So we keep pushing google docs in lieu of a native suite program or office productivity
software. I downloaded my calender from google docs which was a zip file. unzipping
created a .ics file. Is there a program which I can use to view it offline?

From what I can say there is none. There are some web tools, AFAIR, but that will not help for confidential/private data.

I hacked together a small importer for my csv database tool, so a friend who needed to export all business calender information as text, was able to process the data. And there wasn´t a proper tool that did it without cloud processing or installing tons of tools on windows.

However it was just a hack and is nothing I would release. Things like birthdays are handled differently and caused a broken entry. Since he just needed the other stuff, I never invested more time to find out how this format works. I never finished it, as you never know when google will drop something. However, it worked for him. :)

Geit

Might also be worth asking Polymere (author of Polyorga) as he's likely to have looked into the format when making Polyorga.

http://polymere.free.fr/Site_New/polyorga_en.html

thanks anyways.