Hi Gary! In Calendar (macOS Sierra) I have many entries and events going back to the 1990s that I still occasionally need to find. But searching in Calendar won´t show anything farther back than about 1 year, which is very frustrating! Is this a limitation of Calendar I´ll just have to live with? I like using Mac calendar for its simplicity, clean GUI and flawless syncing with my iPhone, and don´t really want to use a third-party program rather than Apple´s own software. I´ve even tried exporting, deleting and then re-importing my calendars after re-booting. No luck! Thanks so much for any help offered!!
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Ian Leckie
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Searches In Mac Calendar for Entries Older Than About 1 Year…
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If you search Apple discussion forums, you come up with a lot of people asking how to search for old entries in the Calendar. I think it depends on a lot of factors: where the calendar is based (local, iCloud, Google, Yahoo, corporate, etc). But when it comes down to it, it just seems like the search function is really about recent events and the future, not old events. Maybe suggest to Apple that you want this to work better on the Feedback page.
Thanks for your quick reply! I´ve spent some time searching on the web and,
as you say, I´m not the only one with this daft problem! Following two sugges- tions I re-indexed Spotlight and deleted these cache files in~/Library/Calendars: Calendar Cache, Calendar Cache-shm and Calendar Cache-wal. No luck! I´ll be
sending Apple some feedback on this. Best regards, Ian
A very strange situation:
I am keeping my calendar events on a Google account.
I have a Macbook Air 2012 which was updated gradually to El Capitan.
There, the standard Calendar app, when searching, will go back as many years as exist on the Google calendar.
However, on a new SIERRA mac, the behavior is different: searches go back only about 18 months.
I am convinced there must be a hidden pref somewhere. Any ideas?
Ramez: It could be a setting. Have you tried looking in the web-based interface for Google calendar to see? It is probably something there, not in the Calendar app on your Mac. Of course, you could always search in the web interface. I can't imagine you would need to search old past events that often so that is probably the best option if you can't find a setting.
"I can’t imagine you would need to search old past events that often"
I actually use my calendar as a sort of diary: recall past visits of friends or relatives, list medical visits to a particular specialist. The unlimited search "in the past" is very useful for that.
Ramez: So this may be a case of finding a better tool for that. There are lots of journaling apps that are meant for this task. Search the app store for them. But I would always be afraid to use a calendar, especially a free one, to do this. You never know when they will decide to purge old data.