A few of our customers who use our Employee Training Management or Calendar E-Mail Extension have had some usability issues regarding recurring events in SharePoint Calendars.
The main issues are that:
Here are a few tips and tricks which you can use to highlight recurring events and how you can display the actual start and end date of a series.
Firstly I created a new Boolean field called “Is Series” in the calendar list. This is necessary as the SharePoint recurrence field cannot be used in calculated columns. Then I added a simple SharePoint designer workflow to the calendar list which sets the value of this field depending on the recurrence field.
The “Is Series” field can now be used to create calculated columns to highlight recurring events. For example I created a new column called Title*.
The formula of this field is:
=CONCATENATE(Title,” (“,IF([Is Series],”Series”,”On-Time Course”),”)”)
This concatenates the title and an additional piece of information if the event is a one time event or part of a series. I used this field as the title field in the calendar view.
In calendar views you can also use the calendar overlays to color-code one-off and series events. To do this you must create 3 calendar views. One which displays series events only (Is Series is equal to yes) and one which displays one-off events only (Is Series is equal to no). The 3rd view should display no events, so I defined the filter “ID is less than 0”. In the 3rd view add the other two views as calendar overlays and assign them different colors. The following post describes calendar overlays and color-coding in more detail and also how to change the default color of events in a calendar view: How to highlight different trainings or events in a calendar view
What I did next is add an additional calculated column to display the start and end date of the series. The formula I used is:
=If([Is Series],”Series from “&TEXT([Start Time],”MM/dd/yyyy”)&” to “&TEXT([End Time],”MM/dd/yyyy”),”One-Time Event”)
I displayed this field just above the Start Time.
I hope you find this helpful.
If you need a trial for the Employee Training Management or the Calendar with email extension, click on “Download Trial” on the product page. The trial version is fully functional and valid for 30 days.
