Where to go to edit sharing settings
Do you wanna share your calendar with others? Maybe it's just one individual, or an entire team, or maybe you wanna publish your calendar on the web.
In this video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know about sharing your Google Calendar. (air whooshing)
So, let's get started by looking at where we need to go to make these share calendar changes. Now, there's two ways we can get into our settings for these purposes.
First, we can come up here to the gear icon, select the Settings menu, and then select Settings once again. And here, we'll have to scroll down on the left-hand side of our page and select the particular calendar that we want to share.
We're still gonna have to scroll down a little bit to get to this Share with specific people area, but I think there's a much faster way and an easier way.
Here on the left-hand side, all we need to do is select these three dots, the options for the calendar that we want to share, and then select Settings and sharing.
And that's already gonna bring us right into that particular calendar. So here, this is the calendar that I want to share.
I'm gonna come down to Share with specific people. So, all I need to do is select this Add people button.
Sharing your calendar with specific people
And now start to enter in the email address of the individuals I want to share it with. I'm gonna choose this individual right here.
And if I want to, I can keep adding other individuals. I don't have to do this one at a time, I can keep adding other email addresses here.
But where we want to focus our careful attention is under the Permissions dropdown. Now by default, the option is going to be See all event details.
What that means is that if I share this calendar at this stage, this individual, and anyone else that I add, is going to see all of the invitees.
It's gonna see the location, the description, all of the information of those events. But we have other options available to us.
If we select this dropdown, you can see the actual first option is to See only free/busy details, or I should say, hide those details. Meaning, all they're gonna see is blocks of time.
They're gonna see when you have events scheduled on your calendar but they're not going to see the title, they're not going to see who else is invited. They're just going to see the free/busy details.
So, this is a lot more common if you want to give people access to let them know when you're not available, maybe if they need to find time to book time with you, but you don't wanna share those details with them.
Now, there's two other options that we wanna see, and Google has carefully arranged this in a particular order. We're starting with no details at all, See all event details.
The third one down is Make changes to these events. So, they are going to be able to see all the details, they will also be able to make changes to any of your events.
This is the selection you want to make if you're sharing your calendar with an assistant or a secretary or anyone who is helping you to manage your particular calendar because they're gonna be able to make those changes on their end as well.
Last but not least, we have Make changes and manage sharing. This is the highest level.
You could say that you're giving them, really, administration rights at this level because not only can they see the details, make changes, but they'll also be able to add other people who can share and see your calendar as well.
So, this is one that you're only gonna be using for some particular individuals in this case. So, I'm gonna say See all event details in this particular example, and I'm gonna hit Send.
This person is now gonna receive an invitation so that they can access my calendar. And you can see if I ever need to change their level of visibility, I can always do so on the fly.
So, I can come over here and say, "You know what? I actually only want them to see my free and busy details." I can do so here.
I don't have to hit Save or anything else on the page, now they are restricted to that. If I wanna come back later and add other people, I can just do so here by selecting this Add people button and remove them by selecting the X on the right-hand side.
Sharing your calendar with a team or organization
Now, what if you don't wanna add people one at a time and instead, you'd like to add your entire team? Well, if you are using Google Workspace, you can do so here.
Here, I'm in my Simpletivity account and I'm still in the same section, I'm still under my calendar settings here, and I'm just above the Share with specific people, I'm looking at my Access permissions.
Now, we've got a few different choices available here. We're gonna come back to this one in a moment, but you can see that the second one down is Make available for Simpletivity.
Now, this is my organization. So, if I check this box, essentially, anyone within the Simpletivity organization is going to have access to my calendar.
Now, when I select this, you can see I still have some options here on the right, and we're familiar with two of them. The bottom two are grayed out because this really doesn't make sense to give your entire organization the ability to make changes and to manage your calendar, but the first two are still available to us.
So, we can either hide our details and just show free and busy. Again, this is very common so that teammates can see when they can book meetings and see when other members are free at any time of the day, or you can choose to see all event details as well.
This may be more applicable for smaller teams or people that you know very well within your organization. So, at this stage, again, we don't have to hit Save.
As long as you've checked this checkbox, you can leave it at this stage and now everyone within your Google Workspace will have access to your calendar. Last but not least,
Sharing your calendar publicly
Let me jump back to this other calendar here, and we're gonna see how we can make our calendar publicly available to everyone.
Now, you may be asking yourself, "Why would I want to do this? Why would I want to share my calendar with everyone?" Well, perhaps you've set up a calendar here within Google which is showing community events, or when you are available for a booking.
So, for example, if you work in sales and you want to let people know when they can book you for a call, perhaps you'd like to share your calendar details on your website or in some other public place.
So, in this case, you can see we have a check box called Make available to public. Now by default, this is going to be unchecked.
When you click this, it is going to give you a warning: Making your calendar public will make all events visible to the world, including via Google search. Are you sure?
By hitting Cancel, this box will be unchecked. But in this case, we're going to say OK.
Now, we still have that same option that we saw when we were sharing within our organization. We can either share all of our event details with the world or we can just share free or busy details.
But let's stick with all event details in this case. Now, how do we use this public calendar?
How do we share it with others or maybe include this link in an email or on a website? Well, you're probably most naturally going to draw your attention to this Get shareable link.
But don't be confused. This is actually related to sharing with specific people down below. I'm not sure why Google Calendar has chosen to put this here.
If I click this, you can see with this link, only people you allow can access your calendar. So, for example, if I copy this link, and I'm gonna open up an Incognito window and paste it in here and show it, you can see it's actually going to force me to sign into a Google account.
So, this obviously isn't very public at this point. So, let's go back here and I'm gonna select Cancel.
If you have Make available to public checked, where you really want to go is scroll down further down the page into the Integrate calendar section, and here you want to copy this public URL to this calendar.
So, I'm gonna select this. I'm going to copy it, and I'm gonna go back to my Incognito window here and I'm going to paste it just so we can see what happens.
So, here you can see, now I have my calendar available. So, if I wanted to add this link to my website or in an email, others, anyone online could come here and see those details.
Now, do you wanna see the difference if we set it to free or busy only? All we need to do is come back up here and we're going to select See only free/busy details.
I don't need to share anything else, all I need to do is go back to that calendar here. I'm gonna refresh the page, and now you can see I've got a lot of free/busy.
I've got a lot of busy information here. If I go to the week where we just saw a moment ago, you can see all of those events but there's no titles.
It only shows when I am busy. So, those are the differences between those two.
The last thing I wanna show you about sharing your calendar publicly is if you don't wanna share it as a link, if you come back down to the Integrate calendar section, you can also use this embed code if you'd like to paste it within one of your own websites.
Now, if you have questions about how to use Google Calendar or if you have suggestions for a future video right here on these Simpletivity channel, be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching today's video. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
