Calendar View Needs an Option to Select Label Column

[Vertex42]

I’ve been playing with the new calendar view beta. I looked around for a settings option but am only seeing the drop-down for changing the view between Month/Week/Day.

Here is a screenshot of the calendar view using the Simple Gantt Chart template:

What the calendar view really really really (strong emphasis) needs is some settings that allow you to select which column**(s)** to use for the labels in the calendar. In this example, the WBS number which would typically be the unique column used for related rows doesn’t tell you anything useful in the calendar view. We need to be able to see more information at a glance with the calendar. It would be even better if we could select multiple columns to display, but bare minimum we need to be able to choose a column for the labels.

Examples of columns that would be important to show in a calendar view:
(a) Status column such as “Completed, Confirmed, No Show” etc. An example can be seen here: https://community.spreadsheet.com/t/working-with-time/665/2?u=vertex42
(b) Priority A flag to mark priority items in the calendar. I won’t mention any other “Select” types of examples because they are all similar and could be represented using the same pill style shown in other views
(c) Attachments If it’s an appointment calendar and you have linked to photos of a person, you could show the photo within the calendar itself (or at least in the pop-up details).
(d) Progress % - This wouldn’t need to be displayed as a grayed portion of the bar in the calendar (although that might be cool), but showing a % value at the beginning of the calendar item would be useful (and also in the pop-up details).
(e) Time - In a monthly calendar, if you have something representing appointments then you’ll want to see the time abbreviated within the calendar itself just like you do with Google Calendar (“Title, 3-4pm”). In fact, Google Calendar is a pretty good benchmark to use.

I’m very glad that there are other views besides monthly (day, week, two-week, etc.) but the same thing applies regarding seeing more data and choosing which columns to show.

The other thing that is needed to make calendar views useful is the ability to see more data associated with the row than just the primary/start/end/status columns:

I was hoping that we’d be able to see the same pop-up that you can see when you click on the row in the regular spreadsheet view as this example from the Construction Schedule template:

I’m excited to see the start of the calendar view. But to be useful I would really love to see the ability to choose which columns to display in the calendar and more details in the pop-up when you click on an item.

[Murali_Mohan]

@Vertex42 - You can double click on an item to see the detailed pop-up. Also double click on the calendar itself to use the detailed pop-up while creating a new appointment.

You can also use the ( <–>) to switch to that.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Vertex42]

Ah, can’t believe I didn’t try the double-click.

I started a new worksheet from scratch to test making a custom label via concatenating:

And I definitely like double-clicking to see all the details:

The expression in the photo represents how I feel about how this is working.

Here is the table I created:

An example of the monthly view (I like that the Status can be changed easily because it’s linked to the Color):

Here is the formula I used for the Primary column to display multiple columns of info within the calendar label:

This works great when the Primary column can be created as a column formula. But for other examples like gantt charts, it would still be really useful to choose which column to use for the main label.

I’ve added this example into the Appointment Schedule workbook that is available from my site.

[matt]

Nice example @Vertex42! The concatenated values in the primary column look great in the calendar view.

Thanks for all of the feedback re: cal item labeling and field control in the popup. Calendar View is officially in Beta now, and we have a number of enhancements either planned or currently in development, scheduled for release over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more updates soon.

[Vertex42]

Looking forward to it. This has a lot of possible uses. This week I was working with somebody to create a marketing calendar. Even though it’s possible to display a list of tasks in a calendar format in Excel or Google Sheets using lookup formulas, I was telling them that the Calendar View in spreadsheet.com is likely going to make exactly what they wanted to do possible, namely (1) Showing multiple-day tasks within the calendar view such as durations for ads and sales campaigns (2) Allow a pop-up to show more details for events in the calendar and (3) Interact directly with the calendar to make changes.

Today I emailed my team to suggest that we use spreadsheet.com for our shared schedule and project planning. And we’re also getting ready to launch another Kickstarter, so it will be fun to try using a Calendar View instead of just a Gantt chart for the planning and scheduling of all the details.

[Christopher_Hurt]

This is a very cool example, I just looking at how to make a more effective label and this is certainly one way to go about it. Looking forward to seeing more configurability in the calendar control.