Why You Should Be Using Multiple Calendars on Your Mac

The Calendar app lets you use as many calendars as you like, dividing up your events and appointments into groups that make sense to you. With multiple calendars, you can turn them on or off to more easily see what you have coming up and share only the events that you need to share.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about using multiple calendars. 
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So you can use the Calendar app on your Mac, iPad, and your iPhone to keep track of events, appointments, meetings, all sorts of things. But a lot of people put all of that into one calendar or maybe break it up into two. But there's no reason you can't have lots of different calendars. Doing so gives you some advantages. 
Here in the Calendar App I've got two calendars. One called Work and one called Personal. It's pretty straight forward. But there's no reason to just have two. You can have as many calendars as you like. Sometimes it makes sense to have more calendars because you can easily switch them On and Off. For instance I could add a new event here, I'll use the Plus button here to do that, and I'll say Meeting on Friday at 10. It will add that for next Friday and I can customize it here. It puts it in the calendar that I've selected. But there's no reason I can't have a special calendar just for meetings. So I could go to File, New Calendar and it's going to create it under the calendar I'm currently using. So in this case iCloud and I could put meetings. I can move this event to it. Moving an event from calendar to calendar is easy. One way to do it is to Control Click on it, select Calendar, and then switch to another one. But you could also double click on it to bring it up and then use that pull-down menu here to switch. Another way to do it is to simply drag and drop it onto the calendar and it will switch the calendar that it's using.
The advantage to having all my meetings on a separate calendar is I can easily switch them On or Off. So I can have it separate from other things I do for work. Maybe work tasks. Maybe I won't even have a general work calendar but have things specific to different projects I'm working on, different groups I work with. You could easily have them all switched On and see them just like they were in the same calendar. But one advantage is they will have different colors for the dots next to them. If you can Control Click on a calendar and choose Get Info you can change its name, add a description which will appear here again so that can help clarify things for you if you want to add some notes about why this calendar exists. You could also change the color. You can pick from specific colors but you can also choose Other and then use the color wheel here or any part of the Color Picker to choose any color you want for that calendar. So, for instance, you can range all of your work related calendars from yellow to red to orange and have personal things be more blues and purples. 
It's perfectly okay to have three or ten or twenty different calendars and switch them On or Off to make things more clear on your calendar. Here, this is pretty empty. It's just my demo calendar. But a lot of us have a very crowded calendar with lots of things. So having different categories for different parts of work, personal life, travel, get togethers, reminders for things all in different calendars can really help organize it and you can focus on one thing at a time. Of course you'll be able to see all of these on your iPad and iPhone as well because here I'm using these calendars under iCloud. 
Now another advantage of having multiple calendars is sharing them. You don't want to share all of your work events or all of your personal events. So you can go and create a new calendar here, let's call this one Family, and then I can click on the Share button next to it and Share It with members of my family and they would see things in here. You can have multiple Shared calendars shared with your family. So things like vacation plans or even if you have a calendar for your work travel you can make that a shared calendar and share it with your spouse so they know when you're traveling, they know where you're staying, they know your flights and all of that. But that can be separate from meetings and work tasks that you don't need to share with anybody else.
You could also, of course, share it with different services. So it's okay to have iCloud calendars here. But if you go to Calendar, Preferences you could see under Accounts here I have an iCloud account, of course my Apple ID associated with this, but I also have a Goggle account here. If I enable this account for Calendars it will then appear here on the left and I can have Goggle calendar. They can appear side by side here with my iCloud calendar. There's really no difference. So if I select this one here and let's say I add an event here, that's in my Goggle calendar. So I can turn that On or Off. The advantage of doing that is if you have a co-worker or family member that isn't in the Apple eco system, they instead are using Android or Windows and they have a Goggle calendar and not an iCloud calendar, you can just as easily have that shared between you. So you could have your iCloud calendar and your Goggle calendar all shown at the same time and use check boxes to determine which ones are being shown at any given time.
Now, if you create a bunch of calendars and decide you don't need some of them but you don't want to delete them you can merge them with an existing calendar or with each other. So you go here under Edit, Merge Calendar and you can see you can merge another calendar with the one you have selected. I can merge my meetings calendar with work this way. I can continue to merge calendars. So, for instance, say you start a calendar when you started a new project and have work. When you're done with that project you have an Old Projects Calendar. Then you can merge that project into the Old Project Calendar to keep all the events and information around without having all of these calendars that you're not using anymore sticking around. You can also select a calendar you don't want anymore and before you delete it you can go to File, Export and export in one of two formats. Using Export gives you the standard calendar format. So you can Save that out. Put it as a file somewhere and then delete it from Calendar. You've got kind of this backup of it if you ever need to refer to it.
So I hope this gives you some ideas about how to better use the Calendar's app on your Mac, your iPad, and your iPhone. Definitely setup multiple calendars. If you don't like them you can always merge them back into one calendar. But I think having multiple calendars makes it easier to organize things, to see what you need to see on the calendar at any given time, and it's just a really useful tool if you utilize it.

Comments: 10 Responses to “Why You Should Be Using Multiple Calendars on Your Mac”

Eric

3 years ago

Merge:

Hi Gary. I don't see the option to Merge calendars. Is it a new feature? What release of macOS and Calendar did you use in your tutorial?

Gary Rosenzweig

Eric: I think it has always been there. I'm using Big Sur, of course. Make sure you are bringing up the context menu of one of your iCloud calendars, not something under "Other."

Brian Murphy

I've been using this feature for years and it is great except when I travel the world and come back to my home the Calendar "Birthdays" under "Other" (which comes from my Contacts) always is a day or 2 out, why does this happen, even when I change the date in my Contacts they still pop up a day or two later.

Brian: I've never seen that. Have you tried contacting Apple to report it?

Merge:...

Ah ha! On my set-up (Big Sur 11.5.2 (20G95), and Calendar 11.0 (2811.5.1)) it would seem that it is only Calendars "On my Mac" that can be merged and not those on my iCloud account.

Is this the same for you?

Eric: No. What I am showing in the video, in fact, is merging two iCloud calendars. Perhaps you are trying to merge an iCloud calendar with an On My Mac calendar? It would make sense that that wouldn't be possible as it would either remove those events from iCloud or add them to it depending on the direction.

Still have not got this to work! Apple Support is on the case. Re-installing macOS Big Sur (at their suggestion) made no difference. Trying it on a new admin account (at their suggestion) made no difference.

I tried it on a MacBook Air (Intel) and the Merge option could be seen once both via context menu and from the Edit menu but by the time I went back to take relevant screenshots the Merge option no longer appeared!

Are you working on an M1 machine when you made the video?

I did discover that I could simply drag one calendar onto another one to merge them (as long as they were on the same system, i.e. both on iCloud or both "On My Mac").

Eric: The two calendars you are trying to merge. Where is each one? iCloud? On My Mac? Google? Somewhere else? Try it with two iCloud calendars. Also make sure they are YOUR calendars, not ones you have subscribed to or are special things like Holidays or Birthdays. I am using Big Sur and using M1 makes no difference (this is software, not hardware).

Gary: In all my tests a) the calendars are ones that I have created, b) I have only tried to Merge calendars that in the same location (i.e. both on iCloud, or both "On My Mac", and not one of each of those domains), c) they are not special in any way.

It remains a mystery!

Comments Closed.

Why You Should Be Using Multiple Calendars on Your Mac

Comments: 10 Responses to “Why You Should Be Using Multiple Calendars on Your Mac”

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