Viewing Your Schedule in a Calendar App
If you want to see your personal Forecast schedule in the same place you have all of your meetings, appointments, and other events, you can enable a feed that will sync your assignments in Forecast to the calendar program of your choice. The feed uses the ICS standard, which is supported in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and many other popular applications.
Each feed is for one person only and will include all of that person’s Forecast assignments (except Time Off) as well as milestones for any projects they’ve been scheduled for. Note that these items will appear as all-day events on your calendar app, since Forecast assignments don’t have start/end times. Each event in your calendar app will have a link to the relevant week in Forecast.
Here are a few important notes about calendar feeds, with more detail in the following sections:
- This feature is available for everyone in an account, even if they don’t have permission to sign in to Forecast itself. People with View or View and Edit permissions can set up their own calendar feed, and people with View and Edit permissions can also set up feeds for other team members, including people without access to the account.
- Because a feed link provides information about all of your assignments, it should only be shared with people you trust. If the link is shared with someone who shouldn’t have access to it, people with View or View and Edit permissions can reset their own link, and people with View and Edit permissions can also reset other team members’ links, including for people without access to the account.
- How often the feed pulls in new and updated assignments depends on each calendar app’s refresh frequency, which can be as long as every 24 hours, although some apps allow you to configure this.
Enabling your own feed
If you have View or View and Edit permissions, you can enable your own calendar feed with these steps:
- Click your name at the top right of your screen.
- Select My Calendar Feed.
- Either click the Subscribe to Feed button to automatically open your default calendar app or click the Copy Feed Link to Clipboard button to copy a link that you can use to set up the feed manually. If you’re not sure how to do this manually, we’ve linked to instructions for a few popular calendar apps in the Manually adding your feed to popular calendar apps section below.
Enabling the feed for someone else
If you have View and Edit permissions, you can send other team members links to access their own calendar feeds, even if they don’t have permission to sign in to the account:
- Head to the Team view of your schedule.
- Click on a person’s name to expand them.
- Click their Actions dropdown and select Calendar Feed.
- If required, enter an Email address for them.
- Click the Send Feed Instructions button. They’ll then receive an email with instructions on subscribing to their calendar feed.
Resetting a feed
Because of the insight it can give into a company’s clients and projects, each calendar feed URL should be shared with care. If a team member shares their URL with someone who then leaves the company or otherwise shouldn’t have access to it, it can be reset, which means that the old URL is deleted and a new one is generated.
Note that you don’t need to reset calendar feeds for archived or deleted people, since they’re only active for team members who are currently active in the account. If you restore an archived person, they’ll then automatically see their schedule in their calendar program again, as long as they haven’t removed the URL in the meantime.
If you have View or View and Edit permissions, here’s how to reset your own feed:
- Click your name at the top right of your screen.
- Click the link to reset your feed.
- Type
YOLO
and click the Reset Calendar Feed button to confirm. - Click Subscribe to Feed or Copy Feed Link to Clipboard to start the process of adding the new URL to your calendar program.
If you have View and Edit permissions, here’s how to reset another team member’s calendar feed:
- Head to the Team view of your schedule.
- Click on a person’s name to expand them.
- Click their Actions dropdown and select Calendar Feed.
- Click the link to Reset [person’s] calendar feed.
- Type
YOLO
and click the Reset Calendar Feed button to confirm. We’ll send an email to the team member with the new calendar feed URL, which they’ll need to re-add to their calendar program to continue viewing their Forecast schedule.
Manually adding your feed to popular calendar apps
Once you’ve copied the link to your Forecast calendar feed, you can subscribe to it in your preferred calendar app. Here are links to instructions for a few of the most popular ones:
- Google Calendar (follow the steps to Add using a link)
- Apple Calendar
- Microsoft Outlook (follow the steps to Subscribe to a calendar)
Configuring the refresh rate of popular calendar apps
Different calendar apps pull new and updated data from subscribed calendar feeds at different rates, but in some cases you can configure the refresh rate to make it more likely that you’re seeing the most up-to-date information at any given time.
At this time, the refresh rate can’t be configured in Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
In Apple Calendar, follow the steps to Refresh a subscribed calendar in this help article. On your iOS phone or tablet, follow these instructions:
- Go to your Settings app.
- Tap on Calendar.
- Tap on Accounts to see all your calendar accounts and subscriptions.
- Tap on Fetch New Data.
- Scroll down to the Fetch section and select your desired update frequency.