I've struggled to find much use for AI. It's not that I'm not motivated—it's my job to try out new technology and point out useful ways to use it—but I rarely, if ever, stumble upon something the AI can do that I can't do faster and/or better with some other tool.

Until now.

I recently took a long trip that involved multiple flights and I wanted to add those flights to my calendar. I was annoyed to discover the airline didn't offer a button for doing this, or even an iCal download—all I got was a list of the flight times. So I thought I'd try AI.

I copied the times into Claude, which is an AI tool similar to ChatGPT. I asked the bot to convert the dates into an iCal file, and it worked. All I had to do was download the text file it offered, change the file name extension to "ics", and add it to my calendar. It worked perfectly: the times were even converted to account for the time zone differences at all locations.

Now, not every AI seems to work for this. I tested using ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude. Gemini gave me a tutorial about how to create an iCal file, which wasn't what I wanted; ChatGPT gave me a tutorial with a partial iCal download that was missing most of the events. It's possible I could get better results by adjusting my prompt, but with Claude I didn't have to: it gave me a perfectly formatted iCal file complete with a download button. All I had to do was rename the file extension after downloading and I could open it in the Calendar app on my Mac.

This, I think, might be my ideal use for AI: taking unstructured text data and converting it into an actual file. The iCal thing works an any context where someone gives you a list of dates and times—just copy that and ask your favorite bot to create an iCal file.

This isn't just for calendar appointments: you can make most any kind of file, assuming you have the right kind of data. For example: I copied some numbers from Wikipedia and asked Claude to turn it into a CSV file—it worked.

Basically, if there's data you want organized in a particular file type, Claude seems like a good solution. Now, there's a a catch here. The free version of Claude will complain if you paste in a large dataset and possibly stop partway through the conversion. If you're a paying customer, though, it should power through.

Again, I'm not really an AI guy, but this I find useful. Give Claude a try the next time you have to turn a messy assortment of text into an actual file—it just might work.

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