Holiday Calendars and Subscribing To Other Public Calendars

In the Mac Calendar app, you can view a selection of local holidays using switch in Calendar Preferences. You can see holidays in other countries by temporarily switching your Mac's region and then toggling this preference. You can also subscribe to any publicly-available calendar you wish from the Internet. You can make your own calendars and share those as well.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: In the Calendar app you may notice that there are a lot of holidays that you didn't have to put there yourself just like when you buy a calendar in the store and it's got holidays, like you can see here, President's Day. These are all part of the Holidays calendar. In this case the US holidays. You can see it here on the left in the sidebar under other. I can remove them from the calendar, just temporarily if I wanted to, by unchecking it here and you can see they all go away. I can bring it back in to check to see maybe why so many people are off school and work today. That kind of thing. 
Now you don't have to subscribe to this calendar. You can uncheck it temporarily. You can get rid of it completely by going to calendar preferences and then under General there's Show Holidays Calendar and you can unchecked and that completely removes it from there. You can always bring it back by checking it again. 
Now why US Holidays? It turns out it doesn't really mean anything in particular other than that's my region set for my Mac. So if I turn it off here and I go to System Preferences and in System Preferences I go to Language and Region and change my region to something else. Let's change to the United Kingdom here. I don't even have to get rid of this window. I'll just go back into Calendar into the Preferences here and say Show Holiday's Calendar now and you can see I'm given UK holidays instead. If I were to go and change back to the United States for my region you can see it actually doesn't change this back to US. I have to deselect Show Holiday's Calendar and select it again and I'll get back to US holidays. So you can kind of temporarily change your region to select another main calendar there.
But you're not restricted to just having this calendar or none. You can subscribe to any calendar you want really in the Calendar app because it will allow you to use a URL and pick any calendar that's in standard format. There are tons of them out there on the internet. So if you want to have another one that's particular to the things you want to celebrate or to maybe a work schedule, maybe your organization actually puts out a calendar that you could subscribe to that shows the days off from work or special events happening at work, you can subscribed to that. 
The way to do that is to go File, New Calendar Subscription. Now you have to enter a URL for this specific calendar. At this point you need to know the calendar URL. If it's something from work you've probably been sent that in email. Maybe the email said everybody subscribe to this calendar here and that way everybody knows when things are going on at work. Maybe it's for something else. Maybe it's a sports team that you're a fan of or a part of and they've got a calendar as well. Or an organization or school or anything. Anyone can easily create a calendar. If there's a website they can put a calendar at that website and then you can tell all your members to subscribe to it. 
You can find a lot of publicly available calendars online. There are sites like this one, iCalShare.com that has been around for awhile. Let's look at an example there. Here's a NASA Launch Schedule calendar. That can be interesting. I'll click on that and I can hit the Subscribe to Calendar button. Safari is smart enough to know that it's something that should open in the Calendar app. I'll do it and you can see it prefills in the calendar URL. I'll hit Subscribe and it will ask me some things like I can name it. So I'll just name it NASA really quick. I can decide whether it's just going to be on my Mac or it's going to be iCloud which means my iPad and my iPhone are also going to see this calendar. I can say I don't want to have the alerts for this calendar. I just want to have the information there. Also if there's any attachments I don't want those. So I can decide that. I can decide how often it refreshes. For something like a launch calendar I might want it to refresh everyday. I'll hit Okay and now it brings it in and I can see it here. It's listed under iCloud since I selected iCloud calendar. If I were to select it you can see here there's some launches and some things on that NASA calendar there. I can get rid of the holidays there and you can just see those items. Of course this would be something that would be updated all the time. It's not going to be static for years in the future like for holidays. But it may just actually show me like, you know, changes for launches for next week. That kind of thing. It's kind of interesting. You can buy all sorts of calendars out there.
So this brings up the question of how do you create your own. It's pretty easy. I won't go through all the steps here but I'll point you in the right direction. You can go File and Create a New Calendar. You can call it, like, Events. Then I can click this little broadcast button here and I can make it a public calendar. You can see it says, Allow anyone to subscribe to a read only version of this calendar. It's got a URL here that I can copy. I also can click the little Share button just to quickly send an email. Click Done and it basically publishes this calendar to my iCloud account and then I can send that URL off to people. So if I ran a little league sports team, I was a manager of a little league sports team, and I wanted to put all the games on a calendar, I can put them on a calendar and share it this way. I can send it to everybody and they can subscribe to it.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Holiday Calendars and Subscribing To Other Public Calendars”

Bert Mullemeister

7 years ago

Hi Gary
is it possible to have in my case the both Australian and the Netherlands

Gary Rosenzweig

Bert: Great question! Yes, there is a way. Subscribe to the one not in your region by setting your region to that and adding it in preferences like I show in the video. Then Control+click on it in the sidebar in Calendar and select Copy URL. Then change your region back, uncheck and then check that box in Preferences to subscribe to that one. Then use File, New Calendar Subscription, and paste the URL of the other calendar to manually subscribe to that one too.

fefeo

Thank you Marina! xx

Norm

Wow! I really enjoyed the personalized calendars such as Little League scheds, or PTA meetings et al

Wayne Sheridan

Excellent video on adding calendars. I was looking to add moon phases and NASA launches. Done. Thank You! I'll share this for sure.

Comments Closed.

Holiday Calendars and Subscribing To Other Public Calendars

Comments: 5 Responses to “Holiday Calendars and Subscribing To Other Public Calendars”

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