iCal subscription link

[Patricia_Howat]

I’m sharing an “Airtable Calendar View” with Google calendar (via an iCal subscription link ).
Twice in a couple of weeks the link appears to have broken and events no longer show on my Google calendar.
On the first occasion all events were missing so I Unsubscribed from the Calendar and then re-subscribed which seemed to fix the issue.
On the second occasion only a few events are showing on random days - Resetting the link hasn’t worked this time - any suggestions gratefully received

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Patricia_Howat!

Unfortunately, the Google Calendar client only updates calendar subscriptions every 24-48 hours, sometimes longer. And sadly, Google doesn’t give users any way to force-refresh subscriptions any sooner than that.

So what you’re seeing on your end is simply a lengthy delay between the time you change your calendar in Airtable vs. the time that Google Calendar refreshes the changes for you. And Google Calendar won’t let you modify its refresh times.

So, the solution for you would be to switch to a completely different calendar app that can refresh subscribed calendars much sooner than that.

On the Mac, all of my clients love using BusyCal, which is the most advanced calendar software available for the Mac. It can be set to refresh calendar subscriptions as frequently as every 5 minutes. (You can also feed your normal Google Calendars through BusyCal as well, so all of your calendars are in one spot.)

My guess is that Apple’s built-in Calendar app can refresh subscriptions every 5 minutes as well, but once you use something as advanced as BusyCal, there’s no going back to a basic calendar like Apple’s Calendar.

If you’re on Windows, my guess is that other calendar programs — such as Outlook — can do the same thing. Outlook runs on Mac as well.

Hope this helps! If this answers your question, could you please mark this comment as the solution to your question? This will help other people who have a similar question. :slightly_smiling_face:

[Patricia_Howat]

Thanks @ScottWorld for your feedback, the issue was actually with some calendar events that stopped syncing altogether.

I can live with the 12hr or so timelag, but if that does become an issue I may try Zapier as I’m really happy with the Google suite of products.

I think the Airtable data may have got corrupted somehow, so I’ve deleted the Base and replaced it with a backup copy which seems to have resolved the problem.

So glad I remembered to backup ! :slightly_smiling_face:

[ScottWorld]

Patricia_Howat:

but if that does become an issue I may try Zapier as I’m really happy with the Google suite of products.

Remember that you don’t need to leave the Google suite of products to use a different calendar app. Google Calendar events still work with all calendar apps on the market.

If you use Integromat or Zapier to sync events, that could work too, but it could be a real pain to recreate an entire syncIng scenario from scratch. If you end up deciding to go down the route to manually syncIng Airtable with Google Calendar, you might want to check out this zzBots tool.