Calendar
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Please note that this site is now out of date and has been replaced by Google Workspace: a Practical Guide. If you came here from a link, please update the link accordingly. If you have any questions, please email itsupport@york.ac.uk FAO the DISC team.
Calendar Essentials
Most people find the Calendar simple to use for creating their own events. Many of its strengths, however, lie in the way it is able to interact with other applications and the Calendars of your colleagues.
Links
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Read this Google Document that includes an overview of Google Calendar
Visit the Google Calendar support pages
Calendar Tips
(8' 56") A useful video from a very friendly tech guy called Steve Dotto. Includes inviting guests, suggesting times, shared calendars,and notifications. A little on the long side but he's very watchable!
Collaborating with others
One of the most powerful aspects of Google Calendar is the ability to collaborate with others.
To add a colleague's calendar to your list of calendars enter their name or email address in the Add a colleague's calendar field at the bottom of the calendar list on the left and hit the Enter key.
View A Coworker's Calendar
(2 min) How to view the calendar of someone else within the University.
By default, you will only be able to see whether they are free or busy - however, you can ask your colleague to share their calendar or more information with you. The following page shows how to share your calendar with others, and how to control what they can see:
Using the Find a time feature, you can always see a colleague's calendar when arranging meetings - you don't have to add their calendar to be able to do this.
If you're using Doodle, you can link your Doodle account to Google Calendar, so that tentative and confirmed events from Doodle polls are automatically added to your calendar.
Sharing, Viewing and Subscribing to Calendars
(2 min) This video shows how to share calendars, including 'free-standing' calendars that are not associated with a specific Google account.
Customising your Calendar with Labs
Google Labs are experimental features. They're not fully integrated into Google but can be very useful and allow you to customise your Calendar to suit your needs.
To access Labs in Calendar click the gears icon and select Labs from the menu.
Useful Labs for Calendar include:
Hide morning and night - allows you to minimize hours in the morning and night from your calendar view.
Free or busy - see which of your colleagues are free and busy right now
Year view in calendar - allows you to view your calendar by year
Who's my one-on-one with? - shows who your one-to-one meetings are with in brackets, eg Lunch (Jane Smith).
Appointment slots
The Appointment slots feature lets you set time slots on your calendar that other people can book - for example, a line manager could set aside specific hours each day for staff consultation, and allow people to book it (either as a single block, or smaller slots within the time).
Importing and exporting calendars
You can import existing calendars into your York Google calendar, and export your Google calendar to use with other systems. Google provide instructions on the following pages: