Now with support for Google & Apple Calendar

Often you see some some text in an email, web page, or a document that is really an unformed calendar event. Examples include,

Coffee with Jeff Saturday 6:31am 555 Main St, Palo Alto, CA some more text...

Or

12:47 pm tomorrow lunch with James 4567 Capital Ave, San Jose, California

Or

Pickup up cake at Safeway 1444 Shattuck Pl, Berkeley, CA 94709 Wednesday 3pm

Or

Pick up Susan

These could be in an email, web page, or a document. So how to quickly and easily add to your calendar?

This shortcut allows you to either select the text and use the Share menu to run the shortcut or copy the text and run the shortcut and the shortcut will:

• Attempt to find any address in the text to put into the location field.
• Attempt to find dates and set them. Any date will be used as a default start time and you will be able to update it in a nice iOS dialog. The end time defaults to 60 minutes after the start time.

  • Note you can use friendly terms like, “today” “tomorrow” or “Monday” as well as actual dates and they will be converted for you. No time found will default to 12pm.
  • If you set start and end times to the same value it will be an all day event.
  • If no date is found, it will default to today.

• The title of the event is editable from the shortcut.

• The text you select might be Rich Text like HTML. If so, you can choose to keep the formatting or convert to plain text for the Note field of the event.

The idea is to have a fully formed event ready to go. When you finish setting up your event, you can set it to open open in the following browsers:

1. Brave
2. Chrome
3. Firefox
4. Safari
5. Apple Calendar

You can confirm any details, clean up any mistakes, and save the event. Voilà! You have an appointment.

This now works two ways:

1. For Google Calendar, choose your choice of browser.

   Note I’m using a browser to add the calendar item because as far as I know there is no way to access the native Google Calendar app for this job.

2. For Apple Calendar. You need to configure two things in the shortcut for this to work:
   • Your Email
   • And choose "Email" as the Browser.

This will make an ICS file and mail it to you. Open that in your native iOS client and you can import the appointment.

Info

This shortcut includes Embed-a-Update, so it requires no external shortcuts or resources like UpdateKit. Embed-a-Update is also very fast. Enjoy.

If this Shortcut doesn’t work as expected, you have suggestions, or an idea to improve it, let me know!

Related Shortcuts

You may also like:

• Share Availability

• Import ICal File this allows you to import ics files saved to your device or grab them from any website.