Putting your Facebook calendar into your normal calendar

You've told Facebook you're Going or Maybe to an event. But it's not in your personal calendar, so you might forget or double-book. Keeping track of Facebook events on your personal calendar can be a bit of a challenge, and I bet a lot of people deal with it by manually creating another event.. It certainly isn't obvious that you can view your Facebook calendar in your personal calendar, using a special link as a calendar "feed".

Warning

This only displays your Facebook calendar in your personal calendar, but the appointments are not aware of each other and do not interact with each other. In other words, if you book something in your personal calendar without looking, you won't see a conflict/double-booking warning. While this is unlikely for you, it becomes a risk when you open your personal calendar up for others to book you. An appointment in the Facebook calendar doesn't appear as busy time in your personal calendar (workaround at end of article). Someone booking you through, say, Calendly, FreeBusy, or the native calendar sharing option might send you a request seeing you're free. If you accept without visually checking your calendar, you may double-book yourself. It's a good solution if you're the only person who interacts with your calendar.

Step 1 of 2: Find and copy the special link

1. Open any event in Facebook. Click the ellipsis to the right of the Share button and choose Export Event. (You'd be forgiven for thinking this only has to do with this event.)
• On the Android Facebook app, the options are mostly different and this one is missing. As far as I can tell, it's desktop only.
2. Copy the link. (Ignore everything that references this event only.)

Step 2 of 2: Paste the link into your calendar application

Every calendar app has its own way of doing things.

Google Calendar

1. On the left side of the calendar, click the drop-down next to Other Calendars
2. Choose Add by URL
3. Paste

This new calendar didn't magically add itself to my already-set-up BlackBerry calendar. I recently removed and re-added my main Google Apps account to my PRIV and saw that additional calendars in place before adding the account were added upon setup. This seems to be something required if you're adding calendars after the fact.

BlackBerry Android Calendar (like PRIV, DTEK50/60, KEYone, etc.)

Tip: Since I was at my computer, I pasted the URL into a bogus calendar appointment in my Google Calendar and waited a moment until it synched over to my BlackBerry Calendar, so I could copy/paste.

1. Tap the three bars in the upper left of the calendar app
2. Tap Add Account
3. Tap BlackBerry Subscribed Calendar
4. Paste the URL and select the sync frequency when prompted

I suspect, like BlackBerry 10, if you tap the URL in your browser, it'll automatically take you to the right place. Just haven't tested that.

BlackBerry 10 Calendar

Example is Classic 10.3.3, but it's the same all 'round. Shortcut is to tap the URL in your browser, and *poof* a miracle occurs.

Outlook

Example is Outlook 2010, but it's the same basic idea. Scroll down to "Add an Internet Calendar Subscription to Outlook" for the instructions, which are basically click the link from above, and answer Yes when prompted by Outlook. (Your browser may confirm with you first.) The Facebook calendar opens in its own tab with a distinct colour; click the arrow on the tab to overlay it with your main calendar.

Workaround for free/busy booking problem

At the top of the article, I mentioned that the Facebook calendar doesn't interact with your personal calendar, and if other people are booking you based on free/busy availability, you've got a potential problem on your hands. Most calendar applications that know how to use these subscribed calendars also understand that, and allow you to copy an item from one calendar to another. It's still only a workaround though, because it's a copy; if the source calendar changes, the copy won't. I use this with events where the basic details (date/time/location) are unlikely to change.

Google Calendar

1. Open the Facebook calendar event in your Google Calendar, and in the header, click More Actions
2. Select Copy to <your main calendar name>
3. Click Save

BlackBerry Android/BlackBerry 10

Not sure yet how to copy events from one synched calendar to another. (No big deal if you're receiving an invitation - you just select the target calendar. But this isn't that situation.) If you have the answer, please let me know. I generally live mobile first, but am not religious about it.

Outlook

I swear there was an easier way to do this - some simple "copy to other calendar" option that I can't find now. 

Option 1 - Move

1. Open the event in your Facebook calendar in Outlook
2. From the File menu, choose Info > Move to Folder and browse to your calendar folder

It's moved out of the synched Facebook calendar and into your main one. Not sure what this means to Facebook yet; have you taken yourself out of the event? Probably not.

Option 2 - Copy

1. Click the event only once in your Facebook calendar in Outlook
2. Press CTRL-C to copy. You will get no feedback.
3. Switch to your main calendar and do not click anything. Press CTRL-V to paste.
4. You'll get a notice about accepting the meeting. It doesn't matter what accept option you choose - the second one will say you've failed. But it works anyway. (If you choose Copy, it'll also work, but you now have an annoying "Copy:" prefix on your event. It's Outlook's way of letting you know there's no relationship between this event and the source.)

Enjoy!