Everything You Need to Effectively Use SharePoint Calendars

SharePoint is an incredibly robust platform for document sharing and team collaboration. Many businesses use SharePoint to streamline operations, foster communication, and keep track of various workflows and schedules. However, one of its most useful but underutilized features is the SharePoint calendar.

Despite its usefulness, SharePoint calendars often remain underused due to confusion surrounding their setup and capabilities. When implemented correctly, they can enhance your organization’s productivity by effectively managing reminders, appointments, and events directly within SharePoint.

In this guide, we'll explore SharePoint calendars in detail, showing you how to leverage their full potential.

At its core, a SharePoint calendar is a custom list that stores metadata about events, reminders, and appointments. This list is hosted within your SharePoint site and serves as a centralized location for managing various schedules.

One of the standout features of SharePoint calendars is their ability to be overlaid. By using the calendar overlay feature in SharePoint 2021, you can merge multiple calendars into one cohesive view. This is especially useful for administrators who need to streamline the management of team meetings, project deadlines, and more.

With multiple calendars in SharePoint, you can track various business operations across different departments without overwhelming your main calendar.

SharePoint calendars help organizations stay organized by managing multiple schedules in one place. You can create separate calendars for different departments or teams. For example:

• HR Calendar
• Sales & Marketing Calendar
• Training Calendar
• Client Calendar

These calendars can also be synchronized with Outlook, making it easier to access all events from within the Outlook interface. This synchronization ensures that users do not need to visit SharePoint to manage or view their events. Additionally, any updates made in SharePoint are reflected in Outlook, and vice versa, offering seamless integration.

With this synchronization, SharePoint and Outlook calendars stay in sync without requiring users to switch between platforms.

SharePoint calendars come with several powerful features that can help streamline your business operations:

1. SharePoint Calendar Overlay

The calendar overlay feature lets you combine multiple calendars into one consolidated view. This is particularly useful for keeping track of events across different teams or departments. You can customize overlays based on your needs and even color-code different calendars for easy identification.

2. Calendar Rollup

The calendar rollup feature allows you to aggregate up to 10 calendars from various sites into a single view. This enables simplified reporting and management across your organization. The rollup feature is particularly valuable for enterprises that need a bird’s-eye view of all upcoming events across various departments or projects.

3. Outlook Calendar Synchronization

SharePoint allows full synchronization with Outlook Calendar. This means that events from SharePoint can be viewed and managed within Outlook, and any changes made in one platform will automatically reflect in the other. This integration saves time and makes managing multiple calendars more efficient.

4. Approvals and Workflows

Since SharePoint calendars are essentially just SharePoint lists, you can use the same list functionalities, such as approvals and workflows, to manage events. This feature enables easy tracking of approvals for scheduled events and allows you to automate certain calendar-related processes.

5. Embedded Calendars

Calendars can be fully embedded on both classical and modern pages in SharePoint. This makes it easier for teams to access event schedules without leaving the SharePoint site.

Creating a SharePoint calendar is simple and requires only a few steps. Here’s how you can set up a calendar for your team:

Step 1: Obtain Suitable Access Permissions

Before creating a SharePoint calendar, ensure you have the necessary access permissions. You'll need either Owner or Admin permissions to create and manage calendars. Additionally, make sure you're creating the calendar on a public site so that your team can easily access it.

Step 2: Create the Base Calendar

To create a SharePoint calendar, go to your site and select Site Contents. Click on New and choose the Calendar app from the dropdown menu. From here, you can configure your calendar by adding metadata such as:

• Calendar name
• Calendar description
• Calendar type (personal or group calendar)

If you're creating a group calendar, you can add team members by selecting the appropriate group.

Step 3: Add Users to the Calendar

To allow other users to access your calendar, you can add them directly from the list of users in the calendar creation pop-up. Keep in mind that external email addresses cannot be added to SharePoint calendars in its out-of-the-box version. You can choose whether users can view or edit the calendar.

While SharePoint calendars offer powerful functionality for organizing schedules, they come with a few limitations that can make managing complex calendars challenging. Fortunately, SnapOn Software offers solutions to these common issues, making it easier to maximize SharePoint's potential.

Problem: Limited Calendar Customization and Space Usage

SharePoint calendars can take up a considerable amount of page space, and there’s currently no option to resize or customize the display. This can make it difficult to keep the calendar manageable, especially when you have a large number of events.

Solution: Calendar Plus App (SPFx)

Calendar Plus App (SPFx) solves this issue by providing a unified calendar view that aggregates multiple calendars into one. It not only simplifies calendar management by consolidating various schedules but also integrates with Microsoft Teams—so you can manage events from within Teams without switching back to SharePoint. This level of customization allows for a cleaner, more efficient calendar display.

Problem: Limited Filtering and Searching Capabilities

With SharePoint’s default calendar, searching for specific events or appointments can be cumbersome, especially when you’re dealing with a lot of data. The built-in filtering options are quite basic, and users may have to manually scroll through lengthy calendars to find what they need.

Solution: SharePoint List Filter Plus Web Part

List Filter Plus takes filtering to the next level, allowing you to easily filter calendar data by various parameters. You can customize the filters based on the type of event, department, date range, or other relevant criteria. This means you can quickly locate the information you need without wasting time scrolling through pages of calendar events, improving both efficiency and accuracy.

Problem: Lack of Printing or Offline Access to Calendar

SharePoint calendars don’t offer an easy way to print or access calendars offline, which can be a problem for users who need to handle business trips or work in locations where access to the SharePoint platform is limited. This can lead to inefficiencies when users need to take their calendars with them or share hard copies of events.

Solution: SnapOn Software’s Printing Feature

SnapOn Software’s Printing Feature allows you to convert any calendar to a PDF and print it directly from SharePoint. This is especially useful when you need a physical copy of your calendar for offline use, or if you’re managing events in places where network access to SharePoint might be unreliable. This web part enhances the functionality of SharePoint calendars, providing greater flexibility for users who need to print or share event details in physical form.

Problem: Lack of Bulk Editing for Calendar Events

In SharePoint’s default calendar, updating multiple events at once is time-consuming because you must manually edit each one individually. This can be especially problematic when changes need to be made across multiple calendars, such as rescheduling a set of events due to unforeseen circumstances.

Solution: List Inline Editor

The SnapOn Software’s List Inline Editor makes bulk editing simple by allowing you to update multiple calendar events at once directly within the SharePoint interface. This saves time and ensures that your calendar remains accurate and up-to-date. It’s especially helpful when there are urgent changes, and you don’t want to waste time editing each event manually. Plus, it’s fully compatible with Excel, making importing and updating data even easier.

By leveraging SnapOn Software’s solutions, you can overcome the limitations of SharePoint calendars and create a much more flexible and streamlined system for managing events. Whether you're dealing with multiple calendars, need better filtering, or require bulk editing, these tools provide the enhancements necessary to take your SharePoint calendar experience to the next level.

SharePoint calendars are a powerful tool for managing schedules, reminders, and events within your organization. By leveraging calendar overlays, rollups, and Outlook synchronization, you can keep your team on the same page and streamline your operations.

However, to truly unlock the full potential of SharePoint calendars, consider enhancing them with SnapOn Software’s solutions. These extensions can help your business manage complex scheduling needs while improving the user experience.

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