This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Subscribing to Public Calendars
Besides the calendar events of yourself, family, friends, and colleagues, you might be interested in importing other kinds of calendars. For example, you might want to subscribe to an automatically updated calendar for holidays in your country. Or if you’re a sports fan, you might want the playing schedule for your favorite team to appear in your calendar. Maybe you want the local weather, or the phases of the moon. All of these, and many more, are available as public calendars to which you can subscribe. You’ll typically use iCal on the Mac to subscribe to one of these calendars, but once you do, you can choose to either keep that calendar local to your Mac, or to share it with the rest of your devices via iCloud.
In this section, I’m going to show you how to find a public calendar using iCal, subscribe to it, and then view it in your calendar.
To subscribe to a public calendar:
- Open iCal on your Mac.
- Choose Calendar > Find Subscriptions.
Your default web browser will open and bring you to Apple’s list of available public iCal calendars
. at the top of the list, you can choose to view the calendar feeds by Most recent, Most popular, or Alphabetical. - Find the calendar to which you wish to subscribe, then click the Download button for that calendar.
Depending on the source of the calendar, you may be taken to a different website where you can choose from a number of calendars. If so, find the calendar feed you want from that website, then click to subscribe to it.
When you subscribe to a public calendar, iCal shows you a dialog with the URL of the calendar
. - Click Subscribe.
iCal shows you a detail screen about the calendar
.
Subscribing to the calendar gives you its information, and allows you to choose whether you want to subscribe to it only on your local Mac, or via iCloud. - Do one or more of the following:
- Change the name of the calendar.
- From the color pop-up menu next to the Name field, choose the color in which you want the calendar’s events to appear.
- Using the Location pop-up menu, choose either iCloud or On My Mac. This is probably your most important choice in this dialog; choosing iCloud will make the subscribed calendar appear on all your devices.
- By default, most subscribed calendars have Alerts, Attachments, and Reminders removed. In most cases, I recommend you keep it that way.
- From the Auto-refresh pop-up menu, choose how often you want the calendar to refresh its data from the original URL.
- Click OK.
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The subscribed calendar appears in iCal. Double-click one of the calendar events to see its details 
.
You can’t change the details of the events in a subscribed calendar, but you can view them.
To delete a subscribed calendar:
- In iCal, click the Calendars button in the upper left corner of the window.
- The calendar you want to delete will appear in the Subscriptions section of the calendar list. Right-click that calendar, then choose Delete from the shortcut menu
.
Right-click the calendar you want to delete, then choose Delete from the shortcut menu.iCal asks you if you’re sure you want to delete the calendar.
- Click Delete.
The calendar and its events and reminders are deleted. If you had the calendar shared on iCloud, the events and reminders will disappear from all your devices.