The calendar merge feature allows you to include events from one calendar into another calendar. For example you may wish to create a group calendar by automatically including the personal calendars from four or five people. Going further, you may wish to merge the group calendar back in to each of the personal calendars, in effect creating an announcement calendar. Merging is bi-directional. The merge feature also aids in searching multiple calendars.

Enabling a merge is simple. Follow these steps:

Other options on this dialog

The merge dialog presents a list of available calendars, including hidden calendars (but excluding archived calendars). Check those calendars from which you would like to merge events. The next time you view the merging calendar any events from the merged in calendars will be displayed.

If coloring mode is one of the 'specify' options you are able to choose the font and background colors of merged in events for each calendar. If coloring mode is one of the auto options colors are assigned automatically.

The various coloring modes are described in the following table:

The show legend option either displays or does not display a legend at the bottom of the current calendar indicating which events come from which merged in calendar.

Searching merged calendars

Merged calendars may be searched in exactly the same way as any other calendar. Because the search filter is applied after the event list is built but before the event list is presented the merge has already taken place and therefore the search is, in effect, working across the merged calendars. In this way you may search multiple calendars at once.

Hierarchical merges

The merge feature is not hierarchical. By this we mean that merges of merges do not work as you might expect.

For example, say you had two departmental calendars, one for sales and one for marketing. Each departmental calendar merges in each of five personal calendars for people in that department. You may not create a master calendar which merges in the departmental calendars. The events in the 10 underlying personal calendars would not appear. This is because the merge feature is not hierarchical. To create the effect of a master calendar in this case you would have to merge in each of the 10 underlying personal calendars directly into the master calendar (in effect, jumping over a generation).

Maximum number of merges

A further limitation of the merge feature is that at most 40 calendars may be merged into any one calendar. This is a hard coded limit and cannot be increased. sorry :(