Combining two tables into one calendar

Welcome to the community, Joanne! :slightly_smiling_face: This question comes up semi-frequently. Because a calendar in Airtable is a view, it can only pull dates from its own table. To pull dates from fields in another table, you need to use some combination of links and lookups to bring other dates into the table with the calendar view.

Hi Justin,

I am new to Airtable and we are testing this app to see if it will meet our needs for a comprehensive calendar. I have a communications plan on one table, the list of global holidays on another table. I want to be able to show these on
one calendar. The only common field I have is ‘Start Date’. I did figure out that only the primary field shows up on the calendar. So if I have the communications (primary) by date and the holidays (primary), how do I link the tables? I am an end user,
so this is not totally intuitive to me.

Thanks for your help,

–Joanne

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Thanks for sharing more about your base design, Joanne. In your situation, it probably wouldn’t make sense to connect the two tables. The information in each is pretty different, and generally when tables are linked it’s because the data in one has some connection to the other. The dates on your communications plan don’t directly relate to holidays, though, and trying to force-relate them would likely just confuse things.

Frankly, Airtable’s calendar features aren’t really designed for it to be used as a one-stop, comprehensive calendar, keeping track of different types of things in one calendar space. To achieve the end result you’re seeking, my preference would be to leave the tables separate and unlinked, and create a separate calendar for each table. With each calendar, I’d grab the iCal subscription link and subscribe to it in a separate calendar app (Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, etc.), which would then display all entries from all calendars. In other words, I’d only use Airtable to store and manage the date information I want to track, using a more robust calendar application for viewing the merged output of all calendar views.

I actually do that now with one of my side jobs, which is a class that I teach online. I’ve got both morning and evening classes, and track all class info in Airtable. The schedule info for both classes is actually in a single table, but I’ve got different fields for AM and PM meeting times. With the free account, I can only use one field per calendar view. However, this kinda worked in my favor because I wanted to not only view this myself, but also give my students a link they could subscribe to, and wanted separate links for AM and PM classes. I created two calendar views in the same table, then subscribed to both calendars in Apple Calendar for my own use, but only gave the relevant subscription to the students from each class.

Anyway, let me know if you need more guidance on going this route with the subscription links and I’ll be happy to provide more details.