Google Calendar: Find available time

Google Calendar: Simple Workflow for Finding Available Times and Booking People and Rooms

Need to book an appointment with someone?  Or book an AISJ room?  Need to book a room AND invite people all at once? But what time are any of these pieces available?

Well, Google Calendar provides a simple workflow for you to explore available times for people and rooms and then to invite and/or book them all in one process!

In the example below, we'll start with looking for an available "room" time to book and then add a guests into the process.  But, this process can start with people or rooms.

1) In your Google Calendar, click on a time slot that you would like to book the Library for.

2) In the Calendar window that opens, click on the More Options link.

3) Add a title indicating it is your booking.

4) Click on the Rooms link.

5) Using the drop down menu, select "Include Unavailable Rooms" (just in case the ES Library isn't available in the time slot you initially chose).

6) Search for the "room" you are looking for (in this case, ES Library).

7) Select the room from the search results by clicking on it (even if it is struck-through, due to unavailability in this slot).

8) You'll see now that whichever "room" you selected (ie. ES Library) is now visible and that the Library's Google Calendar is part of the booking.

9) Select the "Find A Time" link.

10) You can now view and scroll through all the Library bookings in the Library Calendar view to search for an available slot that you can book.

ADDING GUESTS:

Since you're booking a room, do you need to invite some people to be there with you?  If so, we need to know what times work for both room availability and your guests: 

11) Go and click on the "Guests" link.

12) Search for and select the persons you'd like to invite to the booking.

This screenshot below shows the "week view" once we've selected the room (in purple) and chosen two guests (in red and darker blue).  The "week view" can be cluttered, so you can change to "day view" for a more useful perspective (see next screenshot).

13) Once we've changed to the "Day view", you can see the Calendars for all rooms and guests side-by-side. You can scroll back and forth to different days, if necessary. 

14) Time slots that are available for all parties are highlighted in light gray.  Once you choose one, you can use the Start Time and End Time boxes to do any final tweaking to the time slot that you desire.

15) Click the Save button.

16) After you click the Save button, you need confirm that you want to Send "invitation emails" to your guests.  The booking should now appear in both your Google Calendar as well as that of the room you booked AND you're guests will get Calendar invitations.