Looking for app to add calendar events with presets

[Gwendolini]

Hi,

I work at two companies with different shift starts and not on the same weekdays every month, thus there is no real repeating pattern.

At one place the monthly plan looks like this (just an excerpt for a week, the week after that does not look the same):

It also does not come as an excel file, just a table/text based PDF (which I can extract to a CSV, but the formatting is wrong and reading out data is a bit complicated using Numbers).

Anyway, is there an app, macOS or even iOS, that lets me add presets to the calendar entry field and then just select the dates I have that shift on?

As I am on work and only have Excel, I had to use that to "visualize" it.
As you can see, I need about a dozen presets, of which all have to write to one of three calendars, have one of two alarm settings and one of two locations.

Does anyone know of such a software? I once asked Fantastical if they have such a feature, but they said they were looking into it and that has been over a year or so ago.

I can currently get by with copy/paste of old entries, but maybe someone has already encountered such a problem and might have found a solution. I guess having 13 different shift start times is not that common, though working for two companies and inside those two companies working at several "stations" is common in TV broadcast stations.

 

[TiggrToo]

I seem to remember years ago that Informant had the idea of calendar templates, but am unsure how flexible it was, or even if it's still available.

 

[NoBoMac]

A variation on the copy old events, can setup template events to repeat every month (whatever day will be most convenient for you), then copy/paste them to the days needed.

Can also setup some Automator apps. In this example, might setup three different Automator apps, one for each location. Basically, bring up Automator, create a new Application. Select Calendar from left column. Will see a "New Calendar Event". Select that and drag over to the right pane. Edit accordingly. Under "Options", check "Show this action when workflow runs". Save. You now can double-click the "app" from Finder and will get a dialog box to edit/input as needed. On my El Cap setup, the dialog did not appear full-sized, but easily can grow it by dragging top or bottom edge to grow it out.

You can add multiple event create actions within each app/workflow.

Aside from that, Google web Calendar allows you to get a link to an event. You can bookmark it and click it to add/create the even. Then sync your Google Calendar to MacOS/iOS. Believe Outlook web calendar can do something similar.

On iOS, might look into the Workflow app: that might have something similar to Automator event creation.

Otherwise, have not seen/heard of anything simple, off the shelf (ie. can also export Calendars to ics file(s) and then TextEdit the events to match what you need).

 

[Gwendolini]

I seem to remember years ago that Informant had the idea of calendar templates, but am unsure how flexible it was, or even if it's still available.

Thanks for that tip, and I really like Informant from what I have seen in the past ten minutes, but the calendar templates are just like the opposite of what I want, as I have to go to the day and then select which template to apply, and I don't know if that is worth the 50 USD for me compared to CopyPaste. But I suppose I get the iOS version, as it has a much better month view than Fantastical and Calendar and that other iOS app I cannot remember. In other words, thanks for the tip.


[doublepost=1520716042][/doublepost]

A variation on the copy old events, can setup template events to repeat every month (whatever day will be most convenient for you), then copy/paste them to the days needed.

Can also setup some Automator apps. In this example, might setup three different Automator apps, one for each location. Basically, bring up Automator, create a new Application. Select Calendar from left column. Will see a "New Calendar Event". Select that and drag over to the right pane. Edit accordingly. Under "Options", check "Show this action when workflow runs". Save. You now can double-click the "app" from Finder and will get a dialog box to edit/input as needed. On my El Cap setup, the dialog did not appear full-sized, but easily can grow it by dragging top or bottom edge to grow it out.

You can add multiple event create actions within each app/workflow.

Aside from that, Google web Calendar allows you to get a link to an event. You can bookmark it and click it to add/create the even. Then sync your Google Calendar to MacOS/iOS. Believe Outlook web calendar can do something similar.

On iOS, might look into the Workflow app: that might have something similar to Automator event creation.

Otherwise, have not seen/heard of anything simple, off the shelf (ie. can also export Calendars to ics file(s) and then TextEdit the events to match what you need).

Thanks for the pointers, I also thought about using Automator or Keyboard Mayestro or something like that. I will take a look at that next week when I have more time to spare.