How to merge two Google Calendars?

Google Calendar is an important product of Google Workspace. It helps you track events and appointments, schedule meetings, share resources, and more. Additionally, you can download and print the calendar later. But sometimes, you need to manage multiple calendars simultaneously. In this case, you have to organize all these calendars efficiently. By doing this, you don’t miss any important schedule from them. But it can become quite a daunting task. That’s why you need to merge Google Calendars.

Benefits of merging two Google calendars

•  It helps you to get a view and track your teams’ regular events and deadlines. Also, you come to about the daily, bi-weekly, monthly, or recurring events. As a result, you never miss any important meeting or agenda. So, this is beneficial for your project management.
• It saves you from sending manual email notifications to your employees about significant meetings and deadlines. They will be automatically notified about these tasks. As a result, you save a lot of time for your tasks.
•  You can access the merged calendars from multiple devices.

 Some scenarios for merging calendars

• Coordinating schedules: Sometimes, your clients may ask if you’re free to schedule a meeting on Friday at 4 pm. That time you have to check all your calendars to inform them about the event. Thus, you should merge your Google Calendar to coordinate the schedules.
• Consolidating multiple calendars: You can easily merge your personal and work calendars to track your family and office programs. So, you never miss a commitment with your clients, colleagues, or family members.

Assessing Calendar Compatibility

1. For merging calendars, you can access Google Calendar from any OS, such as Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, etc.
2. If you’re using a desktop or laptop, you can launch the Google Calendar from any web browser. So, you will find the App Launcher (nine dots) from the upper right portion of your Google page. You will find the Calendar from this app launcher.
3. You need to download and install the Google Calendar app from Google Play Store for Android devices.
4. For Apple iOS, you have to download and install the app from the App Store for iPhone or iPad.

Why do you need to ensure both calendars are accessible and manageable?

You must access and manage both calendars to track your progress and commitments, and update or delete events. Also, you need to find out if there are any missing events, duplication, or syncing problems in these calendars. Thus it’s important to manage both calendars.

Exporting Calendar Events

1. Open Google Calendar from your computer.
2. Find the My Calendars section from the left side of the page. Click the section and expand it.
3. Point out the calendar you want to export. Then click More > Settings and Sharing.
4. Next, click Calendar settings > Export calendar.
5. Your calendar will be downloaded as a form ICS file (.ics).

Note: You can’t export the events using the Google Calendar app.

Importing Calendar Events

After exporting your events, you can import them into the target Google Calendar. The process will be as follows –

1. Open your Google Calendar.
2. Go to the Settings section from the top right corner. Click Settings.
3. Click Import & Export from the left menu.
4. Next, click Select file from your computer. Select the exported file. This file should have an extension of .ics or .csv.
5. Choose a calendar that you want to add to the imported events.

Note: Your imported events are stored in the primary calendar, by default.

1. Click Import.
2. If you get a .zip file, it will contain all the ICS files for each calendar. You need to extract the ICS files from the .zip file and import them individually for each of your calendar. But, if you import repeat events from a CSV file, they will not appear correctly. Thus you should import the .ics files from a .zip file.

Managing Duplicate and Conflicting events

• If you see both the target and source calendars simultaneously, you may find duplicate events.
• If synchronization occurs from a single account for the primary and shared calendars, the resultant effect might become duplicated or conflicted.
• If you set a restricted view for an event on your shared calendar, then there will be a possibility of duplicate events. The synced copy of the source event might create a duplicate version to provide visibility to the users.

Strategies to identify and resolve duplicate events or conflicting schedules

The most straightforward strategy to identify duplicate events is when you see the same time scheduled for them.

To resolve these issues –

• You need to adjust your privacy settings and sync details for the events on the target calendar, based upon the context.
• Toggle (on / off) your source calendar when you need to see the event details or edit the source events.
• You can delete a series of duplicated or conflicted tasks from Google Calendar in this way –

1.      Open Google Calendar.

2.      Click the task you want to remove. Then click Delete.

3.      If it is a recurring event, then select an option: This task / This and following tasks / All tasks.

4.      Click Ok.

Tips on reviewing and adjusting event details after calendar merging

• You can copy an event to another calendar to avoid any conflicts.
•  You can transfer an event into another Google calendar owned by you or someone else.
• You can use Event Merge Extension to adjust and de-clutter your event on the merge Google calendars. It merges duplicate events from different calendars into a single event. Then colored the event to make it visually appealing. 

