Saturday, February 16, 2008

Custom Views in Google Calendar

Google Calendar has an option to define custom views: you can replace the "next 7 days" with other intervals like the "next 3 days" or "next 2 weeks". In the settings you'll also find an option to make your custom view the default.


Another way to change the current view is to use the small calendar from the left sidebar. Click on the small arrows to change the month and select a date to see the corresponding events. To see the events from a date range, click on the start date and drag it to the end date. Note that this only works for short periods of time.


Google Calendar has two useful shortcuts that let you easily move between periods of time: p (previous date range) and n (next date range). To see the events from a certain month in the past, click on "Today", go to the month view and repeatedly press p. Alternatively, type a date in the search box and click on "Search my calendars".

{ via Google Calendar Group }

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  16 comments ( Post a comment )
Thanks for the old news.
Yes thats very old
You're welcome, Michael. Thanks for your very useful and insightful feedback. (By the way, it was just a tip, not a new feature.)
I wish they would provide the option of TRULY customized notifications (e.g., 2 weeks, 25 days, etc).
Think I figured that out the day I started using google calendar.

Maybe next time a useful tip?
I don't think you were aware that you can create a custom view by selecting a date and dragging the mouse to another date. This is a clever feature and I'm not sure if it's documented at Google's help center.

The rest is pretty obvious, but I didn't want to post a single paragraph, so I added other features that let you define a date range.
The feature is documented, but I still think it's pretty obscure.
I really wish Google calendar engineers could come up with a solid plugin to sync outlook , Apple ical and others. I think lot of people don't use the calendar because of lack of integration. I found Plaxo sync as one alternative but thats very unreliable and buggy sometimes. Sorry for off-topic comment.
I didn't know about dragging the mouse on the little calendar; I found the tip useful. Pascal needs a girlfriend, and perhaps a more advanced blog where he can chat with others who, like himself, rarely have contact with sunlight and manners.
This was new, relevant, and interesting...thanks.
Feature request: Week numbers. My timesheet software uses week numbers and I can't find those in Google Calender.
If you happen to use Firefox, there's a Greasemonkey script that adds week numbers. If you don't have the Greasemonkey extension, install it and restart the browser before adding the script.
Every feature is known to someone, but not everyone knows about that feature. I didn't and if that makes me stupid, well then there you go, but I'm pretty happy to have something like this pointed out to me so that I can start using it.

By the way, I'm using an EeePC and switching to a two-week view makes the calendar infinitely more useful to me. I had switched to weekly view on this machine, as opposed to monthly view which I prefer, but it wasn't as good as this. So, it's a good tip.

Thanks.
SECRET TIP TO SHOW ANY DATE RANGE, NO UPPER LIMIT!!!

Note: you will need firebug.

Ok then how about this for a genuinely useful tip:

Got a busy period coming up over the next couple of months or half year? What if you want to show more than just 4 weeks on your new big monitor? Well here is the secret tip:

Go to Settings, General, Custom view, click the drop down menu, right click on, for example, the last option 4 weeks, and choose Inspect Element from the context menu. Firebug will now popup and show the html source of that option of the html select tag. You will see the line:
<option value="custom,28">4 Weeks</option>

Now double click on the 28 (28 days is 4 weeks), and change it to... say 70 (i.e. 10 weeks). (You should also change the 4 weeks to say 10 weeks, just for your own benefit in the next step).

Now close the firebug window and choose the new last option from the custom view drop down menu: 10 weeks!

Lastly just click save and you'll see your new custom view of up to... well actually THERE SEEMS TO BE NO LIMIT!!! Certainly, you can keep going til each week is just a pixel or two high. I got the range today up to the year 2027 on one screen, admittedly it was unreadable, but it shows that you can get whatever range you want.

Just change “custom,##” to the number of days you want, doesn’t even have to be a multiple of 7.

Let me know, does that work for you? Anyone got anymore tips like that?
Why does my calender keep saying "redirecting when loading?????
Thanks so much for your help! I thought I'd have to install a Firefox add-on or something to be able to view in two-week intervals, but when I found your page and the advice, I was so glad that you've posted the helpful tips.