Google Calendar Tips for Extension Employees

This article includes Google calendar tips that will help you configure your calendar for Extension’s new mileage reimbursement policy. Tips for how to share your calendar, make individual meetings private and adding travel time to meetings are all included.

Sharing your U of MN Google calendar 

Default calendar view
By default, anyone at the U of MN (TC Campus) can view your University Google calendar. Note: Extension employee Google accounts are set to TC campus for this purpose.  What can people see on your calendar? Meetings on your calendar will display to others as “busy” but it does not show the details of your meetings. To comply with Extension policy, you should allow some people to see the details of your meetings by sharing your calendar with specific people (e.g. your supervisor, support staff, work team).

Sharing with specific people:

  1. Open your Google Calendar
  2. On the left, under My Calendars, find your calendar and click the arrow next to it
  3. Select Share this Calendar
  4. Under Share with specific people, add the email address of the person you want to share with
  5. For Permission Settings, choose an option in the drop-down menu. Learn more about permissions below.
  6. Click Add person, if they aren't already added
  7. Click Save. Once you click Save, the person you shared your calendar with will get an email invitation to view your calendar. If they click the link in the email, your calendar will be added to their "Other calendars" list.
Permission Settings – control what others can see
When you share your calendar with someone, you can decide how they see your events and whether they can also make changes like adding or editing events. Here's what people can do with each sharing option:

Make changes AND manage sharing
  • Change sharing settings
  • Add and edit events
  • See details for all events, including private ones
  • See the time zone setting for the calendar
  • Restore or permanently delete events from the calendar's Trash
Make changes to events
  • Add and edit events
  • See details for all events, including private ones
  • See the time zone setting for the calendar
  • Restore or permanently delete events from the calendar's Trash
See all event details
  • See details for all events except those marked as private
  • See the time zone setting for the calendar
See free/busy information (no details)
  • See when your calendar is booked and when it has free time, but not the names or other details of your events.

Making individual meetings private

Items marked as "private"
Some things on your calendar should be set as private such as doctor appointments, unless you don't mind if people see them. If you have given someone permission to view details on your calendar, the items marked as private will display as "busy".
  1. Open the meeting you want to mark private
  2. At the bottom of the page, find the Visibility section
  3. Select Private
  4. At the top of the page, click Save

Adding travel time to meetings 

Adding your travel time to and from meetings is an important part of managing your calendar. This will prevent people from scheduling meetings at a time you are traveling. Create a separate “travel time” meeting before and after your meeting. Here’s an example:



Extras:

Take a moment to explore some other Google calendar settings. Under your Calendar Settings General tab, you can change:

Default event duration: when you click in your calendar to create a meeting, the default time is 30 minutes. You can change this setting to different amounts of time.
Working hours: give people a warning if they try to schedule meetings outside of your regular working hours.
Change how you view your calendar: dim past/future events, show weekends, customize your default view.

Under your Calendar Settings Labs tab, explore some calendar add-ons. The add-on that I have enabled is "Who's my one-on-one with?" If someone has scheduled a meeting with me, it will display their name on my calendar next to the event.

As always, we welcome comments, tips and feedback on the QuickBytes blog.

Happy New Year everyone!





Comments

  1. Thanks Karen - great tips! I've now added the Lab you suggest.

    Recently I added my Calendar page as another Startup tab when Chrome opens (along with my Gmail page and TweetDeck) - which saves me the (horrible, horrendous) hassle of that extra step to open my calendar every time I open up email.

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    Replies
    1. LOL Todd - I agree it takes so much extra time to open the calendar! Great tip for another QuickByte -- adding a startup tab to Chrome. As always, thanks for your feedback.

      Delete
  2. Karen--did you discover the "View Trash" option for the cal? It just saved my butt when I deleted an event that I should not have deleted! http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/05/google-calendar-for-the-web-gets-a-trash-can/

    ReplyDelete

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