Invite People to Events

Want to make sure all the necessary folks show up to a meeting? Use Calendar to invite them to your event and keep an eye on who’s coming. This chapter looks at how to send an invitation, has tips on how to Get in Touch with Invitees, and covers how to Accept and Decline Invitations that others send you.

Send the Invitation

You can send an invitation either when you create an event or when you view an event’s Info pane later. (Invites are sent as .ics files, which most popular calendar programs support.) Click the Add Invitees field and then type in a person’s name or email address. As you type, Calendar looks for matches in Contacts, Mail, and connected calendar servers. If the person’s contact information is already in your Contacts app, for instance, it can make a match just from the name. Press Return or Tab to go down a line and add another.

To avoid errors, before trying to send an invitation, make sure you’ve added your own contact info—with an email address—to the Contacts app. In Contacts, check to see if you have one by choosing Card > Go To My Card. If you don’t have one, create one, and then choose Card > Make This My Card to make it official.

Calendar keeps track of who you usually invite to meetings and will make suggestions based on this when you invite more than two people.

When you’re done, click Send. Invitees receive an email with details about the event and can click to accept, decline, or waffle with a maybe (Figure 33).

Check an Invitation’s Status

Calendar lets you check the status of your invitations in a number of ways after invitations are sent:

• By invitee: Symbols appear next to invitee names in the Info pane (Figure 34).

  

  Here’s a run-down of what a symbol tells you about an invitee:

  • Hasn’t responded, but isn’t busy at that time
  • Hasn’t responded, but is busy at that time
  • Hasn’t responded, and this calendar doesn’t track availability
  • Has accepted your invitation
  • Has responded “Maybe”
  • Has turned your invitation down
  • Not listed on this calendar server
• With notifications: In the Calendars list, if a calendar has any notifications, the number of notifications appears next to the calendar name. Likewise, the Notifications button in the toolbar shows how many new notifications you have. (The button doesn’t show at all if you have no new notifications.) Click it for a rundown (see Figure 35).

  

• With a symbol on the event: In Week or Day view, a symbol on the event summarizes the status of its invitations (Figure 36).

  

  Ideally, you want to see a person with a check , which means all invitees accepted your invitation. If responses are mixed, you’ll see a person with a question mark ; if everyone turned you down (sorry about that), you’ll see a person with an X .

Get in Touch with Invitees

Sometimes, it takes a little more effort to get the ball rolling.

Resend Invitations

If you need to resend an invitation later because you’ve noticed some invitees haven’t responded at all, choose Edit > Resend Invitations.

Write to the Group

You might find yourself needing to send a message to your group, say if the conference room changes, you want them each to come prepared with a pitch, or you need to know what kind of pizza they eat.

In that case, Control-click (right-click) the event in Calendar and choose Email All Participants or Message All Participants. When you do, a Messages or Mail window opens—already addressed—where you can type in your note. Click Send and it’s on its way.

Accept and Decline Invitations

If you’re invited to an event, accepting or declining is a fairly simple matter:

• Click the Notifications button in the Calendar toolbar and then click New. The invitation should be listed. Click Accept, Decline, or Maybe.
• If a Calendar notification for an event invitation appears at the top right of your screen, click Close, Accept, or View, depending on the available options. (For more about notifications, see Set Up Notifications.)
• If you receive an invitation via email, click the Accept, Decline, or Maybe button in the message.

Change Your Reply

If circumstances change later and you want to change your reply, Control-click (right-click) the event in your calendar and choose Accept, Maybe, or Decline in the contextual menu.

Ask for a Different Time

What if the proposed time doesn’t work? You could email or message the organizer, of course, or you can let Calendar help you do it.

In Week or Month view, drag the event to a new day. Or, in Day or Week view, drag the event to a new time. The original event becomes subtly striped and a new event appears marked PROPOSED. A dialog asks if you’d like to ask the organizer to move the event. If you do, click Propose (Figure 37).

How your proposed time change gets to the organizer depends on the type of calendar service:

• iCloud: Follow the prompts to send the organizer an email message.
• Recent versions of Exchange Server and some CalDAV servers: The organizer can click the Notifications button in the toolbar, click New, and then see your proposal in the list. They might also see a Calendar notification.
• Some Exchange and CalDAV servers: Email is sent automatically to the organizer.