The Complete Guide to Google Calendar

The Complete Guide to Google Calendar

Subscriptions, sync, cleanup, troubleshooting, and AI

Last updated: June 2026 | Verified on Google Calendar web and mobile

Google Calendar does more than most people ask of it. If you use Gmail, you already have a Google Calendar account, and everything you put in it syncs to every device signed into that account. That part works well enough that most people never think about it.

The thinking starts when something unexpected happens. A school calendar you added stops showing new events. Your sidebar has accumulated calendars from two jobs ago that you cannot seem to get rid of. You subscribed to a sports schedule but the game times are wrong. Or you just heard that Google’s AI features can now read your calendar, and you want to know what that actually means.

This guide covers all of it. How to subscribe to external calendar feeds and understand why they sometimes feel out of date. How to clean up a sidebar that has become a junk drawer. How sync actually works across devices and accounts (they are not the same thing, and understanding the difference fixes most problems). How sharing and privacy work. What AI can and cannot do with your schedule. And the real troubleshooting answers for the problems that actually come up.

Every step has been tested on a real device and is verified against the current version of Google Calendar. When platforms change, we update the guide and record what changed in the changelog at the bottom.

In this guide

How to subscribe to a calendar feed

Organization, cleanup, and lifecycle

Sync, accounts, and cross-platform

Events, views, and notifications

Sharing and permissions

Troubleshooting

Privacy and security

Google Calendar and Gemini

What is a calendar subscription?

A calendar subscription is a live, auto-updating connection between a calendar source and your calendar app. You subscribe once, and new events, changes, and cancellations flow to your calendar automatically. The events are read-only because the source controls the data. (See calendar subscription in the glossary.)

How to subscribe from a URL

You subscribe by giving Google Calendar a URL that points to a calendar feed. You might hear people say calendar feed, subscription URL, or ICS feed. They all mean the same thing: a web address your app checks on a schedule to pick up the latest events.

Open calendar.google.com in your browser and sign in.
In the left sidebar, find Other calendars and click the + icon next to it.
Select From URL.
Paste the calendar feed URL. This is usually a URL ending in .ics or starting with webcal://.
Click Add calendar. The calendar appears in your sidebar under Other calendars.

Google Calendar > Other calendars > + > From URL > paste URL field

That is it. Google Calendar now checks that URL on a regular schedule and pulls in any changes. The events appear alongside your personal events and sync to every device signed into the same Google account.

To try this with a real calendar, go to [placeholder: school page URL on autocaldata.com], find the Subscribe button, and follow the steps above. School calendar services like AutoCal provide subscription URLs so your calendar stays current throughout the year, including snow days, schedule changes, and rescheduled events.

What happens when you click a webcal:// link

Many calendar providers offer a clickable webcal:// link instead of asking you to copy and paste a URL. When you click a webcal:// link, your device opens your default calendar app and offers to subscribe automatically. You skip the “From URL” steps entirely.

Here is something worth knowing: webcal:// and https:// links often point to the exact same calendar data. The only difference is what happens when you click. If a webcal:// link is not working on your device, try replacing webcal:// with https:// and pasting the URL manually using the steps above. You will get the same calendar. (See webcal:// in the glossary.)

Can I subscribe from the mobile app?

No. The Google Calendar mobile app does not have a “From URL” option. You have to use the web version at calendar.google.com in a browser. On your phone, you can open calendar.google.com in Chrome or Safari and request the desktop site if the option does not appear.

Once you subscribe from the web, the calendar and all its events automatically appear in the mobile app. You only need a computer or a phone browser in desktop mode for the initial setup.

This catches people off guard because importing works fine on mobile. There is no technical reason for this limitation. Google has not built the feature into the app. If you are wondering what the difference is between importing and subscribing, read the next section. It matters more than you might think.

