Sunday, March 17, 2013

Google Calendar - Repeating an event on the last of the month

I regularly attend Information Worker gatherings which occur on the last Thursday of every month.
I added a repeating Google calendar entry a wile back only to realise that in some months there were 5 Thursdays instead of 4 and my calendar event was actually set to repeat "Monthly on the fourth Thursday" and for the life of me I could not figure out how to change this.



After some frustration I manage to find the following ways of doing it.
  • Add the entry on an appropriate month, one with 5 Thursdays in my case.
  • Add the entry in the main calendar view using simple English.
  • Hack the ICS
  • A better way...

Add the entry on an appropriate month, one with 5 Thursdays in my case.

A fairly easy way is to find a month that actually has 5 Thursdays and make the event start from there. This will set the recurrence to repeat "Monthly on the last Thursday", instead of "Monthly on the fourth Thursday".



Add the entry in the main calendar view using simple English.

The simplest way I found is to just write out the entire event in plain English as a single line of text using 'at' and 'on'.

For example:
Information Worker Cape Town Community Night 
at Golf Park 3, Engen House, Raapenberg Road, Mowbray, 7925 
on the last Thursday of every month

This will create an event called "Information Worker Cape Town Community Night", with the 'Where' field set to Park 3, Engen House, Raapenberg Road, Mowbray, 7925" and the repetition set to "Monthly on the last Thursday".


Hack the ICS

This solution is probably the hardest, but because the ICalendar format does support this, you could write the code manually. To do this you would have to export the calendar to a file, hack it and import it back.

NOTE: If you're re-importing events from the same Google Calendar, do not delete the events in your calendar first. Simply import the file, which will make the necessary updates. Deleting all the events will cause you to not be able to import your file.

While it's nice to know this, seems like more effort than just typing what you want in English right?


A better way...

Perhaps Google can provide us with an additional option in the repeat popup to allow for this.

Or maybe the IW organisers should maintain there own calendar feed that we could all subscribe to. This would also mean that if a particular meeting gets moved or cancelled, all the subscribers calendars would automatically be updated!

 

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