Set Up Calendar

If you want Calendar to work the way you do, set it up right from the start. Add cloud accounts, such as iCloud or Google, so you can see a calendar from work or share calendars across all your devices.

You can also Create More Calendars, Tap into Special Calendars (such as birthdays and holidays), and Color-code Your Calendars to make it easier to see what’s coming up.

Finally, learn about the many ways you can Customize Calendar, including when a week begins and how many days are in a week.

Connect Calendar to iCloud

When you use iCloud with Calendar, your events appear on all your other devices—your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch—that use the same iCloud account. Make a change on one device and it appears automatically on all the others. Set an alarm on one, and it will chime on the others when the time comes. This can be extremely convenient when you’re on the go. Another perk of connecting to iCloud is that you can share calendars with others who also use iCloud.

Here’s how you get set up:

1. Go to System Preferences > iCloud.
2. If you aren’t already signed in, do so by typing your iCloud username and password. Click Sign In.
3. If your Mac asks you whether you want to use iCloud for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Notes, and Safari, make sure that checkbox is selected and click Next (Figure 11).

   

4. Otherwise, make sure Calendars is selected (Figure 12) and close the System Preferences window.

Connect Calendar to Other Accounts

In addition to the iCloud account that I just discussed, Calendar can also use calendars from other accounts, including Exchange, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and AOL. Here’s how to add one:

1. Choose Calendar > Add Account, select the account type, and then click Continue.
2. Sign into your account, following the prompts on screen.
3. Choose which services—Calendars, for one—you want to use with this account (Figure 13).

   

4. Click Done.

The added account is listed as a separate header in the Calendars list.

Create More Calendars

It’s a good idea to take a moment to think about whether some types of events need to be kept in their own calendars. Organizing events this way allows you to:

• Show and hide calendars as you need. Select or deselect a calendar’s checkbox in the Calendars list to make its events appear or disappear from the main calendar display.
• Color-code Your Calendars so you can distinguish event categories at a glance. (These colors are more obvious in macOS than in iOS.)
• Share certain calendars (project deadlines, a conference room schedule, a kid pick up schedule, and so on) with others. See Share & Subscribe to Calendars.

To make a new calendar, choose File > New Calendar. Now:

• If you’ve not connected the Calendar app to any cloud accounts, an Untitled entry for the new calendar appears in the Calendars list. Type a name for the calendar to replace Untitled. So long as the checkbox adjacent your new calendar’s entry remains selected, your new calendar’s events will display in the main Calendar view.
• If you’ve connected the Calendar app to one or more accounts, you may see a File > New Calendar submenu that includes an On My Mac option. (If you don’t, see How can I get an On My Mac option?.) Choose On My Mac to store the new calendar only on your Mac. Choose a cloud account to be able to access it on other devices through that account or share it with others via that account. A new Untitled calendar appears in the Calendars list, and you can type a name for it to replace Untitled (Figure 14).

If you realize, after the fact, that you got a little crazy with the calendar making, you can merge the many into one. See What if I made too many calendars? for details.

Tap into Special Calendars

You might see one more category on your Calendars list—Other. You can opt to show these special calendars by choosing Calendar > Preferences > General and then selecting any or all of these options:

• Show Birthdays calendar: This calendar brings together birthdays listed for your friends and colleagues in the Contacts app.
• Show Holidays calendar: Select this to subscribe to calendars that include holidays based on your region (for instance, the United States). Region is determined by the Region pop-up menu in System Preferences > Language & Region.
• Show Found in Apps calendar: This calendar includes events that macOS has detected after scanning Mail and Messages. For advice on working with this calendar, see Add a Suggested Event.

Color-code Your Calendars

Color-coding your calendars makes them easier to distinguish from each other. At a glance, you can see what your obligations are for work and what fun activities are coming up on the home front (Figure 15).

You’ll see a calendar’s color in these places:

• The checkbox next to its name in the Calendars list.
• In Week and Day view, the event background.
• In Month view, the dot next to each event (all-day events don’t have dots).
• The banner behind all-day events.
• The highlight of a selected event.

