How To Create and Share Public Calendars From Your Mac

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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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.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Create and Share Public Calendars From Your Mac”

Mark Lamartina

3 years ago

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

Gary Rosenzweig

Mark: Which tools are grayed out, exactly?

Craig

2 years ago

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?

Comments Closed.

How To Create and Share Public Calendars From Your Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Create and Share Public Calendars From Your Mac”

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