How to delete a Google Calendar entry

[0800-grizzly]

Hi,

I set up an automation to create some events in an Airtable table in my Google Calendar (Google Calendar action). This was easy. But I can't figure out how to use the Google Calendar Update action to delete an entry.

Since it in the automation says "Leaving selected fields blank will unset them", I tried to update the start/end times with empty fields, but that was impossible. After manually deleting any setting in the automation field, Airtable "repaired" them when I exited from the view.

What is the trick?

Rgds,

Björn

[ScottWorld]

Airtable’s automation actions don’t allow you to delete Google Calendar events.

To do that, you could either write your own custom JavaScript, or for a no-code way that doesn’t require writing any programming code, you would want to use Make’s Google Calendar automations.

Note that you’ll need to keep track of the Google Calendsr Event ID in Airtable in order to tell Google which calendar entry to delete.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

For example, here is how you would instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances here.

For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

— ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

[0800-grizzly]

@ScottWorld, thank you.

But uh oh, can it really be so that delete/cancel is not possible? From Calendly experience a change that would include change of date would technically mean a delete from original date + new entry for the new day.

Therefore I tried to use the "Update event" with empty date so that it might have led to the similar behaviour (no date = cannot exist in a calendar).

Rather useless feature be able to add an event to a calendar if one cannot follow a possible cancellation 😞 / :).

Björn

[ScottWorld]

As far as I know, Airtable’s automations won’t let you cancel/delete an event by leaving the date blank. It seems like Google Calendar’s API might support this action by setting the “status” parameter to “cancelled” when updating an event, but it doesn’t seem like Airtable lets you set the “status” parameter for an event. If you know JavaScript, you could probably get this to work natively in Airtable by writing a JavaScript as part of your automation, but I don’t know how to write JavaScript code so I always use Make for these sorts of things.