Nontrivial Exercises

Import the Dallas Mavericks Schedule to Outlook

I’m excited about the start of this NBA season, and especially about my Dallas Mavericks. This is a very intriguing team, with several unique players, not the least of which is Dirk Nowitzki, an interesting study of a player learning to use and further develop his significant talent.

The NBA is offering something unique as well for fans to keep up with their teams’ schedules. If you’re interested in keeping track of the Mavericks – or any other NBA team for that matter – NBA.com has made it fairly easy to add a team’s schedule to Outlook. I don’t know if this has been available in the past or not, but I think this is a great way to help connect fans with their teams schedules without having to keep referring to the refrigerator magnet or tri-fold pocket schedule.

Here’s how to get it set-up:

On the Mavericks schedule page, there is a link called Download the Mavs schedule into your PDA. They should really rename this, since it really just imports the schedule into Outlook, thereby allowing you to sync it with your PDA.

The PDA page has a link to download a CSV text file with a list of calendar items, each of which represents a game on the Mavs schedule. Then, in Outlook, you can import this file into the Outlook calendar, and voila – each game is on your calendar with the start time, opponent and location.

Now, I didn’t want all these games showing up as busy times on my calendar, and I wanted to use a unique color label that Outlook provides. So, I pulled up the list of all 82 games in my calendar in a table view, added 2 fields to the table view – Label, and Show Time As. Then, I was able to enter the label name (“Mavs” in my case) and “Free” for Show Time As via my keyboard in the table:

It didn’t take but a few minutes to make all these changes, and now I have the Mavs schedule right at my fingertips (and pen tip) in my Outlook calendar. Here is tonight’s game against the Spurs: