You May Be Using Colors In Apple Calendar App Wrong

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you may be using color in the Calendar app wrong. 

So I often get questions or see comments from people about colors in the Calendar App on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad. These questions seem to indicate that a lot of people don't understand what colors mean in the Calendar App. 

So for instance here I am in the Calendar app and you can notice a variety of different events on my calendar and they are using a variety of different colors. There's some red, there's some green, there's some orange, there's some blue. It might seem that you have the ability to color code events. So you can decide that some events deserve to be red while others deserve to be green and just set the color for each event as you like. But that's not what these colors are about.

If you look in the left sidebar here you'll see your Accounts and you'll see the Calendar is under those Accounts. If you don't see the left sidebar click this button here at the top and it should appear. The Sidebar shows you Accounts, in this case iCloud, Gmail, and Other which are mostly subscription calendars. So if you have just one account you may just see iCloud here, for instance. If you have multiple accounts you may see iCloud, Gmail, and Other Services. You go to Calendar Settings and then go to Accounts here you'll see all the potential accounts. So these are internet accounts that you've setup in System Settings. You can decide to enable or disable this account in Calendar. Just because you're using Gmail in the Mail App doesn't mean you have to use Gmail for Calendars. You can simply turn it off and you can see it is removed from the left sidebar here. This is, in fact, how I use it. I do use Gmail for one of my email accounts but I don't want it used at all in Calendar. So I've got Gmail disabled here in Calendar. But you may, for instance, have Goggle as your Calendar for work so you may want it enabled. Then you use iCloud for other calendars like your personal or family calendars. 

Now for each account you can also have multiple calendars. So a Calendar is like a database of events. Any single event would be in a calendar which is inside of an account. So in this case, under iCloud, I have three Calendars, Work, Personal, Family. Under Gmail, or Goggle, I've got one and that's also called Personal. Others may have more or fewer calendars in each account. But the important thing to know is you probably have multiple calendars, which is normal, and each calendar has a color assigned to it. In this case red for work, green for personal, orange for family, and then this blue for the personal calendar under Goggle. The subscription calendars, like for instance US Holidays here, this one is a different shade of blue. 

So to illustrate this imagine you've got two accounts connected to your Calendar, iCloud and Goggle. There are also calendars under Subscriptions. You can see here that you've got three calendars under iCloud, two under Goggle, and one additional subscription calendar, standard US Holidays calendar. If the color for the personal calendar is set to red then all of the events, for that personal calendar, will appear with the red color when you look at them in the calendar app. Each calendar has its own color and you'll see that color for every event. So these two red colored events, meaning a project due, they are red because they are simply in the Work Calendar under iCloud. The two green ones here, family dinner and doctor, those are green because they are in the Personal Calendar in iCloud. This one here for a lunch appointment that's blue because it is in the Personal Calendar under Gmail. 

You may be wondering what's different about this orange event here. It's orange so it indicates that it is in the Family Calendar under iCloud. But why is the entire title of the event shaded rather than just a simple line of color to the left? Well, these events here all have a specific start and end time. This one is from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. Whereas this event here is an all day event. You can see All Day has been checked here. So if this were a vacation and it were scheduled over two days you can see how this becomes a line that stretches between dates. The longer you make it the longer the line gets which makes sense. Whereas these events with a single bit of color to the left of the title they are just a portion of that day. If you switch to, say, Week View here you notice the same concept applies here. You'll see the shading goes from the beginning to the end. So like it does when you're looking at Day View when the shading will got between days. On the Week View, where you actually have time on the vertical axis, the shading will show you the length of the event. So if I were to make this event longer, say this, you can see how the shading continues there just as it does in this Monthly Calendar if this event were to extend across multiple days. 

So what a lot of people are getting wrong is using color on a per event basis instead of realizing that it's indicating which calendar its in. So for instance somebody may look at this event right here and then decide they want this to be green. So they see the colors here and they change it to green. But what they've actually done is they have moved it from the Work Calendar to the Personal Calendar. So when you change the color you're actually moving the event from one event database, one calendar, to another event database, another calendar. 

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So what about if you want to have specific colors for specific events without moving them to another calendar? Well, you have an interesting option. That is to simply change the title to include a color in there. Now you can't color the text. That is not a property of the title. But you can include emoji characters. So you can either use the fn or Globe Key and e to bring the up the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. Each bring up the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. Older keyboard shortcuts use Command and Space. Sometime that brings up suggestions and you have to use that a second time to actually bring up all of the different emoji characters. You can browse through here. Of course the emoji characters are filled with color. So you can decide to use a specific emoji character here to represent some kind of event. So, for instance, you may want to use something like one of these food items here to represent a dinner meeting so you can use this. You can see how it adds a little splash of color. Let's put it at the beginning there like that and Apply. You can see now I've got a little bit of color now in the title of the event. Maybe you can reuse your favorite emoji characters to represent different kinds of things. Like whenever a meeting involves a meal you can always use the same emoji character. 

But you can also use simply color blocks and circles. So I can search here simply for a color, like for instance green. You can see there are a lot of green emoji characters and there are a few that are basically just about the calendar color. There's the green heart there and there's also a green square and a green circle. So if you use one of these, like that, you can see that adds a color there that even overpowers the calendar color. So you can use this green dot to represent something. It's easy actually to even copy and paste it from this event to, say, another event like this. Then have that same color, even though those two events are in different calendars. You can use multiple ones of these. You don't have to stick with just one if you really want the color to stand out. 

So if you don't really care about the color of the individual calendar you can certainly change it. You can Control click, right click, or two-finger click on the Calendar here and notice you can choose one of the 7 standard colors. You can simply make all of your calendars the same color here so that the color doesn't actually represent anything. You can also choose Custom Color here and then choose from any of the Color Picker options here. If you choose white notice how you just get this little gray line and black text. Choose black and you get a black line and black text. So it is fairly devoid of color and ready for you to add your own color emoji to things. Although I would recommend against assigning the same color to each of your calendars because it makes it harder to differentiate things. Then you can accidentally assign a personal event to your work calendar and vice versa. It is better to have them all have their own color there and then use emoji characters if you want more color in the title. 

Also note that you can do this with subscribed calendars as well. So, for instance, I have my calendars under Other. But if I turn on US Holidays I can change the color for US Holidays to something else or assign a custom color to it. Don't be afraid to switch these On or Off and also On and Off your other calendars to filter what you're seeing there depending upon what you're looking for at the moment. When creating a new event remember you select the calendar here on the left and then use use the Plus Button or just double click in here, then it will use that calendar for the new event. So while you can change it afterwards it helps if your first step is to select the correct calendar and then create the event. 

So I hope this helps some of you who may have been confused about what the colors in the Calendars App mean. Thanks for watching.