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Tara Devlin's Website Home >Siri Shortcuts>>

Easy Calendar Update

Unfortunately the Shortcuts app can't talk to the Google Calendar app yet, which means that for other Siri shortcuts to have access to your plans to use the data for stuff, you need to add those items manually. And then you need to add them again to Google Calendar manually. This shortcut is designed to speed you through that as much as possible.

How to use

  1. Run the shortcut.
  2. First the shortcut will ask you the date and time of the event.
  3. If you have any other events that day, the shortcut will show them to you and ask if you want to continue or quit.
  4. Then the shortcut will ask you to enter a location. You can type in the location, search for local business addresses, select a contact, or make the event with no location added. The location becomes the name of the event.
  5. The shortcut will create the event with this information.
  6. Then you will have a choice of how to continue: Set the reminder alarms, open the Calendar app, or open a new Google Calendar entry form.

How it works

I did a lot of work to figure out how to pass the details of this event to the Set Alarms shortcut, but then I realized that because alarms don't have a "date" property, they can only be set for today's date. And usually calendar events are set up before that day. Oh well! The functionality is still there if you need it.

Here are some of the ways this shortcut makes calendar entry easier:

  1. Doesn't ask you the duration or when the event will be over; it just sets them all the last for 1 hour. I never pay attention to this value and having to set it manually annoys me because it's uninteresting. So now it's gone!
  2. Makes it easy to add a location by letting you grab it from a place it might already be, or letting you look it up quickly.
  3. Helps you prevent conflicts by showing you any other events scheduled for that day.
  4. Prompts you to add the event again into Google Calendar. I wish that this could be completely automated, but this is a limitation of the technology.

Hopefully these improvements make it easier to add calendar events more consistently.

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