The new school year started for my colleagues and I a few weeks ago. One process that I have to go through at the beginning of each school year is getting all of the year’s events onto my Google Calendar. This is a tedious process, but it’s an important one for me. The main task here is copying events from our school’s calendar onto my calendar. The school calendar is jam-packed with stuff and I only need a subset of those events.
While going week-by-week through the school year, I thought “There has got to be a quicker way to navigate through this!” Well, I did a little poking around and found my answer! Keyboard Shortcuts!
If you go into Settings, you can turn on Keyboard shortcuts. First, let’s look at how to do this and then I’ll share some of my favorite shortcuts.
So, that animation showed you our first 2 keyboard shortcuts:
– / brings up the search, all ready for you to find that special event you were looking for.
– ? brings up all of the keyboard shortcuts, for when you forget some of them (which you will).
Here are the other ones that I’ve added to my repertoire:
Next Period and Previous Period
This is the one that I really needed – when going through the entire school year, clicking on the forward arrow over and over was driving me bonkers. Here’s our solution: click n for Next Period and p for Previous Period. You can also use j and k for this task, but n and p just make more sense in my book.
Create and Save Events
Each time I copied an event from the school calendar to my own, I had to manually click Save to create each event. This is what really drove me to research keyboard shortcuts in Google Calendar. On my Mac, Command + S saves the event (Ctrl + S on Windows or ChromeOS). Also, when you’re in Calendar and are ready to create a new event, you can do that quickly by clicking c.
Go to Date and Go to Today
If you’re trying to jump to a date that you’re looking forward to, spending the time navigating month by month can be frustrating. Just click g and you can type in the date. It’s like a Delorean without Marty McFly. I love that it’s so flexible on how you type it in too (i.e., Nov 3 2020, nov 3 2020, November 3 2020 all work). And click t to jump back to Today!
Switch Calendar Views
And finally, what if you’re in week view but you need to see a detailed schedule for one day? Just click d! You can also use w for week, m for month and y for year. There’s also x for custom view (I set mine to 2 days so I can see today & tomorrow at once) and a (s on some devices) to see your agenda (or schedule).
