You can create a calendar like a work, organization or team schedule on your Mac, and then publish it using iCloud so others can view it. Calendar apps on other platforms can subscribe to the calendar although some may not show updates in a timely manner.
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▶ Watch more videos about related subjects: Calendar (36 videos).
Video Summary
In This Tutorial
How to create, publish, and share a public calendar from the Mac's Calendar app using an iCloud account, so anyone can subscribe regardless of the software they use.
Intro
- A public calendar is useful for sharing dates for an organization, workplace, or team, and the Mac's Calendar app can create and publish an iCloud calendar that others can subscribe to with the right URL.
Creating and Publishing the Calendar
- A new calendar, for example Team Schedule, is created in the Calendar app and selected so new events are added to it, then made public by clicking the icon beside its name and choosing Public Calendar, which produces a shareable URL that can be copied or sent by email or message.
Subscribing on Apple Devices
- A recipient subscribes through File, New Calendar Subscription by pasting the URL, after which they can keep or remove alerts and attachments, set the refresh frequency, rename it, and change its color, with changes propagating within the chosen interval such as one day.
Subscribing in Google Calendar
- In Google Calendar, the Other Calendars Plus button offers Subscribe to Calendar, From URL, where pasting the link adds the calendar and, after a few seconds, displays its events and notes intact.
Update Timing Considerations
- Apple leads competitors by allowing the subscriber to set how often the calendar updates, even hourly, whereas Google and Microsoft can take days to reflect changes, so this approach works best for fairly fixed schedules, with any changes communicated to people through another channel as well.
Summary
The Mac's Calendar app can create a public iCloud calendar that publishes a URL anyone can subscribe to, whether on Apple devices, Google Calendar, or other software. Because update timing varies by platform and can lag on Google and Microsoft, the method suits schedules set well in advance, with important changes also shared through another means.
Video Transcript
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create, publish, and share a public calendar from your Mac.
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So let's say you're in charge of making up a calendar. Maybe for your organization, your work, maybe you've got a softball team. There could be all sorts of reasons that you want to create a calendar and then publish the dates for other people to see. Now most computers and mobile devices come with a Calendar App of some sort. For instance on your Mac you've got the Calendar App. The same thing on your iPhone. People that use android phones and Windows computers also have apps and a lot of people actually just use Goggle Calendar on the web.
But on your Mac you can create your own iCloud Calendar using the Calendar App and you could publish it there. Anybody else can actually subscribe to that if they have the right URL and then see the events on this calendar.
Let's start here in the Calendar App and I'm going to make a New Calendar and it's going to give me a Name here. Let's go and call this something like Team Schedule. Now I'm going to make sure it's selected so when I add New Event they will go to this calendar. So let's say I put some dates here. Let's put one here and add a whole bunch more. So you can see I've added these various events here and I can fill them out with all sorts of things. For instance, add some notes and things like that. Now the idea is I want to publish this and let anybody else, whether they are on a Mac or not, be able to subscribe to it so that they can see this on their calendar software.
So here under Team Schedule I'm going to click on the little icon to the right. Click there and make this a Pubic Calendar. Then hit Done. Now if I click on it again you could see that there is a URL there. I could actually triple click it to select it or click here and set it up to go out in an email or a text message. With it selected I'm just going to Copy it right here and then hit Done. Now let's say this is somebody else and they get the message that the Team Calendar is online. They could simply go to File and us the new calendar subscription here and Paste in that URL. If they click it in a link it should do this all automatically. You could see that long URL is there and they could subscribe. Then it comes up with the information. Here's the name. They could decide whether or not to keep the Alerts, keep the attachments or remove them and how often to Refresh. Also they could rename it and change the color to something else if they wanted to. Now you could see those things appear there in their calendar.
Now any changes that are made to the public calendar will be updated within one day, since that was what they selected.
But how about if somebody is using something completely different like for instance somebody is just using Goggle Calendar. Well, in Goggle Calendar if you look at the bottom here on the left there are other calendars and you could click Plus and Subscribe to Calendar. Then when you're here click From URL. Paste it in and Add Calendar. It says Calendar added. So now we can go back to the settings here and you'll see it down here. Actually after it loads, it takes a few seconds, it comes up with the name right here and sure enough if I switch this to Monthly here I could see those events fill in. You can even see the note is there intact.
Now there's one way that Apple is really ahead of everybody else in Calendars like this. That's the option to update the calendar within a given amount of time. So if you know there's a schedule that's going to change often you could say update every hour and you'll be sure to get changes soon after they happen. However Goggle calendar actually doesn't have that and people complain that sometimes it takes days for an update to show up on their calendar. I have heard the same complaint about using Microsoft software. So perhaps the best way to use a calendar like this is when you know something is kind of certain and you can put the dates in there well in advance and it's not going to change. If a change does happen make sure all the people involved know about the change in some other way besides just posting it to calendar. But otherwise this is a really handy way to use nothing really but your iCloud account to create a calendar like this, maintain it on your Mac using the Calendar App. Just about everybody else, no matter what they are using, should be able to subscribe to it and get all the information that you put into that calendar.
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Hi Gary, I just watched your video on screen shots. Very helpful! However most of my tools are greyed out and don’t work. Any idea what I’m doing wrong?
Thanks
Mark: Which tools are grayed out, exactly?
Gary, I really like your videos; they are very helpful. I followed the steps in this tutorial to create a read-only calendar to share. But, people that subscribed to that calendar can modify it on their computer, even though I made it read-only. Is something wrong? Please advise. Thank you.
Craig: Do you mean they can edit it and you see the changes too, or that they can edit it and only they see the edits?