Importance of synchronizing calendars after merging them

Syncing your merged calendars helps to track your events from different Google Calendar accounts. You don’t need to add the events manually on multiple accounts. This helps to know the client’s availability, manage reservations, and cancellation of events. Thus it saves your time, effort, and resources. In this way, you can improve your business productivity as well.

How to ensure both calendars stay up-to-date and synchronized?

1. Open the Google Calendar from your Android phone.

2. Go to Menu > Refresh.

How to set up automatic syncing or periodic manual updates?

To set up auto-syncing for your merged calendar –

1.      Open your device’s (Android) settings app.

2.      Tap on Accounts.

3.      Select an account from the list.

4.      Tap the Account sync.5.      Finally, turn on your account sync for the Google Calendar.

How to manage sharing and permissions for the merged calendar?

You can manage sharing and permissions with the process described in the following subsection. Also, your Google Admin can manage and turn off permissions if your merged calendars belong to work or school.

How to grant access to other users or update permissions?

When you share a merged calendar, you can set Access permissions from the calendar’s settings.

If you want to share the calendar with some specific people, then –

1. Go to Google Calendar > My Calendars.
2. Expand the My Calendars section with the down arrow.
3. On your Calendar, click 3 dots (More) > Settings and Sharing.
4. Then, go to Share with specific people > Add people.
5. Now, add the users or their Google Group addresses. Here, you can adjust their permission settings. People with full access permissions can respond to your invitations, create, edit, delete events, share your calendars with other users, etc.
6. If you want to share the calendar with the public then, go to Settings and Sharing > Access permissions > Make available to the public.

 How to control visibility and editing rights for events in shared calendars?

1.      Go to Google Calendar.

2.      Open the event for which you want to change the visibility.

3.      So, click Default Visibility and choose a privacy setting for the event.

4.      Finally, click Save.

Troubleshooting Common Issues: Problems users may encounter during the merging process

The common issues are - duplicate events, missing events, import errors, incorrect time zones, and syncing errors. You have already learned the solutions for duplicate events. Now learn the solutions for the rest.

Solutions

•  Missing events

1. First, you should verify the missing event notifications on your calendar. So, find the Event notifications or All-day event notifications to ensure your event notifications are on.

1. Confirm your Google Calendar has permission to show notifications. So, you should add calendar.google.com for notification permission.
2. Also, you need to check your OS settings like – the browser’s notification permission and OS-specific notification issues. You will find the solutions here.

•  Incorrect time zones

1. You can change the time zone for one or multiple calendars to avoid incorrect time zones.
2. You can turn on the world clock from the Settings of Google Calendar.  Click Show world clock and add the time zone as per your choice.

1. Moreover, you can edit the time zone for an event and select a secondary time zone to solve this issue.

• Import errors

1. First, read the importing steps carefully to avoid import errors.
2. You will see the ‘Google Calendar is temporarily unavailable’ if your imported file size is too large. So, you need to import a file size less or equal to 1 MB. Otherwise, you have to split the file into smaller files.
3. You will get the ‘Processed zero event’ if there is any mistake in your importing steps or if you click the Import button twice. So, repeat the import steps if you don’t find the imported files.

Importance of synchronizing calendars after merging them

•  Make sure you have a stable internet connection.
• Verify that you’re using the Google Calendar app.
• Check your calendar’s visibility and ensure it is visible.
•  Confirm your new events are added to the Google Calendar.
• Also, check whether your calendar sync is turned on or not.

Know more about the Fix sync problems with the Google calendar app.

Foresight and its automation process

Foresight automates and simplifies your Google Workspace workflows with a few clicks and times.  You don’t need to learn any computer programming language to use this automation platform. It promotes no-code workflow automation. Also, it can implement the missing features of Google Workspace as per your organizational requirements. Foresight has complete integration with Google Workspace. So, you can enjoy all the benefits of Google Workspace from Foresight. Ultimately, it will improve your business growth, productivity and manage time efficiently. It has several automation use cases like - Bulk Create Calendar Events and Save Time, Automate Adding GuestsTo Google Calendar Events, How Do You Connect Google Docs To Google Calendar? etc.

Conclusion

Now, you learned how to merge two Google calendars to manage your calendar events. Know more features of Google Calendar and explore Foresight. This SaaS platform provides easy automated solutions for your regular business workflows. So, try the 14-day free trial with Foresight.