Google Calendar gets new appointment scheduling features

Google announced it's rolling out new appointment scheduling features to Google Calendar. Right now, when you create an appointment schedule in Calendar, you can configure its reoccurrence to repeat weekly or don't repeat.

A new option brings more flexibility and allows you to set custom weekly occurrences for an appointment schedule. For example, you can customize the appointment schedule to bi-weekly instead of weekly.

For those who don't know, Google Calendar previously had two features called "appointment slots" and "appointment schedules," which basically did the same thing. Google announced earlier this year that appointment slots will go away, starting July 18, and appointment schedules being the better one will take its place.

Appointment Schedules offers a dedicated user interface to create and manage multiple appointments for the entire week. It lets you create and share booking pages so people can book time with you.

You can set different timings for individual days, choose locations, add other people, set off days, and configure reminder emails, among various options. A highlight of the scheduling feature is you can manage all your bookings from a full-screen interface that is separate from the main Calendar UI and opens in a new tab.

Apart from custom weekly occurrences, Google Calendar now lets bookers (and co-hosts) add other users to a booked event. However, this feature only works if the person who creates an appointment schedule enables the "Guests can invite others" permission.

While setting up a schedule, the creator can also add Google Groups as co-hosts so users who are part of a group can easily host appointments with others.

Over the coming weeks, these features will be rolled out to Business, Education, Enterprise, Nonprofits, and other workspace tiers and users with personal accounts. Note that the ability to add Google Groups as co-hosts won't be available on personal accounts, Google One Premium users, and individual Workspace subscribers.

In previous updates, Google has added several other features to Calendar like an improved syncing experience with Microsoft Outlook and a full-screen view for tasks.