Ical subscription link to calendar, adds ":" to each calendar event

[Helen_Vaskevitc]

I’ve got a calendar view in my base for which I’m using an ical subscription link to have it show up in my calendar app. For some reason, when I look in my calendar app, every single event has the character “:” added to the end the event name. (For example, “Meeting with Marcy:” instead of “Meeting with Marcy”.)
There is no colon in the event names in the airtable calendar. Does anyone know why this is happening and how to fix it?

[Justin_Barrett]

What calendar app are you using? I’ve got a couple custom calendars that I subscribe to in Apple Calendars, and they show up without any extra characters.

What field type is the primary field in your calendar view?

[Helen_Vaskevitc]

I use the apple calendar app, used to be called iCal, now is just called Calendar.

The primary field in my calendar view is a formula that combines a few pieces of data from the record to make a string. In the calendar view in airtable, there is no extra “:” at the end, just in apple Calendar.

[Justin_Barrett]

Thanks for the update. Would you be able to share the formula used in that primary field, along with a screenshot of what you see in Airtable coming from that field?

[Helen_Vaskevitc]

Sure. The formula for the primary field references other fields, I’ll list them all here:

• Primary field formula: {Desc} & {Spaces formatting}
• {Desc} is a single line text field.
• {Spaces formatting} formula: IF({Artist}, ’ (’ & {Artist} & ’ ’ & {Spaces/Services} & ‘)’)
  //I keep {Spaces formatting} hidden, it’s just there as a step in formatting the string so that the primary field is tidier.
• {Artist} is a lookup field
• {Spaces/Services} is a lookup field

Here’s three screenshots:
The airtable grid view; I’ve only shown the relevant fields

The airtable calendar view

My apple calendar

[Justin_Barrett]

Thanks so much for sharing those images. That’s very odd indeed. One thing stood out to me, though. In your calendar view in Airtable, the share icon—next to the highlighted “Color” button—should be highlighted if you’re using a link from that view. My guess is that you might not be subscribed correctly to the calendar, and the data isn’t being passed through correctly. My gut says that if you unsubscribe from your current subscription, then make a new link in Airtable and subscribe using that link, it should work.

[Helen_Vaskevitc]

Whoops, I actually just didn’t screenshot the correct calendar view. Here it is:

You can see there is also no “:” in any of the entries in this view.

[Justin_Barrett · Accepted solution]

I figured it out: it’s because you’re using two date ranges.

Look in the setup dialog for the calendar view:

Notice the “with label” portion at the end of each setup line. This defaults to the name of the first date field for that line (“Start” in my case). (Yes, I used the same fields for both lines, but just for the purpose of this test.)

In Airtable’s own view, it looks like this, with the label rendered in a slightly different style next to the record name:

In the subscribed calendar, though, a colon is used to separate the name from the label:

That label can be manually overridden. My hunch is that you put one or more spaces in that label field, perhaps because you didn’t want a label. That made the label effectively disappear within Airtable. However, the data passed to the external calendar still treats the space(s) as a label, so the colon is added for separation. In the end, you have a colon before a blank label.

If you don’t actually need the second date range, I suggest removing it, which will remove the label automatically. If you need the second range, then either add a label, or accept that the colon will be there if you leave the space(s) in place.

[Helen_Vaskevitc]

Ah yes, that’s exactly it!

I guess I’ll just get used to the “:” being there, I do need both date ranges.

I’m using both date ranges so that the calendar properly formats all day events. I use one date range (without a time attached) for all day events, and another date range with a time attached for events that have start and end times. I would love for airtable to come up with a Time field that can be used in a calendar, otherwise I have found no other way to have a mix of dates for which some have times and some don’t, other than to have two sets of date columns.

[Justin_Barrett]

Makes sense. :thumbs_up: If you would, please mark my last comment above as the solution to your question. This helps others who may be searching with similar questions. Thanks!