To change a calendar’s color, Control-click (right-click) its name in the Calendars list. In the contextual menu that appears, click the dot that’s the color you want (Figure 16).

Or, select the calendar in the Calendars list and choose Edit > Get Info. Click the pop-up menu with a small colored square and choose a color in the list (Figure 17).

Customize Calendar

Do you want to see only events for Monday through Friday? Are you tired of new events showing up in the wrong calendar? Get a jump on these problems and more by setting up Calendar to work the way you do using the options in Calendar’s preferences window, especially in the General preferences and the Time Zone Preferences in the Advanced pane. (I covered the Accounts preferences earlier in this chapter, in Connect Calendar to Other Accounts, and you can learn about the Alerts preference in Set Up Calendar Alerts later.)

General Preferences

Choose Calendar > Preferences > General to see the basic options, which concern your default Calendar app, your default calendar, and various details relating to times and days (Figure 18).

Here’s a rundown of what you can change in the General preference pane:

• Default calendar app: macOS assumes you want Calendar to be your default app (we’d expect nothing else, Apple), but you can change that by clicking the Default Calendar App pop-up menu and choosing a program—if you have one—that’s more to your liking.

  When Calendar is the default, the app will launch whenever you open a calendar (.ics) file or click a link to subscribe to a calendar.

• Days in a week: If you use your calendar exclusively for work, it might be easier to see only the days that count—Monday through Friday. Select 5 in the Days Per Week pop-up menu. Your shortened week will appear only in Week view (Figure 19).

  

  In Month view, you’ll still see all the days, with weekends in gray.

• When the week begins: Have you ever wondered why the calendar week starts on Sunday when we all know the actual week starts on Monday? You can fix that, or choose another day as your beginning if your workweek kicks off then. Choose the day you want in the Start Week On pop-up menu.
• Hours in a day: In Day view, Calendar focuses on the 12 hours it figures you’re awake. To get an expanded or narrowed view, choose the number of hours you want to see from the Show pop-up menu.

  You can also choose when your day begins and ends. This makes a subtle change in Day view. The hours before your starting time appear without a line next to them (Figure 20).

  

• Default calendar: A common annoyance with Calendar is that new events show up in the wrong calendar. To fix that, pick the one you want to use most often in the Default Calendar pop-up menu. If you choose Selected Calendar, new events will be added to whatever calendar is selected in the Calendars list.

  If you use Siri on your iPhone to add events, they’ll be placed in your iPhone’s default calendar, so make sure you’ve designated the one you want to use on that device, too. On your iPhone, tap Settings > Calendar > Default Calendar and choose it from the list.

Time Zone Preferences

When you travel, say with your MacBook, it can be disconcerting for Calendar events to shift to new times and for alerts to go off early or late. This can happen if the Set Time Zone Automatically Using Current Location option is selected (as it is by default) in the System Preferences > Date & Time > Time Zone preference pane. Usually that’s a helpful feature, but in Calendar it means that if you scheduled a 3 PM meeting when you were in Pacific time, the event will shift to 12 PM when you’re in Eastern time zone.

To avoid this hiccup, use a key setting in Calendar’s Advanced preferences pane, Turn On Time Zone Support.

When you select this box, two Time Zone menus appear in Calendar:

• Toolbar: Use this (Figure 22) to override where your Mac thinks it is, based on the settings in System Preferences > Date & Time > Time Zone. Whatever you choose becomes the default time zone for new events.

  

• Info pane: Use this to set the time zone when you create events for a trip. For example, if you’re traveling from San Francisco to Singapore for a conference, choose Singapore Standard Time in the Time Zone menu for the events you’re planning for your stay. Events set to a different time zone than your calendar include a special time stamp. In Figure 23, you can see that a group event at 5:45 PM Pacific time will actually be held at 8:45 AM when the viewer reaches Singapore, which is 8 hours past GMT or Greenwich Mean Time.

There’s even a setting for the rare times when you want an event to stay at the same time no matter where you are. (For example, you might plan on eating lunch at 12 PM local time whether you’re in San Francisco or Singapore.) In that case, set the event’s Time Zone pop-up menu to Floating (Figure 24).