Stop double bookings from your personal calendar

If your Saturday is already taken by a family event in your own calendar, nobody should be able to book you for it.

Adding a calendar

Go to Booking → Your other calendars. (There is also a **Your other

calendars button on the Hours screen, beside Time off**.)

Under Add a calendar, give it a Name, such as "Family".
In Private iCal address, paste your calendar's private address (see below).
Press Add and read it. Meridian reads it straight away, so a wrong address is

caught while you are still on the screen.

Finding the private address

Every calendar app has a private web address that lets another program read your calendar without signing in. Look for:

Google Calendar — on a computer, open Settings, choose your calendar, go to Integrate calendar and copy Secret address in iCal format.
Apple Calendar — share the calendar publicly and copy the link (it starts with webcal://).
Outlook — Settings → Calendar → Shared calendars → Publish a calendar, and copy the ICS link.

What it does

Meridian only reads the address. It never signs in to your Google, Apple or Microsoft account and never changes your calendar.
Only the times are kept, as "Busy". Titles, places and guests are not stored.
It reads the calendar again every 15 minutes, so a new appointment can take a quarter of an hour to block your booking page. Press Refresh now to read it straight away.
Repeating events are included for about the next year. A single occurrence you have moved or cancelled is respected.
Events marked "free", cancelled events and all-day events marked as free (such as birthdays) do not block anything.
If the address stops working, the screen shows Last refresh failed and the last busy times it read stay in force, so a broken link never quietly opens up days you had taken.

The list shows when each calendar was Last read and how many Busy times it found.

Limits and removing one

You can add up to five calendars. To stop using one, press Remove and confirm. The times it blocked open up again.

Do not add your Meridian calendar address here (the one from [your diary in your own calendar](/calendar)) — it would block every booking against itself, so it is refused.

Anyone with a private calendar address can read that calendar, so keep it to yourself.