Importing a calendar and subscribing to a calendar look identical at first. Both put events on your Google Calendar. But they behave completely differently afterward. Mixing them up is the single most common reason people end up with calendars that seem broken, and it is the first thing to check when something is not working the way you expect.

Import

What it does

One-time copy of events into your calendar

Live connection that checks for updates automatically

After setup

Events are frozen. Source changes are not reflected.

Events update when your app checks the feed.

Can you edit the events?

Yes. They become your own events.

No. Read-only. The source controls the data.

Best for

Records of past events that will never change

Anything that could change: school calendars, sports, community events

How to tell which you did

You can edit event titles and move dates

Events are grayed out or locked when you try to edit

Here is a concrete example. You import a Little League schedule in March. In May, a rained-out game gets rescheduled from Saturday to Sunday. Your calendar still shows Saturday. You show up to an empty field. If you had subscribed, the change would have appeared automatically.

Import creates a static copy. Subscribe creates a live connection. Same data, completely different behavior.

If you imported when you meant to subscribe, delete the imported events and subscribe properly using the steps above. There is no way to convert an import into a subscription after the fact.

How often does Google Calendar refresh a subscribed feed?

Google Calendar checks subscribed feeds roughly every 12 to 24 hours. You cannot change this. There is no setting, no workaround, and no way to force a refresh. It is just how Google Calendar works. Google has never officially confirmed this number, but it is consistent with what every major third-party source reports.

What this means in practice: when a source publishes a change, it can take up to a full day before your Google Calendar reflects it. The change is not missing. Your app has not checked yet.

The delay between a change being published and appearing on your calendar is a platform limitation, not a problem with the feed.

If you need the latest version right now, the only option is to unsubscribe and resubscribe using the same URL. This forces a fresh fetch. It works, but you lose any color-coding you set on that calendar.

How this compares to Apple and Outlook

Apple Calendar lets you choose your own refresh interval, from every 5 minutes to once a week. Outlook refreshes every 3 to 24 hours, also with no user control. If refresh speed matters to you and you use Apple devices, Apple Calendar has a genuine advantage. Our Apple Calendar guide and Outlook guide cover refresh on those platforms.

How far into the future do subscriptions show?

Here is something that surprises people and almost no other guide mentions: Google Calendar subscriptions only display events approximately six months into the future. If a school publishes its full-year calendar in August, you will see events through roughly February. The rest appear as the months progress.

This is not a bug in the feed. It is a Google Calendar limitation on how far ahead it renders subscribed events. The data is there at the source. Google Calendar just does not display it all at once. If you are looking at a subscribed calendar and wondering why it seems to stop partway through the year, this is why.

How do I organize, clean up, and manage my Google calendars?

Google Calendar’s sidebar organizes every calendar on your account into sections. Over time, calendars accumulate: personal ones you created, work calendars from jobs you no longer hold, subscriptions to feeds you stopped following, holiday calendars you added once and forgot about. Cleaning this up takes about fifteen minutes and makes everything afterward easier to manage.

Understanding your sidebar: My Calendars, Other calendars, Other people’s calendars

My calendars contains calendars that belong to your Google account: your primary calendar (named after your email address), any additional calendars you created, and system calendars like Birthdays and Reminders.

Other calendars contains calendars you subscribed to from external URLs, calendars you imported, and holiday calendars you added. If you subscribed to a school calendar or a sports feed, this is where it lives. This is also where people lose track of subscriptions, because they look under My calendars first, do not see it there, and assume the subscription failed.

Other people’s calendars contains calendars that specific people have shared with you: a spouse’s personal calendar, a coworker’s schedule, a team calendar your manager set up. These are shared calendars with permissions, not anonymous subscriptions.

Google Calendar sidebar showing My calendars, Other calendars, and Other people’s calendars sections

A typical cluttered sidebar. Most of these calendars can be removed, hidden, or reorganized.

