1/6/16
10:00 am

Fun With Mac Calendar Printing

The Print function in the El Capital Mac Calendar app offers a ton of options. Some options provide nice printed versions of your calendars or event lists. But you can also print to a PDF and use the text in those PDFs to do things like get a list of your upcoming events.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take a look at the Print function inside the Calendar app on your Mac. It is actually useful for a lot more things than you may think.
In El Capitan the Calendar app has some pretty interesting printing functions. You may not have even thought to look there. Let's take a look at see what it can do.
Go to File, Print. You see it comes up with what looks like a pretty decently looking calendar that you can go and print out this month and will include your events. You can see them there in the preview. It also customizes it a lot. For instance, whether or not to put all day events, events with a specific time, or neither or both, Mini calendars here at the top, the keys which basically show which calendars you are including. 
By the way you can choose which calendars you want to include. For instance, if you want to turn off certain calendars then they won't appear and the events won't appear in there. You can also switch to black and white to save on printing ink. You can change the text size. So for instance you can have text in here appear bigger. 
You also get to choose the range. So you can say this month or next month or say starts in January and ends in December. Now I'm going to have twelve months to be printed. So I'm actually going to print out an entire calendar here. In this case it would be useful to turn off all the events and have a blank calendar printed out. A cheap way to get a calendar. But you can choose other things here as well and you will see that in a second as we change the View.
So when you change the View it is a pretty dramatic change. You've got Day, Week, Month, and List. So let's look at Day. In Day here you've got this kind of day planner view. You can set similar things here like which calendar and what appears and what doesn't. It gives you an idea of your day. You can change which date is there and you can also have it go to specific days. So I can actually have multiple days included as well. You can see it is going to print five days here.
I can change to Week to get a week view. You can see the events in there. One of the most interesting ones, though, is to change  to List. List will actually give you a list of events over a range. So I can start today and go for as many days as I want. You can see all the different days appear here. Then the events appear underneath them. I can also customize what it looks like, for instance, by changing some of these things and the font size and all of that.
But the cool thing about the List view is it is the only way I know of to get the list of all of your different events. You can't export them from the calendar. You can't get them any other way. But here if I were to do this and say Continue and then just open that in Preview, don't actually print it, I get this list here. I can select a text and copy and paste it into something.
So if I wanted to give to a colleague my schedule for the next ten days I could actually print a list view here and then copy and paste this into an email and they would see what I've got in kind of a list form. It helps if you edit this because you can see you get these days that have no entry. There are lots of those so you can go in very quickly and delete some of those days and just leave the days that actually have something going on. It is a quick way to export into a list the things that you've got on your calendar.
Now there is an even better way to do this. You can select various events using the Command key so they don't have to be continuous or you can just select all, Command A, and you select all the visible events. Then when you go to Print you can choose the view of Selected Events and it doesn't include the days where there is nothing or where you haven't selected something. So this is an even better way to get a list of events you've got coming up, or appointments, and possibly give them to somebody else. 
You can get rid of some of the stuff up here to make it really short and just basically use this as a PDF here or copy there, and then let's say we open this up in TextEdit. This could be an email I was composing. It is a pretty neat view here. I can maybe add some spaces to make it even better. Now this is something I could send to somebody to give them my schedule or even to print out for myself as a schedule of what I've got coming up. So another useful way to use printing without actually even using any paper.
So I love functions like this, like Print here, when there is so many different options because I'm sure if you play around with it long enough you will find some interesting things you can do with this by selecting different options, different views, even different types of paper. All sorts of things with ranges. So I encourage you to play around with this, experiment, and see what else you can some up with to make use of the Print function. It doesn't necessarily involve just printing.

Comments: 21 Responses to “Fun With Mac Calendar Printing”

Anna S

8 years ago

Learned some great things about Mac Calendar. Thanks for putting this topic in your Newsletter. I enjoy your informative website that keeps me current with Apple products and applications.

