More info in calendar view?

[Mille]

Hi!

Just started to use AirTable and I like it very much!

I understand that everything won’t be possible using this tools, so you have to be creative. But one thing that I can’t find, which I think should be there, is customizing/displaying more info in the week view in the calendar. Is that possible?

[ScottWorld]

Sadly, Airtable has neglected the calendar view (as well as many other areas) of their product. What you see is what you get. Even their .ics subscription feeds only deliver the 2 fields that you see on the screen.

You may want to post your comments as a feature request in the #show-and-tell:product-suggestions category.

Unfortunately, you only have a couple of options here, and they require you using EXTERNAL apps that are outside of Airtable.

In my opinion, the #1 best option is to pay extra for this extension from MiniExtensions, which lets you create an .ics subscription link to send your data from Airtable to an external calendar client (such as Outlook or BusyCal) — and it lets you send up to 8 different fields. Note that I wouldn’t recommend sending to Google Calendar, since Google Calendar only refreshes subscriptions once per day.

miniExtensions

Generate iCal Calendar URLs for Airtable Records - miniExtensions

Airtable's calendar feed only provides the date/time and the single Primary Field. This extension supports 5 other fields: Event Location, Notes..etc.

MiniExtensions is on a mission to fix every glaring hole in Airtable’s feature set. As you can see from the excellent tools on the MiniExtensions website, there are a TON of things that are missing from Airtable, and MiniExtensions keeps adding new tools every week.

You could also use an external automation platform like Integromat to synchronize information between Airtable and an external calendar platform like Google Calendar. However, this could get very tricky to manage the synchronizing — depending on your workflow, you might need to create automations for: (1) creating events in Airtable, (2) editing events in Airtable, (3) deleting events in Airtable, (4) creating events in Google Calendar, (5) editing events in Google Calendar, (6) deleting events in Google Calendar.

[Mille]

Hey Scott,

Thank you for the information and all your suggestions.

Like you are are saying to keep all the data synchronised could be difficult. Since I’ve just started to use AirTable I will investigate if this is good enough. The calendar view will be the main functionality for us since we will use it as a planing tool. But maybe there are some better tool out there for us, I will have to look around.

Thanks you again, and for the quick reply!

[ScottWorld]

You can always click on the event in Airtable’s calendar view to expand your record once, and then click on the “Expand” button a second time to see all the fields in your event. But that can be a pain to go through that process of clicking twice on each event to see the fields.

For you, the MiniExtensions product would probably be your best bet. It doesn’t do a “synchronization”, so you don’t have to worry about keeping things “in sync”. It simply provides a live calendar subscription link to your external calendar apps, which you can then configure however you’d like. So you’ll be viewing your calendar events in nearly real-time.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project, and you’d like to work with an Airtable consultant to help you setup your Airtable system, I am an expert Airtable consultant. You can feel free to contact me through my website at scottworld.com.