Color-Coding Comes to Google Calendar

Post date: May 12, 2011 3:23:49 PM

Just in time for the end of the semester and the clearing of everyone’s calendars, Google has released color-coded events for Google Calendar.

For a long time now, it’s been possible to color-code events by sub-calendar. So, for example, I have four sub-calendars that feed into my One Calendar to Rule Them All: family, teaching, union, and writing/editing. Because these events are all in different calendars, they show up in different colors–handy for quickly understanding the shape of a day. (And the color-codes for these calendars translate into apps such as CalendarBar, too.) I know that there are Google Calendar ninjas who will scoff at only using four calendars–for example, if, like George, you embed your syllabuses into Google Calendar, you might have many more, and you might well have different calendars for different writing projects or, FSM help us all, different committees–but I try to get by with as lightweight a taxonomical scheme as possible. (Advice extrapolated from Merlin Mann, as usual.)

Sometimes, though, it’s helpful to distinguish events on a particular calendar. For example, my son right now does three things after school (obviously not on the same day!): Little League, soccer, and art. I don’t care enough about the difference between soccer and Little League to have them on two different calendars–but I might care about the difference between weekday practices and games. It’s also nice to be able to include a visual cue that “both parents are needed” for certain events.

The mechanism is simple: When you click on an event, there’s now a color picker right beside the event name. (If you’re in the detailed event editor, there’s just an area to select color. Here’s what the result looks like: