I’m hugely grateful that my children’s school publishes an iCal calendar so I can have school events integrated into my business and personal calendar. Problem is, when I subscribed iCal picked a color that is exactly the same as my business calendar color. Can I change the color of a subscribed calendar in iCal?
You can do quite a bit to customize subscribed calendars in ICal, actually, including not only changing the color that’s used for calendar events but changing the name of the subscribed calendar too, something I appreciate because I like succinct names while everyone else in the world seems to like long, descriptive names.
As with much in the world of Mac software, it’s all about trying Control-Clicks in various places to see what comes up. (this is also true in iTunes, for example, where there’s quite a bit of otherwise hidden functionality)
In iCal, get to a window where you can see all your calendars, as I have here:
As you can see, I have a lot of calendars, both my own and those to which I’m subscribed. No worries. Let’s go ahead and tweak the TechStars Calendar for this demonstration. Here I’m going to click on the name of the subscribed calendar, but hold down the Command key simultaneously (hence “Cmd-Click”):
Choose “Get Info” and there’s all sorts of things you can do to customize the appearance of this particular iCal event:
Want to change the name to just “TechStars”? Easily done. To change the color is just as straightforward: click on the button with the sample color swatch (in this case, blue):
If one of the default colors works, just select it and click on “OK” but let’s have a peek at what happens if you choose “Other…”:
Turns out that for the TechStars calendar, I picked a light yellow to differentiate it from the tons of other calendars I have displayed.
When you’re done, close the Color Picker window, click “OK” on the Get Info window and iCal will forevermore show your calendar event in the color of your choice.
I have the latest MOJAVE and this is not working. Any recommendations?
Have you tried changing the color, quitting Calendar, then restarting it?
I have Snow Leopard still and I had to hold down control and not command. I was doing command and was going crazy until I tried it with control and bam….it worked and perfectly. Thanks so much for such an informative solution!
Running Lion; got the results described finally by holding down control instead of command…
OMG! You are the smartest! Your answers are simple, to the point and easy to execute! THANK YOU SO MUCH! I literally started browsing topics other than the one I googled (how to delete an email from auto-complete on gmail) and saw so many other useful nuggets of info. I love when the Internet serves a real purpose!!
Thanks so much!
Great.
Now try it on the iPhone with a shared calendar over WebDav. Please.