used Samsung smartphones for several years and regularly relied on the app “S Planner” to store tasks and keep track of her daily activities. Now she is moving from Samsung to another Android-phone, and so she wanted to move all her task history to Google Tasks. The issue is that S Planner uses a local calendar and we couldn’t make the tasks it stored export and/or synchronize.
Finally we succeeded, but it took quite a lot of work, so I thought I would summarize the steps here.
The required tools were also a bit surprising, because it ended up being a roundabout way, since we didn’t find any more straightforward solution:
- The Samsung smartphone with the required tasks, plus a USB cable
- A Windows PC
- Samsung Smart Switch installed on the PC
- Microsoft Outlook (!)
- The Google Tasks Import browser application.
1. Install Samsung Smart Switch on a PC
Download and install Samsung Smart Switch on the Windows PC. Plug in the smartphone with a USB cable and connect it in Smart Switch. Select the option to synchronize calendar and tasks with Outlook. The synchronization will take a while, and once it complete you can disconnect the phone. Opening Outlook, you should be able to see the calendar events and the tasks that were on the phone
2. Export the tasks from Outlook
The standard export function in Outlook works great for the calendar, but not so much for the task list.
For the calendar: select the calendar pane in Oulook and click on “Save As…” in the File menu. Then choose “.ics” format and use the advanced options to save the whole calendar, including event details. The obtained “.ics” file can be imported in Google Calendar (instructions). This completes the process for the calendar part.
For the tasks: the standard Outlook task export file is not very useful. Instead, download the Export Outlook Tasks tool from the Google Tasks Import website. Instructions are at the link, but basically you will have to select your Outlook task list and, in a minute or two, you will obtain a CSV file with all the tasks.
3. Import the task list in Google Tasks
This is where the magic happens! I used a browser-based app called Google Tasks Import to import the CSV file created above in Google Tasks. You just press on the big “Authorise” button and select your Google account. Then you upload the CSV file created above and the import process starts. This might take a while (for us, ~ 1 hour for 5000 records), but at the end you’ll have all your loved past tasks show up in Google Tasks, and so also visible in Google Calendar.