Alternative Calendar View

[Mike Llamedos]

Hi there, you've created a beautiful calendar view, and since you seem to know what you are doing with regards to Google Calendar, do you think the following is feasible?

I first raised this query about three years ago. I was just wIondering if there had been any new developments, the original post is as follows:

I'm very frustrated with the Google Calendar Layout - especially the lack of choice when viewing multiple calendars. For many years we've had a family planner paper calendar hanging on the wall in the kitchen. It uses rows for days and columns for people with a 2 page spread per month.

Concise, easy to use visual and immediate. I felt for sure there must be a technological equivalent. Sadly no, there isn't. Instead we are using a shared 365 row Google Spreadsheet to manage the family yearly planner. It works great and I've added a screenshot from 2015's sheet to show you what I mean.

This simple shared view/edit capability works really great for a family calendar but there are a number of shortcomings with this sheet:

1. It is a spreadsheet and not a calendar - therefore no-one gets reminders of the appointments or entries on the schedule

2. It's a faff to set up each year, I have to create a new spreadsheet in Google, reset all the conditional format formulae, copy anniversaries  colour code holiday rows in yellow etc etc

3. I'd like to be able to create an item as a meeting in my calendar and invite other family members and have those invites automatically process into their calendars

I can't believe that Google hasn't actually come up with a way of displaying multiple calendars side-by-side like this. It would look so neat too to be able to add other calendars and turn them on and off to show/hide a column, or drag 'n' drop to reorder the display of calendars.

Thousands upon thousands of Family Planners and bought each year to hang on the wall because no electronic shared family calendar comes close, I'm pretty sure such a display method is not beyond Google Labs capability.

Really hope you can do something Google!.

So there it was, a three year old request - if I had even half a clue about where to start I would have a crack at coding this myself, but as I'm no developer it's unlikely to happen. In your view do you think a view of this nature could even be possible? would it be read only, or could you click on a row (date) in an column (calendar) to create new or edit existing calendar data?

Keen to get your thoughts

Mike

[ct]

The layout you describe is certainly possible but too dissimilar in structure to be incorporated easily into the visual-planner app which takes more of an overview approach which would be compromised by separating the calendars into separate columns. 

Although read-only, you can create new calendar events by pressing the '+' key, selecting a date range then pressing ENTER. This will open Google Calendar where you can enter the event details. Similarly, clicking on an event will open it in Google Calendar for editing.