John Stires

8 years ago

I second Anna's comment; terrific stuff!

James Cirilli

8 years ago

Always love your hints Gary.
Been looking for a way to print the calendar in Profile view.
Any way to do this in iCal?

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

You mean Calendar, right, not iCal?
You could always print, then after you hit the Continue button use the Show Details button. Then go to Layout and change it to 2 pages per sheet. This puts a calendar at the top of a vertical page.

Alison Jee

8 years ago

Really helpful - thanks Gary

Ron DeMarco

8 years ago

Gary; I've had a problem with printing calendar events in list format. The time seems to be chopped on the print-out but not on the calendar itself. Here are 2 examples (thanks to the copy and paste tip you gave!)
● Events
80 to 90 Ford: Sable {This should be 8:00 to 9:00}
● Events
100 to 120 Painting {This should be 10:00 to 12:00}
Doesn't happen all the time
● Events
945 to 1045 C'ville {This is fine}
Any ideas what the problem may be?
Thanks, Ron

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

Not sure. I'd play around with different printing options to see what could cause it.

Bev

8 years ago

I wish there was a way to print a full-year calendar with boxes so that I can keep tract of things like checking off the date I changed my contact lenses, or something similar.

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

There is. Print out by month, select it to go for 12 months. After you press Continue, on the next screen go to Layout and then have it fit pages on a sheet. That gives you a 4x3 grid of 12 months on a sheet.

jennifer

8 years ago

When I go to layout and pages per sheet, it goes from 9 pages to 16, doesn't give me option for 12???What am I doing wrong?

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

Right. Choose 16. You'll see.

Gena Gry

8 years ago

Gary you are the best. This tip is great, love it.

Ron DeMarco

8 years ago

Follow-up on the printing problem; appears the problem was the way I formated the "short" form for time (Preferences>Language & Region>Advanced> Times>Short. I had 1 digit for hours and 1 digit for minutes. Changed that to 2 digits each and the problem appears to be gone.

Carolyn

8 years ago

Thanks for this video. How far back can I get a calendar of events that occurred prior to the digital era but were entered recently in order to recycle old calendars? When I tried, I got a dialog window saying “calculating layout” but it was unchanged interminably and I finally exited. On my laptop I can get a list of appointments from decades ago, but I can’t search them on my iPhone, where I originally entered them. How far back can the iPhone [5s with iOS 9.2] search for events?

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

Not sure why the first issue. Maybe just try again.
For iOS, try Settings, Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then under Calendars, use the Sync button. Set it to "All Events" instead of X months back.

Carolyn

8 years ago

My Settings for calendar Sync was already set for "All Events." (For whatever it's worth, I use only one calendar.) I still have 13.3 GB available with a Capacity of 26.4 so that I don't seem to be overloaded. Any other ideas?

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

Not sure. You may need to have an expert take a firsthand look at what you are dong to diagnose the issue and suggest a fix. Genius Bar?

Carolyn

8 years ago

Already been there. The “genius” set up my iCloud so that my iPhone will sync with my laptop, and that’s OK for searching on the laptop. Where/who else would know how far back an iPhone should be able to search? Thanks for letting me pester you, Gary. Luv your videos.

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

Maybe it just doesn't work for retroactively-entered old events. Or maybe the old limit of 1-year is still in place, though I'm sure I heard that it was unlimited now.

nadia

8 years ago

Hello, nice video. I had a question about events lengths. My calendar elongates the length of an event to a week or maybe more , even though i check again and again and its says its for a single day. Its an all day event if that helps?
Also this only happens in month view.

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

Nadia: It really sounds like the event is scheduled over a series of days. Maybe you are checking that in the wrong place? If you can't figure it out, maybe have a second set of eyes investigate. Visit the Genius Bar if you need to.

Comments Closed.

Fun With Mac Calendar Printing

Comments: 21 Responses to “Fun With Mac Calendar Printing”

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