12 June 2017

How to customize Alfred to work with Google Calendar (Alfred workflow)



I use Google Calendar in the browser a lot so I thought why not setup Alfred to make working with Google Calendar easier.
(If you're not familiar with Alfred, it's an application launcher and productivity application for Mac)

I started off with trying to find an Alfred workflow that lets you easily open Google Calendar and easily add an event. I couldn't find such a workflow so I started working out different ways Alfred could do what I need.

At the end of the day I ended up creating this workflow that combines the different things I typically do with Google Calendar.



It basically lets you do 3 things:

  1. Quickly open Google Calendar in the browser by typing the keyword gcal into Alfred.
  2. Open Google Calendar using the keyboard hotkey ⌘ + g
  3. Quickly add an event to Google Calendar.

The format for adding an event to Google Calendar is:
gc [event] at [time] on [date] in [location]

For example:
gc Dinner with friends at 8pm on next Sunday
Will open this event:


You can even do things like:
gc Weekly meeting every Wednesday at 3pm
And Google will add an event that repeats every Wednesday at 3pm.

Google does a great job at understanding what you mean when you type in natural language so play around and see.

You can also just type gc and hit enter and it will bring you to the new event page in Google Calendar.

Download the Google Calendar Workflow


If you don't want to add a workflow for some reason you can add this custom search instead:
Add event to Google Calendar
(clicking on that will prompt you to add it to Alfred, it's really easy to do)

It will let you quickly add events to Google Calendar via Alfred using the same format as described above.


Enjoy!

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02 June 2017