Color-coding your calendars

Right-click any calendar name in the sidebar and pick a color. Use a consistent system: one color for personal events, another for work, another for each kid’s school. The colors carry through to every view, which makes it immediately obvious which calendar an event belongs to when six of them are layered on top of each other.

Here is a detail most people miss: color assignments are per-account, not per-device. Set your colors on the web and they appear on every device signed into that account.

The cleanup audit

Go through your sidebar one calendar at a time. For each one, ask: is this still relevant, when did it last have an event I looked at, and do I know where it came from?

Active: calendars you check regularly. Keep and color-code.

Stale: subscriptions to feeds you no longer follow. Unsubscribe.

Ghosts: read-only remnants of a work account your former employer deactivated months ago, still showing “Team Standup” every Monday for a team you no longer belong to. Remove the account entirely.

Unknown: calendars you do not recognize at all. These may be calendar spam. Delete them immediately. (For more on ghost calendars and spam, see the troubleshooting section below.)

How to delete, unsubscribe, or hide a calendar

Hide: uncheck the box next to the calendar name in the sidebar. The calendar stays in your account but its events stop showing. Useful for calendars you want to keep but do not need to see daily.

Unsubscribe: hover over the calendar name, click the three-dot menu, select Settings, scroll to the bottom, and click Unsubscribe. The calendar and every event in it vanish from your account immediately. Do not worry about losing data: the events were never stored on your end. If you change your mind, resubscribe with the same URL and everything comes back.

Google Calendar > Calendar settings > scroll to bottom > Unsubscribe button

Delete: for calendars you created yourself. Same path: three-dot menu, Settings, scroll to the bottom, Delete. This permanently removes the calendar and everything in it. Your primary calendar cannot be deleted, only cleared of events.

Ghost calendars from old jobs

If you see a read-only calendar from a previous employer that does not have an unsubscribe option, it is tied to an account still connected to your device. On your phone, go to your device settings (not Google Calendar settings), find Accounts, and remove the old work account. On the web, check which accounts are signed in. The ghost calendar disappears when the account is removed.

How does Google Calendar sync across devices and accounts?

Your calendar app and your calendar account are two separate things. This is the most commonly confused concept in calendar management, and understanding it fixes more problems than any single tip in this guide. (See calendar app vs. calendar account in the glossary.)

Your app is just a viewer. Your accounts are where your calendar data actually lives.

Google Calendar the app displays events from your Google account. But it can also display events from other accounts you have connected: an iCloud account, a work Exchange account, a secondary Google account. All of those events show up together in one view, but they live in different places. If your phone breaks, the events are not gone. They were never stored on your phone. They live in your accounts.

This matters because when something goes wrong, the fix depends on where the problem is. If events are missing on your phone but visible at calendar.google.com, the problem is with the app or its sync settings. If events are missing everywhere, the problem is with the account.

Adding your Google account to other calendar apps

You can add your Google account to Apple Calendar, Outlook, or any calendar app that supports Google sign-in. All your Google calendars, including subscriptions, show up inside that app. The events still live in Google. You are just viewing them through a different window. Our Apple Calendar guide and Outlook guide cover the setup steps for each.

Many iPhone users keep their Google account connected to Apple Calendar specifically so they can see Google Calendar events alongside their iCloud events in one place. This is one of the underappreciated things about how calendar accounts work: you are not locked into a single app.

Multiple Google accounts

If you have more than one Google account, each has its own set of calendars. To see all of them together, add both accounts to the Google Calendar app on your phone.

Here is something that catches people regularly: you subscribe to a calendar feed while signed into your personal Google account, then wonder why it does not show up when you switch to your work account. Subscriptions belong to whichever account was active when you created them. Before subscribing, check which account you are signed into. It is a ten-second check that prevents a confusing twenty-minute troubleshoot.

How do I work with events, views, and notifications?

Google Calendar’s event management covers creating, editing, and displaying events across all your calendars. Most of it is intuitive, but there are a few behaviors worth understanding that make daily use noticeably smoother, especially once you have multiple calendars layered together.

