Google Calendar Adds Appointment Slots

Google Calendar is an excellent organizational resource, whether you’re accessing it for personal or professional reasons. And Calendar isn’t standing still. The recent addition of color-coding, the semi-recent options to share your availability, and the not-so-recent expansion of event scheduling options are all good examples of ways that Google Calendar is stepping up its game. Most recently, Google released an appointment scheduling tool that lets you denote set blocks of time for availability and even allows clients, co-workers, or others register a time slot.

Here’s how you can take advantage of this new feature:

1. Hop into your Google Calendar and click on any time slot just like you would if you were creating a standard event.
2. Click on “Appointment slots.” Note: If you don’t see this option, it may be that the feature hasn’t yet been rolled out to your account. Rollout should be complete in the next few days, however, so check back soon.
3. The first time you click this link you’ll be asked to confirm that you want to get started with the feature. When you confirm this you’ll be directed to the detailed version of the event you’re creating.
4. From the detailed version of this page you’ll be able to:
   • Change the title for the appointment slot and for individual appointments.
   • Add a description to the appointment block.
   • Set the time for the block of available appointments.
   • Set the length for each appointment (with durations ranging from 5 to 60 minutes).
   • Access the URL for the appointment sign-up page.
5. When a user visits your appointment sign-up page, they’ll be able to register for a specific time slot. As soon as they do an event will be created on both your calendar and that of the person who signed up.
6. After you go through the appointment slot process one time, you can access a “quick add” menu from the calendar by clicking on any time slot (as you did in steps one and two).

And you’re good to go! You now have an improved organizational tool and a way to have people schedule with you at their convenience.

[via the Gmail Blog]