Calendar sharing overview

You can share a calendar both publicly and privately with other people. Sharing gives you flexibility in managing calendars. For example, you could create a calendar for your child’s sports team and share it privately with just the coaches so they can edit it. You could also share it publicly with all the parents so they can view (but not change) it whenever they want.

Sharing works as follows:

  • Public calendars can be shared with anyone. To access public calendars, visitors need to use Calendar (or iCal with OS X v10.7.5) on a Mac, Microsoft Outlook on a Windows computer, or any other app that supports the iCalendar file format.

    A public calendar can’t be edited by anyone but the calendar owner (the creator).

  • Private calendars can be shared with other iCloud users.

    Participants can view the calendar using iCloud Calendar, Calendar (or iCal with OS X v10.7.5) on a Mac, Microsoft Outlook on a Windows computer, or the Calendar app on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

As the owner (creator) of a shared calendar, you assign edit privileges to the invitees to control who can modify the calendar. There are two types of access privileges that can be assigned:

Participants with View Only access can:

  • View the calendar and change their view (from day to week, for example), without affecting the view of other participants

  • Change their own calendar preferences

Participants with View & Edit access privileges can do everything listed above, plus:

  • Create and delete calendar events

  • Change details (for example, the name, date, and time) for calendar events

  • Track the responses of guests invited to a calendar event

Participants can’t invite new people to a shared calendar.

Note: If multiple participants try to edit a shared calendar at the same time, the changes that are saved first are kept and reflected in the calendar. The person whose changes arenʼt saved sees a message that his or her changes werenʼt saved.

If you disable your iCloud account, any shared calendars you created become unavailable; all participants automatically receive an email notifying them that the calendar is no longer shared.