All the Ways to Customize Google Calendar
Google Calendar falls into that category of apps that you probably just download and use without giving it a second thought. By default, it’s designed to be clean, lightweight, and functional, which is ideal when you need to quickly check your schedule.
However, you have more options to change the appearance of Google Calendar on the web than you might have imagined. Dig a little deeper into the settings and you’ll find that you can customize what’s shown on screen in a variety of ways, from the number of days you can see at once to how recurring and past events are handled in the interface. .
If Google Calendar is a key tool you rely on, it makes sense to set it up in a way that’s most useful to you: less clutter, faster access to the information you need, and less time spent navigating to additional screens. Here are all the settings worth tweaking.
Custom Views
Whatever view of Google Calendar on the web you’re currently using, you can change it by clicking the drop-down menu in the top right corner, to the right of the gear button. It will be labeled with the name of the current view, such as Month or Week . The same drop-down menu provides some basic viewing options, such as whether rejected events and holidays are shown on screen.
To truly control what you see, you can create your own view. Click the gear button (top right), then select Settings and View Options . In the Set Custom View drop-down menu, you’ll see that you can choose any time period from 2 days to 4 weeks that appears when you load Google Calendar in your web browser.
The setting is saved automatically and appears as the last option in the drop-down menu on the main Google Calendar screen (with Month and Week options). Unfortunately, the same custom view option doesn’t sync with the Google Calendar mobile apps—you’ll have to make do with the standard options.
Back on the View Options page, there is another drop-down menu that allows you to specify which day of the week you want it to start on— Saturday , Sunday , or Monday . This changes the layout of any view in which you view more than seven days at a time. Last but not least, the Google Calendar web app has a keyboard shortcut that you can use to quickly jump to the custom view: just press the X key.
Other viewing options
Click the gear icon (top right), select Settings and View Options , and you’ll see that there are a few other ways to customize the appearance of Google Calendar besides creating your own custom view. Use the Dim Past Events feature to make old calendar entries, for example, appear faded on screen—a handy way to help you see where you are in your current schedule.
There are checkboxes to show or hide holidays, show or hide events to which you have declined invitations, and show or hide completed tasks. By removing some of these details from the screen, you can reduce the clutter in Google Calendar and make your schedule easier on the eyes. Numeric week markers can also be shown or hidden.
Open the Time Zone tab on the Settings page and you’ll be able to display an additional time zone in the day and week views – making it easier to see how events are scheduled in different parts of the world. You can also enable multiple time zones in the sidebar on the left, via the World Time tab: you can see at a glance what time it is in a city (as well as what the current weather is).
Then you have settings that you can edit in the Google Calendar view itself. Click the three horizontal lines (top left) to show or hide the left sidebar, and in that panel, use checkboxes to show and hide individual calendars—a quick way to focus on what you really need to see. You can also click the gear icon (top right) then Density and Color to adjust the text size and label colors used.