Recurring events and the editing trap

When you create a recurring event, Google Calendar offers patterns: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and custom options like every other Tuesday or the first Monday of each month. The part that trips people up comes later, when you try to edit one instance.

Google Calendar asks: this event only, this and all following events, or all events in the series. “This event only” is safe. “All events” rewrites the entire series, including past instances. If you change a weekly meeting’s time using “all events,” go look at last month. Those times changed too. If you only need to change things going forward, “this and all following events” is almost always what you want.

Which calendar do new events go to?

When you create a new event, it goes into whichever calendar is set as your default. If you have a personal calendar, a work calendar, and three school subscriptions, and your events keep landing in the wrong one, this is why. Go to Settings > General and check the default calendar setting. Pick the one you use most. It is a one-time fix for a daily annoyance that most people just live with because they never think to look for the setting.

Time zones

If you travel or schedule across time zones, turn on the secondary time zone in Settings > Time zone. Google Calendar shows both zones in your schedule view. You can also set individual events to a specific time zone, which is useful when booking a flight that departs in Eastern Time and lands in Pacific, or scheduling a call with someone six hours ahead.

Here is something to be careful about: if you accidentally set an event to the wrong time zone, everyone who can see that event, every invitee, every person with shared access, sees it at the wrong time. There is no visible indicator on the event that says “this is in the wrong zone.” It just silently shows 3pm instead of 6pm and nobody knows why until someone misses the meeting.

Views

The default weekly grid works for most people, but the Schedule view deserves more attention than it gets. It shows upcoming events from all your calendars in a clean linear list, stripped of the grid. When your calendar is dense and you just want to know what is coming up next, Schedule is faster to scan than toggling between day and week views. And if you use Google Calendar on the web, the keyboard shortcuts are worth learning: D for day, W for week, M for month, A for schedule. Most people never try them and then wonder how some people navigate their calendars so fast.

Notifications per calendar and silencing subscriptions

You can set different notification defaults for each calendar individually. Go to a calendar’s settings (three-dot menu in the sidebar, then Settings) and scroll to “Event notifications.” This lets you get a 30-minute reminder for work events but a one-day reminder for school events.

Here is something genuinely useful that most people do not discover on their own: you can silence a subscribed calendar entirely by setting its notifications to “None.” If you subscribe to a community events calendar and do not want your phone buzzing for every neighborhood meeting, go to that calendar’s settings and remove all notification defaults. The events stay on your calendar for reference. Your phone stays quiet.

One more thing worth knowing: calendar feeds sometimes include their own built-in alerts (called VALARM in the ICS standard). Google Calendar often ignores these and uses your per-calendar settings instead. If you are not getting reminders for a subscribed calendar, check your notification settings before assuming the feed is broken. (See VALARM in the glossary.)

Sharing a Google Calendar means giving someone specific permission to see or edit your events. It is a two-way relationship, different from subscribing, which is a one-way broadcast.

Here is what that looks like in a household. Your spouse shares their Google Calendar with you so you can both add events to it. That is sharing. Your kid’s school publishes a calendar feed that anyone can subscribe to. That is a subscription. You can edit your spouse’s events. You cannot edit the school’s. Different mechanisms, different permissions.

Shared calendar

Subscribed calendar

How you get it

Someone grants you access by email

You subscribe using a URL

Can you edit events?

Depends on the permission level

No. Always read-only.

Does the source know?

Yes. They chose to share with you.

No. Subscriptions are anonymous.

Where it appears

Other people’s calendars

Other calendars

Sharing with specific people

Open the calendar’s settings (three-dot menu, then Settings). Under “Share with specific people,” enter their email address and choose a permission level. “See all event details” lets them view. “Make changes to events” gives full edit access. “Make changes and manage sharing” also lets them add or remove other people.

