The Essential Keyboard Shortcuts to Tame your Google Calendar

This will probably be a shorter post than the other posts in shortcut series because there aren’t really that many shortcuts for Google Calendar. But the ones that exist are extremely useful and help to explain why Google Calendar is one of the best web calendars on the market.

Again, I am going to quickly run through the important keyboard shortcuts to show you scenerios where you could use them and in the process remember them. By mastering the keyboard, you can ditch that mouse, enter your appointments in a flash and keep up with your schedule without breaking a sweat. Where we’re going, who needs secretaries?

So let’s go to the Google Calendar page :

Right off the bat, the most important shortcut of them all is C for compose. This brings up the screen for creating a new event :

Just use your TAB key to jump from field to field, insert your details and when you get to the SAVE button, hit ENTER to save your event.

But there is an even faster way to make an event. Just hit Q on your keyboard to make a “quick event”.

Remember: if you do anything wrong or you stray into areas you don’t want to stray into, pressing the ESC key gets you out of it. Look upon the ESC key as your “get out of jail free” card!

As with other Google services, we are once again reunited with our old friends, J and K. Pressing J takes you backwards in time to the previous month and K takes you forwards to the next month (try it for yourself and see).

The only other Google Calendar shortcuts of note are the ones which determine which version of the calendar you see on your screen. D gives you the day view, W the weekly view and M the monthly view.

Writing this article though, I became aware of a gaping hole in Google’s keyboard shortcut services for Calendar. To my knowledge, there are no shortcuts for navigating to an existing day or event, editing an event or deleting an event. You can only add new events and view your calendar in different modes. Or does anyone know differently?

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

If you found this article useful then please help us spread the word by Stumbling It.

If you like this article then subscribe to MakeUseOf feed and get latest articles delivered to your Feedreader. If you want to recieve latest articles in your email click here. It's FREE!