Appointment Slots in Google Calendar

Wouldn't it be great if you could send out, or publish a link that people could click, and be taken to a view of your calendar, where they could see available appointment slots, and all they had to do to make an appointment with you is click an available slot, and then the event appears on both your and their calendar? Welcome to Appointment Slots!

1. Important: Make sure you are in Week or Day view. Click into any date/time area on your Google Calendar, and a popup will appear. Click "Appointment slots" at the top of the popup, and then "Edit details" at the bottom:

2. This is where you will do all (and it's not much) of the heavy lifting:

3. Make sure you put something into the "Title" field that will make sense to both you and your end user. For example, if you are setting up advising appointments with students, rather than "Appointment," consider "Advising Appointment."

4. You are likely using Appointment Slots in a repeating fashion. If so, click the "Does not repeat…" checkbox (I usually need to choose "Custom…":

I set this series of Appointment Slots to repeat weekly on Mondays and Wednesdays until the end of the term:

Also be sure to indicate a meeting duration time, and a meeting location in the "Add location" field.

5. Consider something like this in the "Description" field:

Bring your education plan, degree audit documents from DegreeRunner (if you have access) and/or any documents pertaining to your college course of study.

6. Right-click and copy the long, blue URL:

That's what you can send to your students and/or place in your Moodle course and/or email message, etc.

NOTE: The Appointment Slot URL is the URL for ALL appointment slots for the Google Calendar in which you are creating the appointment slot. If you need/want a unique URL, make a different calendar for that.

7. Click the blue "SAVE" button in the upper left:

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Here is what it looks like when I access someone else's Appointment slots link:

Check out all of those appointment slots - I can seem them in context with my other appointments!

When someone clicks to reserve a time slot with you, here is what they will see:

Note that they can customize the details of the event after they save it.

Pretty nifty, huh? I think you've got enough to go on, so go ahead and tinker with your own Appointment Slots. And share your impressions and experience in the comments section below!

For more info, see Google's Help Center page on Appointment Slots.

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So you say you don't use Google Docs because you must have the "Track Changes" feature of Microsoft Word. Or maybe it's Mail Merge you can't live without. In typical Google fashion, they have taken those concepts to a whole new level (not to mention Revision History, Notifications, Bookmarks, etc.):

Think of the educational and administrative implications of these advancements - it's mind-boggling!