Google Calendar > Calendar settings > Share with specific people > permission dropdown

Delegate access

Delegate access lets someone manage your calendar on your behalf, including responding to invitations and creating events as you. This is mostly used in professional settings where an assistant manages an executive’s schedule. You set this up under “Share with specific people” using the highest permission level. One thing to know: the delegate sees your full calendar, including events you marked as private. Keep that in mind before granting access.

Publishing a calendar

Under “Access permissions for events,” you can make a calendar public or generate a shareable link. Be careful with the difference. “Make available to public” means Google indexes the calendar, it appears in search results, and anyone on the internet can find and subscribe to it. If your calendar has locations, meeting details, or personal information, that is now searchable. The shareable link option is less exposed: it only works for people you give it to. (For more on the security implications, see the privacy section below.)

Family calendars

If you have set up a Google Family group, a shared “Family” calendar appears automatically for all members. Everyone can add and edit events, which makes it useful for household logistics. One limitation: there is no per-member notification control. Your teenager’s orthodontist appointment buzzes your phone too.

What do I do when something goes wrong?

Most Google Calendar problems fall into a small number of categories. Each one below opens with the short answer, then explains the cause and the fix.

Why is my subscribed calendar not updating?

Short answer: Google Calendar checks feeds roughly every 12 to 24 hours. If the source changed something recently, your calendar has not checked yet. Wait 24 hours.

If the calendar still shows old data after a full day, the source URL may have changed or the feed may have gone offline. Unsubscribe and resubscribe with the same URL to force a fresh fetch. If the URL itself no longer works, the problem is at the source. (For more on how refresh works, see the refresh interval section above.)

Why do I have duplicate events?

Short answer: you probably both imported and subscribed to the same calendar, creating two copies of every event.

The import creates a static copy you can edit. The subscription creates a live copy that is read-only. Find the set you can edit (the imports), delete them, and keep the subscription. Less commonly, duplicates appear when the source feed has technical problems with event identifiers. That is a feed quality issue you cannot fix on your end. (See UID in the glossary.)

Why can’t I edit or delete certain events?

Short answer: they come from a subscribed calendar or a shared calendar where you only have view permission.

You cannot remove individual events from a subscription. Your options: hide the entire calendar by unchecking it in the sidebar, unsubscribe completely, or ask the owner for edit permissions if it is a shared calendar. (See read-only events in the glossary.)

How do I get rid of calendar spam?

Short answer: change the auto-add invitations setting, then delete the spam calendar or report the individual events.

Calendar spam shows up as events you did not create, often with suspicious links. It arrives when spam invitations are sent to your email (Google Calendar auto-adds invitations by default) or when a web popup tricks you into subscribing to a malicious feed. Do not click any links. Do not tap Decline, as that confirms your address is active. Find the calendar in your sidebar and delete it. For individual spam events, use the three-dot menu and choose “Report as spam.”

Google Calendar > Settings > Event settings > Automatically add invitations dropdown

Prevent most calendar spam with one setting

In Google Calendar settings, under “Event settings,” change “Automatically add invitations” to “No, only show invitations to which I have responded.” This single change stops most spam from reaching your calendar.

I accidentally unsubscribed. Can I get the calendar back?

Short answer: yes. Resubscribe using the same URL.

The data was never stored in your account. It lives at the source. Resubscribing brings it all back with current events. You will lose any color-coding you had set, but the calendar itself returns intact. If you do not have the URL, check your browser history or go back to wherever you originally found the link.

A calendar I subscribed to stopped working entirely

Short answer: the source URL probably went offline or moved.

When a feed URL goes offline, your calendar keeps showing the last events it fetched, but it stops updating. Google Calendar does not notify you that a feed is unreachable. The events just quietly go stale. If you suspect this, unsubscribe and try resubscribing. If resubscribing fails, the URL is no longer valid. Check the source organization’s website for a new link.

I subscribed to the same calendar twice

Short answer: Google Calendar may or may not deduplicate. Remove one.

