Every single time I set up an event in my iCal [“Apple Calendar” -dt] it has a default Alert of reminding me 15 minutes before the event. That’s useless, so I always change it to be an hour in advance. Is there a way I can just change the default?
Repeat after me: “there is no more iCal. It’s now Apple Calendar”. 🙂
That’s okay, I know your response. “Whatever. Jeez, get on with it!”
I use Apple Calendar (see? not “iCal” 🙂 ) a ton and have my schedule planned for six months or longer into the future, so I’m all too aware of every nuance of its behavior, and while it generally is quite slick, there are some quirks and limitations, one of which is related to alerts.
The idea’s great: automatic reminders of what’s coming next and when. But exactly when it notifies you prior to an event, that’s something more nuanced, and while I agree that 15 minute warning isn’t very useful, I actually do something more complicated than you do: I set up multiple alerts for a given event so a meeting, for example, might have a 2 hour warning, 1 hour warning and 15 minute warning. That can’t be set up as the default in the program, unfortunately, but we can change that 15 minutes to 60…
Here’s what you see when you add an event in Apple Calendar:
As you can see, the default is “Alert 15 minutes before start”.
Sure you can click in the event and change things, but doing that on a per-event basis is tedious, even if there are a LOT of options:
I don’t want to do this every time I add something, though, so to change the default, go into “Preferences…” off the “Calendar” menu on the top left.
You’ll get this:
There it is, front and center. Change the default for Events as desired. Now when can I add more than one as my default, Apple?
Oh, and one really cool thing is that if you sync your settings and calendar via iCloud, this change will affect everywhere you create calendar events, including iPhones and iPads. A nifty trick!
I seem to be suffering from the opposite problem. For me 15 mins is Ok as a default in most instances because it means leaving my office and going to a meeting somewhere on campus. I set 15 min as a default notice for my alerts in Calendar preferences, and turned on alerts under system preferences / notifications, but in many cases Calendar won’t give me an alert unless I specifically set one up. As a result, i have missed several appointments lately. This is a recent quirk. i have noticed this since i moved from Maverick to Yosemite.
Any suggestions? Thx in advance.
Using Preferences to set the default alert would be fine if there was a custom setting. The default that I would use most frequently at home is 9:00 PM. Can’t do that with Preferences. You have to do that individually for every event. Is there way to do this with the terminal?
There might be a way to change the default from the command line, Peter, but nothing I can find on a quick Google search.
I went through all this with no success. I realized that the default setting on my “on-line” calendar was making the change as I created an event on my computer. You Need to log on to your web calendar, I sync to Google, and change the default setting there as well.
Another idea would be to create “template” event(s). This would have the typical length for your events and all of the alerts you prefer to receive entered in for the event (reminders and emails). Make the name of the event something very distinguishable “_TEMPLATE event” and then it will be easily searched from Calendar’s search bar. After searching, click on the event in the right-hand search results bar to jump to it, select it, copy the event and jump back to the date of the new event and paste. Modify the event with all its details and your done. You could move this template event to the first day of the month or leave it on Jan. 1 of that calendar year or park it somewhere else you likely won’t have many events competing with it.
I round-about hack, I know.
Thanks for this useful hack. Frustrating the geniuses at Apple didn’t address this issue. Hopefully they will in a future version.
But I’m not holding my breath.
This is fine if you want alert popups. But I would like to have email reminders as my default instead of just the alert popups. I check my email often and sometimes I will have forgotten about a popup alert the day before, whereas I am almost always checking my email in box. When I get am email alert, I keep it in my inbox (which has only unread emails) and leave it there for constant reminder. This however needs to have a very clean inbox for it to work properly, which fortunately, I do.
So, is there any way to set the default alert to an email sent? I have looked through Calendar and there does not seem to be a way to do this. I believe in ical this was possible. So, it appears that functionality has been taken away with the new Calendar app.
Yeah, I agree that the email reminders are supposed less now, Gaetano. I wonder sometimes if Apple gets aggregate usage data as part of the “diagnostics” it uses, then bases future design decisions on massive data dumps of how things are actually being used by people in the field…