Printing (to PDF) Weekly Calendar View

[Rae_Crothers]

Is there any way that I can print (to PDF) my fully weekly calendar view on one page? I’ve tried just doing File-Print, then landscape mode and shrinking to fit to one page, but it only shows me four days out of seven. What I’m trying to achieve is that I have been speaking with AT about getting at least a read-only Calendar week view in the iOS app, but until that happens, I’d like to have a PDF that I could then add to my digital planner and mark up by hand and consult when I’m on my iPad (desktop mode on iPad is clunky).

Thank you.

[ScottWorld]

Airtable is really bad when it comes to printing, so this is what I would do — I would share your calendar subscription feed to an external calendar app that has great printing capabilities:

Airtable Support

Integrating Airtable with external calendar applications

Want to export the events in an Airtable base to your favorite calendar app, such as Google Calendar, Fantastical, or Outlook? You can get an iCal link from a shared calendar view, and if you subsc...

If you’re on the Mac, you’re in luck because BusyCal is the best calendar app on the planet and it has a ton of customizable printing options as well. I’ve been using BusyCal for nearly 2 decades now!

Also, note that your external calendar app might not synchronize in real time to instantly reflect changes that you make to your calendar in Airtable.

BusyCal will update calendar subscriptions as frequently as every 60 seconds (or you can force a refresh to happen immediately), but some external calendar apps like Google Calendar will only update calendar subscriptions once every 24 hours with no way to force a refresh.

[Rae_Crothers]

Thank you for confirming that exporting to BusyCal, which I do, is the best solution. :frowning: Unfortunately, I lose all my colour coding, which is vital to my planning process. It also doesn’t give my my full day, only what can fit on screen, so Iose either my morning or my evening. :frowning: But it is definitely a better solution than what AT is giving me, short of maybe doing a printscreen.

I really appreciate your detailed response. :slightly_smiling_face:

[ScottWorld]

You can actually re-create your color coding in BusyCal.

You would just need to create multiple calendars in Airtable — one calendar per color — and then share all of the subscription links for all of those different Airtable calendars into BusyCal.

You don’t have to delete your current calendar in Airtable that shows you all of your colors combined together — you can still keep that calendar for your own viewing pleasure in Airtable. But all of the additional calendars in Airtable would be for the explicit purpose of sharing to BusyCal.

So, in BusyCal, you would be subscribing to multiple Airtable calendars instead of one Airtable calendar.

From there, you can assign each calendar its own color in BusyCal.

As far as printing goes, there should be some options to get the printing to work in exactly the way that you want in BusyCal. If not, be sure to email their support email at support@busymac.com — the solo developer is extremely responsive to feature requests.

[ScottWorld]

p.s. Oh, also, I want to be sure that you know that I’m not talking about “exporting” to BusyCal, which is a one-time-only static export. I’m talking about “sharing” a subscription link to BusyCal, so you get realtime updates in BusyCal whenever you make a change in Airtable.

[Rae_Crothers]

I’m going to mull over that multicalendar view idea. I think there would be too much duplication of effort as my calendar can change a dozen times over the course of the day. I think that my solution might be a bit more analogue – have my calendar subscription be coloured white in BusyCal such that I can manually colour it in in my digital planner. Hmm…

I will contact BusyCal about print options – I have had good luck with support there.

And I do understand how subscribing vs exporting works. Thanks again for a very detailed reply – I’m sure it will be helpful to others doing a search on this topic. :slightly_smiling_face:

[ScottWorld]

Rae_Crothers:

I’m going to mull over that multicalendar view idea. I think there would be too much duplication of effort as my calendar can change a dozen times over the course of the day.

No, you don’t need to add any extra effort at all. All of your views are always showing you the same exact set of data — across all of your views. If you change the data in one place, it changes everywhere else automatically.

So you could just ignore those extra calendar views, which would just sit in the background, silently communicating with BusyCal with always-updated information.

I discuss Views in more detail in my free Airtable training course “Learning Airtable”:

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Learning Airtable Online Class | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com

Learn the basics of Airtable, a spreadsheet-database platform, including how to create tables, use different types of fields, leverage views, work with records, link tables, and more.

[Rae_Crothers]

Ah, but of course. So I am going to do the multicalendar view for now. Thank you for an unexpected workaround. I will definitely look into your course.

[Rae_Crothers]

Just a quick update that the multicalendar thing worked like a charm! I can then take a screenshot on my iPad and open the resulting image file in Goodnotes to annotate it – it’s not a PDF but it does exactly what I need and, best of all, looks perfect and has all my colours! Thank you so, so much for your time today.

[ScottWorld]

That’s great to hear! You’re welcome! :slightly_smiling_face: