In this "How -To" I'm going to describe how to use the schedule event and invite others feature. This is one of the most handy functions of the calendar in my opinion. If I am scheduling an event, say a party or meeting or whatever, then obviously I will want to invite guests. With Google Calendar, this is a breeze and the recipients don't even have to be Google users to receive their invitations with selections of going or not. Follow along as I walk you through a simple event invitation process.
Obviously we want to open our Google Calendar which is associated with our common E-Mail address that we share with all of our friends and family.
This is a snaphot of one of the calendars I use. In this example, I will be using Saturday as a potential meeting time for my university team to be getting together for a meeting. With the calendar open, I simply click on the day I want to schedule the meeting and a new window open to begin my scheduling.
This simple pop-up box asks exactly what it shows here. Since I am creating an event to take place on this particular Saturday, then I will want this to be an event. In the "what" field I put in a short description of what the event is about. I have seen some people fill in multiple sentences into the "what" field. This is ok, however, there is still more to come with the scheduling event so I strongly suggest keeping this particular field short and to the point. Details of the event can be added later. Once the simple "what" is filled in then select "Edit event" to add more options including those we wish to invite.
As can be seen from the photo above, when we select "Edit event" a new dialog opens that allows for a lot of data input for the particular event we are scheduling. On the left hand side we can see the "Description" field where all the pertinent gata of the event will be input. For those people who want to shove all the data of the event in the description field, this is really where you want to let loose on all those details.On the right, is the area where we get to add all those people who we have in our contacts database to our event. For security reasons, I only added myself, but if a person begins to type in a name or email address in this field, Google will show 5 or 6 of the top matching persons or addresses from your contact list to add to the guest list. As seen below I added myself to the guest list for this event.
Once all the selections have been made for the event including guests and reminders, the remember to click on the "save" button up in the top left corner. This wi;; make sure the event is registered into the calendar as a scheduled event. Believe it or not, this is a very important step in the entire operation. Google Calendar does not have an "Auto-Save" function like many of their other featured products so it is imperative to click on this button to save the event.
After the save button is clicked, this pop-up will show. Since we obviously want to send our invitation to our team members for the event I selected to send the invitation to their email addresses. This is the last step in the event scheduling process. Once this is complete, Google will send us back to our calendar where we see the next screen.
What we see here is our event that was scheduled on Saturday on our calendar. I selected red for this particular event because that is the primary color of my university. Using colors to designate different events is a good way to distinguish one type of event from another just by a glance. If a person clicks on the event in their calendar thay will see all the details of the event or can make changes to that event. This is the calendar side of things, now we will take a look at the email side.
This is just a cut of the email invitation to my inbox showing that I have been invited to an event scheduled by me. Obviously this is just for example purposes. When a person opens the email they will see the image below and be provided a number of options to choose from pertaining to the event. Mainly these include whether or not they will be able to attend the event and any notes involved with their answer as to their participation to that event.
As seen in the photo above, the options are simply available by click on whether or not the invited people will be able to attend the event. There is also an area for recipients to explain why or why not they will be able to attend the event. This system is perhaps the very best and most popular available today for social calendar event scheduling. It's fast, easy and works in all major email handlers.
This has been a basic explanation of how to schedule a shared event from the Google Calendar. This has only been a basic explanation and of course there are many alternatives and variables available including adding attachments and sharing Google Docs with the scheduling of a calendar event. My hope is that others find this writing useful and informative.
