Reader Daniel Conlan is overwhelmed with calendars and would like to do something about it. He writes:
Last year, some people at my work set up a lot of Google calendars for our workgroup. We’ve since had a reorganization and a lot of these calendars are now unnecessary. How can I get them off my Mac and iOS devices?
You can easily hide them or, if you like, get rid of them altogether. We’ll start by hiding them.
One way to hide unwanted events is to turn off their calendar delegates.
On your Mac launch Calendar, open its preferences, click the Accounts tab, select the Google account that holds the calendars, and in the area to the right click on the Delegation tab. You’ll see a list of the calendars associated with that account. Uncheck any boxes that appear under the Show heading and those calendars will vanish.
Another option is to click the Calendars button at the top of the main window’s toolbar to expose any calendars you’re using with your Mac. Then click on an event that belongs to an unwanted calendar. The calendar it belongs to will be highlighted in the Calendars list. (Optionally you can right-click or Control-click on an event, select Calendar from the resulting menu, and the name of the associated calendar will appear.) Simply uncheck the highlighted calendar and its events will disappear.
On an iOS device launch the Calendar app, tap the Calendars button at the bottom of the screen, and then disable any offending calendars by tapping on them. (You can also disable an entire account full of events by tapping on All Gmail.)
That’s fine as far as it goes, but it requires that you futz around with multiple devices. A more efficient way would be to deal with the calendars at the source.
To do that go to your Google Calendar page, click on the triangle to the right of the Other Calendars entry, and choose Settings.
Or get rid of them altogether by unscribing from your Google Calendar page.
In the resulting calendar settings page you’ll see all of these calendars in a list. Click the Unsubscribe link next to the ones you no longer wish to see, confirm that you really wish to do this, and the calendars should disappear from all your devices after a short time.
Have a question of your own? Drop a line to mac911@macworld.com.