Google Snacks Volume 17 - Google Calendar Appointment Slots

Google Calendar has more features than just creating events to keep your life organized and on track. This session will cover creating appointment slots in Calendar, sharing these appointment slots via an appointment calendar, adding other people's calendars, and creating new calendars for you to use. You might be thinking, why would you need appointment slots? A great example is scheduling parent/teacher conferences. You may even use this for scheduling one on one sessions with students, or staff appointments.

Begin by creating a time slot in Calendar and choosing the Appointment Slots option on the right.



You have the option to change one block of time in to several small blocks with a set duration, or you can make one single slot. The several small ones are great for parent/teacher conferences where you have a large block of time you can chop up into equal time slots. The single slot is useful if you have 15-30 minutes here and there you would like to have open for appointments. You can change this option at any time by editing the event block.



Once you have created the event, you can click on the Appointment Page link which will open your Appointment Calendar in a new tab. Your Appointment Calendar has a special link you can copy and paste into an email or Google Classroom.





The blue box in your Appointments Calendar represents the whole time slot, while you can see and click on the individual appointment slots.



When someone books an appointment, it will look like the image below. If they are already logged into a Google Account, it will automatically enter their name into the booking info, so all they should need to do is click Save.



Booked appointments will show up as blue in the Appointment Calendar, as seen below.



Each appointment will also show up in your normal Google Calendar as they become booked.



Next we will take a look at creating new calendars to keep your life more organized. Create a new calendar for yourself by clicking on the Plus icon next to Other calendars on the left hand side of Google Calendar. This is also the same area where you will add other peoples' calendars.



Click on the Subscribe to Calendar option to send a request to add someone else's calendar to yours. You can also make calendars public, in which case you do not need to request access and this will automatically add the calendar to yours.



Enter the email address of the person's calendar you would like to add and they will receive a request to allow you to see the calendar.



Creating your own calendars helps to keep things organized. When creating a new event, you can change which calendar you would like to add it to at the bottom of the event creation.



I hope this helped you get to know a Google feature you didn't already know before. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.