Tech Geek

If you've been around the Lutheran church for awhile, you've seen the Augsburg Fortress Little Red Books. They are the smaller cousins to the Thrivent Big Red Books, also known as the Lutheran Pastor's Desk Diary. Go to a meeting of any Lutheran clergy and you're sure to see someone reach into their shirt pocket or briefcase and pull one one of these Red Books out to scribble a note or write down an appointment. Both of them have info about the lectionary texts assigned for each Sunday, which saints go with which days, and when Easter and Ash Wednesday actually fall this year! Both of them are very paper based, and not all that useful for people like me, who haven't used a paper based calendar in over 15 years!

Today I received this tweet from @bethalewis: Free downloadable "Little Red Book" is available for 2010. http://www.augsburgfortress.org/redbook/ (Beth is the CEO of Augsburg Fortress, along with being a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister,  and KY Wildcats basketball fan.) I didn't think I'd have any use for a downloadable book, then my curiosity got the best of me, and I clicked the link.

Augusburg Fortress has provided a DBA and a CSV file that can be downloaded and used within Palm Desktop (DBA) and Microsoft Outlook (CSV). There is a helpful link for additional instructions on how to insert the dates into either of these software programs. Great! But I use Google Calendar. Can I use them too? Yes!

I downloaded the CSV version of the file to my computer and saved it on the desktop as Year_C_2010.csv. I opened my Google Calendar and Click Add --> Import calendar at the bottom right of the Other calendars box at the bottom of the left column. This brings up a new window which asks for the file name (the Year_C_2010.csv file I just saved) and what calendar I want to import the file into. I used my daily calendar. After clicking the Import button, I waited a few seconds, and then my calendar had lots of new entries. Some of these are duplicates to things I'd already put there, but most of them are new entries. You could also create a new calendar (before starting the import process) and import all of these dates to that calendar, if you wanted to keep them separate from your regular events.

Updates:
Paul Amlin has provided this comment below, but so you don't miss it, I'm moving it up here.
Hey gang, for the mac users out there who are google challenged or don't use that amazing tool, but who wish to use the LRB calendar in iCal, I've converted an iCal friendly version and posted it for download on my website: http://www.paulamlin.com/downloads/ This has been a popular request by many on the facebook group I admin, hope it's helpful to others here as well. peace, Paul :o)

Beth Lewis, who I mentioned above, also posted some more information on her blog, available at http://blogs.augsburgfortress.org/?p=210 .

Thanks to Rev. Matthew A. Smith (Bethlehem Evangelical Lutheran Church, Lansing, MI) for compiling this information for us into the Downloadable Little Red Book.