If you subscribe to the exact same URL twice, Google Calendar sometimes recognizes the duplicate and sometimes creates two separate subscriptions. If you see the same events doubled, go to your sidebar, find the duplicate entry under Other calendars, and unsubscribe from one of them.

Google Calendar is not syncing on my phone

Short answer: check that sync is turned on for the affected account in the app’s settings.

This is different from a subscribed calendar not updating. A sync failure affects all calendars on an account, not just subscriptions. Open the Google Calendar app, go to Settings, tap the account that is not syncing, and make sure the sync toggle is on. If it is already on, try removing the account from your phone and re-adding it. Also check that your phone is not restricting background data for Google Calendar, which some battery-saving modes do silently.

What should I know about calendar privacy and security?

Your calendar is a detailed record of your daily life: where you go, who you meet, what your kids’ schedules look like, when your house is empty. A few settings determine who else can see that information.

URL exposure

Every subscribed calendar has a URL, and anyone who has that URL can see every event on the calendar. If you publish your own calendar using the shareable link option, treat that URL the way you would treat a password. Do not post it on a public webpage unless you intend for anyone to subscribe. (See published calendar in the glossary.)

What your employer can see

If you use a work Google Workspace account, your employer’s administrator can see your calendar events on that account. Personal events on your personal Google account are not visible to your employer unless you explicitly share that calendar with your work account. If you share your personal calendar with your work account so you can see everything in one view, your employer’s admin can now see your personal events too. That dentist appointment, that real estate closing, that flight itinerary. Keep work and personal on separate accounts if that visibility matters to you.

The “secret address” setting

Google Calendar offers two sharing addresses: a public address (works only if you made the calendar public) and a secret address (works for anyone who has the URL, regardless of publicity settings). If you suspect your secret address has been compromised, you can reset it in the calendar’s settings under “Integrate calendar.” But be aware: if 50 people are subscribed through that URL, all 50 lose access instantly. Reset only when you mean it.

What Gemini can see

Gemini reads all calendars stored in your Google account, including subscriptions and shared calendars. It does not read calendars from non-Google accounts (iCloud, Exchange) you have added to Google Calendar. If you have personal events on a work Google Workspace account with Gemini enabled, Gemini can access them. The same work-personal separation advice applies: keep them on separate accounts if that matters.

What can Gemini do with my Google Calendar?

Your calendar is now one of the first things Gemini looks at when you ask it a question about your schedule. Ask it to find a free afternoon and it scans every Google calendar on your account. Ask it what your week looks like and it reads your events and answers in plain language. This means the quality of your calendar data suddenly matters in a way it did not before.

What Gemini calendar features do today

With Gemini enabled, a side panel appears in Google Calendar on the web. You can ask conversational questions: “what is on my calendar this week,” “find a two-hour slot next week,” “do I have anything on Friday morning.” In Gmail, it can detect dates in emails and offer to create calendar events from flight confirmations, hotel reservations, and meeting requests.

The side panel is useful when your calendar is dense. Asking a question is faster than switching to Friday’s view and scanning a packed grid.

Google Calendar Gemini side panel showing a natural language query and response

One advantage Google has here: Gemini’s calendar features are available at the free tier for personal Google accounts. Microsoft’s Copilot requires a paid add-on license. Apple’s Siri is free but its calendar intelligence capabilities are still rolling out. For now, Google offers the most accessible AI calendar experience at no additional cost.

What Gemini cannot do with your calendar

Gemini only reads calendars stored in your Google account. If you have an iCloud or Exchange calendar added to Google Calendar, Gemini does not see those events.

Gemini cannot force a refresh on subscribed calendars. If a school calendar feed has not refreshed in 20 hours, Gemini is working with 20-hour-old data and does not know it.

Gemini cannot parse PDF calendars, images of schedules, or unstructured text. If a school publishes a PDF schedule and you ask Gemini to add those dates, it cannot. The events need to be in a structured format like a calendar subscription before any AI tool can work with them.

Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Copilot handle calendar AI differently, with their own capabilities and limitations. Our Apple Calendar and Outlook guides cover those.

Making your calendar Gemini-ready

If Gemini is reading your calendar every time you ask it a question, it is worth making sure what it reads is accurate. A few things help.

Start with the cleanup audit from earlier in this guide. A subscribed feed that stopped updating three months ago is not just sidebar clutter. It is feeding Gemini incorrect information about your family’s schedule. When you ask “what’s on my calendar Thursday” and it misses your kid’s early dismissal because that school feed went stale in January, the cleanup you skipped is the reason.

Name your calendars clearly. Gemini returns calendar names alongside events when you ask about your schedule. “Kid 1 School” is immediately useful. “Untitled Calendar” or a cryptic feed name the source assigned is not.

Consolidate into one primary account where you can. Gemini only reads Google account data. If your important calendars are spread across personal, work, and iCloud accounts, Gemini sees an incomplete picture. The more that lives in or is subscribed through a single Google account, the better Gemini works.

And use subscriptions, not imports. An imported calendar is frozen data. A subscribed calendar is live data. Gemini reading live data gives current answers. Gemini reading frozen data gives stale ones. This is the import-vs-subscribe distinction from earlier in the guide, and it matters more now than it did before AI entered the picture.

Calendar data services like AutoCal maintain verified, auto-updating feeds specifically so this data layer stays reliable, whether you are reading your calendar yourself or Gemini is reading it for you.

What to do next

Most Google Calendar frustrations trace back to three things: the difference between importing and subscribing, the refresh interval you cannot control, and the distinction between the app and the account. Once you understand those, the rest is maintenance. Do the cleanup audit once, set your colors, check your notification settings, and you are in good shape. The calendar you clean up today is the calendar Gemini reads tomorrow.

If you manage calendars across platforms, our Apple Calendar and Outlook guides cover the same ground for those apps, including the places where they handle things differently. If you are looking for auto-updating school calendars that actually stay current, browse 91,000+ US schools at autocaldata.com/calendars. For more guides, visit autocaldata.com/guides.

If something in this guide is outdated or wrong, tell us. Every step is tested on real devices, and we update the guide when platforms change.

Apple Calendar: The Complete Guide — Subscriptions, configurable refresh, iCloud sync, Siri

Outlook: The Complete Guide — Subscriptions, the merge bug, Exchange sync, Copilot

Calendar Glossary — 28 terms every calendar user should know

AutoCal: Setup and Features — How AutoCal feeds work, platform setup, AI enablement

Full guide library — autocaldata.com/guides

Quick reference

The most common questions, answered in one line.

Question

Short answer

How do I subscribe to a calendar?

Other calendars > + > From URL. Paste the feed URL. Desktop only.

Can I subscribe from my phone?

Not in the app. Use calendar.google.com in a mobile browser.

How often does it refresh?

Roughly every 12–24 hours. Not configurable. Not instant.

Why are my events read-only?

They come from a subscription or a shared calendar with view-only access.

I have duplicate events.

You probably imported and subscribed. Delete the imports, keep the subscription.

How do I stop calendar spam?

Settings > Event settings > change auto-add invitations to responded only.

Import vs. subscribe?

Import = frozen copy. Subscribe = live updates. Subscribe is almost always better.

My calendar shows Team Standup from my old job.

Remove the old work account from your device settings.

Can Gemini read my calendar?

Gemini reads Google account calendars only. Not iCloud or Exchange.

How far ahead do subscriptions show?

About 6 months. Events further out appear as the months progress.

Changelog

June 2026: Updated to name Gemini specifically, added Outlook to refresh comparison, added Gemini privacy note, added hub page link. All steps re-verified.

April 2026: Initial publication. All steps verified on Google Calendar web and mobile apps.

Frequently Asked Questions

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