Viewing Calendar Events As a List and Other Tricks

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some handy tricks in the Mac Calendar App.

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So a very common question I get about the Calendar App is, Can you view your event as a list? So in the Calendar App typically you would see things by month and you can clearly see which events are there for each month. You can customize here on the left to show one or more calendars. So I've got two calendars showing right here and they are all mixed in. I could also switch to a week view like this and see the event in this way which is handy, but not a list. If you go to Day you could view each day as kind of a list. It's in a timeline here on the left and you can see information for each thing here on the right. But only what is selected on the left will show up on the right. So is there a way to view everything as a list? It turns out there is. The key is to Search. 

For instance, notice that I've got several events here named Meeting something. If I were to search for Meeting and then select Event Contains Meeting you could see I get a list of all of the events that have the word meeting in them. But that's not what I want. I want a list of all events. So it's almost like if I could search for a Wild Card or just nothing at all. You can do that but not by leaving this blank, which indicates there is no search being done. But by putting double-quotes around nothing. If I use a double-quote and search for something like meeting it will take that as literally this which will give me the same results here. But if it would say multiple words it would make it a little clearer what I'm searching for. But if I actually had nothing in here, in other words I do double-quote and immediately another double-quote then I get Event Contains and this very confusing quadruple quote here. But just select it and you'll see you, in fact, get all of your events. Every single one for all the Calendars selected. So if I turn off a calendar here you could see I only get the one that is still checked. I can even go backwards in time here by scrolling up and see past events and I can scroll forward as well. It's a true list of all the events I have in my calendar. So this is kind of handy right away. If you like seeing things as a list just remember to put two double-quotes here to get that list.

But you can also use this to select things. Notice that all of these events here show As Selected. If I were to click here to select a specific one it highlights for a second but this part of the calendar shows everything is selected and the list here shows this one event as being extra special selected in some way. I can actually select more than one event. A Shift will actually allow me to select a range of events and I could use Command to individually select another event as well. So I've got four things selected. But the indicators here aren't very robust. Notice here that while meeting these shows selected but if I scroll back up to meeting A, B, & C they are not selected. But they are. I still have these four things selected it's just scrolling will get rid of that extra special highlight.

Now once I have those selected there are a variety of things I could do with them. For instance, I can go to Edit, Get Info, or just Command i and it will give me Info for all of the selected events. So if I need to change a variety of events I can bring up all the info windows and kind of have a little easier access to doing them all at once. 

Another thing I could do is I could do Edit and then Copy and now I've actually copied those to the Clipboard and I can Paste them all together. If I do it in a TextEdit document that's set to plain text and I paste you can see I just get the title and the time it's scheduled for. But if I do it in TextEdit to a Rich Text document I actually get all the information, not just the schedule but also things like the URL and Notes, and other information. I can do that in other apps like, say, in email. So I can paste this into an email, maybe format it a little nicer with an extra line, and I can send the information for a group of meetings to somebody by email or paste them into a document or anywhere else that takes Rich Text. 

Now note that you don't have to use the list to get there. I can forget about that list and I can actually select one item and then I'm going to Command Click and select all of these. I can do the same Copy and Paste, the same Command i to get info for all those items. But I could also use the Search to quickly find things. So, for instance, I can search for a meeting again like this and I see all four here. Select the first one, Shift Click to get the last one and it selects them all here in the Calendar without me having to go and hunt for each one. 

Another thing that comes in handy is being able to Copy and Paste events. So I can Copy this event here, just Edit, Copy or Command C, and click on another day. So click here and Command V to Paste and you can see it pastes that same event with title, notes, and everything for the same time but on the new day. But what's really interesting is when you do a set of events. For instance I have three related events here. I'm going to Command Click on each one so I select all three. Command C to Copy. Click on another day. Command V to Paste and it pastes them all into this new day. So when you have a set of related events it comes in handy. You can even do it if its more than one day. So I'm going to move this part to the next day. Then select all three of them. Click here and notice how it pastes them all relative to that day. 

Now there is one other way to get a list. That's to Print. When you go to File, Print you get a calendar, probably a monthly view like this. But you can switch to List View. List View then takes a Starts and Ends. So I'm going to start it, say, on a date and end it on a date, say the end of the month like that. You can see that it puts an entry for everyday, even if there is nothing going on there. Then it includes all of the different events in whatever calendars that are selected here. So you can change that. You can also change some other options about which events are selected. The Mini Calendar here is handy because it will show you for each page exactly which dates are included. You can't preview more than just the one day here. But when you hit Continue then you get a preview here and you can see two days and you can see how the Mini Calendar here at the top looks. You can then go and continue to export this as a PDF or you can Print it or you can go to Open in Preview and then you get to view it in Preview and you Save it from here, you can Print it from here and you can even Share it as a email message from here as well. 

So this could come in real handy if say you have a calendar that's for your team. Everybody should know about all the events in here. Select just that one calendar. You go to Print. You select List. You select the Date Range that you want for everybody to see. You can have a handy PDF that you can send around or print out and post somewhere. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.