Printing (to PDF) Weekly Calendar View

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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”:

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.

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.

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

The workaround for printing calendars is to share an iCal subscription link from your calendar view, and then subscribe to that subscription link from another calendar program that has excellent printing options, such as BusyCal on Mac (or Google Calendar or whatever calendar app you prefer to use).

So basically, the workaround for this is to subscribe to your Airtable calendar from another calendar app, and then print from there.

Thank you so, so much for your time today.

Printing a weekly calendar view to PDF can be tricky if it doesn't fit on one page. If you're struggling with this, you might want to try using an external calendar app that handles printing better, like BusyCal. Also, check out calendar printouts for an easier way to print your calendar in the exact format you need.