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I want am trying to sync all my personal and professional calendars. 

I was able to successfuly add zaps that, when an event is created in one calendar, it searches for this event in the other calendar, and if it does not find, it creates new events on this second calendar.

But I can't seem to be able to delete events.

I added 3 three steps:

  1) Trigger: Anytime an event cancelled is created in Google Calendar

  2) Action “Find event in Google Calendar”

Both these steps, the tests were successful. Then: 

  3) Action “Delete event in Google Calendar”.
This last one, the test fails: Failed to create a deleted event in Google Calendar - Required field "Event" (eventid) is missing.

What am I doing wrong, can anyone help me?

 

 

 

 

Hi @marinaangeli 

Good question.

Perhaps consider a different approach: sharing a GCal - https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37082?hl=en

 

The Event field expects the GCal Event ID.
Also, all 3 of the mapped variables have “No data”, thus contributing to the error.

 


Hi @marinaangeli 

Good question.

Perhaps consider a different approach: sharing a GCal - https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37082?hl=en

 

The Event field expects the GCal Event ID.
Also, all 3 of the mapped variables have “No data”, thus contributing to the error.

 

Thanks for your reply. 
I have 5 calendars: 1 personal and 4 professionals. If someone sends an invite to one of them, I need the availability to all others reflect the new event. The best way I found was to add zaps creating new events in all of them. 
Just being able to manage other calendars will not solve my problem :(


Hey @marinaangeli, just stepping in to help! Appreciate you expanding on your use case a bit further. Is the purpose of this to block that “booked” time on all calendars so you don’t get double-booked? I may have some alternate recommendations in that case that might feel a bit easier. 

Looking forward to hearing more about your “why” so we can get you pointed in the right direction here!


Hey @marinaangeli, just stepping in to help! Appreciate you expanding on your use case a bit further. Is the purpose of this to block that “booked” time on all calendars so you don’t get double-booked? I may have some alternate recommendations in that case that might feel a bit easier. 

Looking forward to hearing more about your “why” so we can get you pointed in the right direction here!

 

This is exactly the problem I am trying to solve. If the zaps are not the best approach, I would love to know any tool that can do this for me. 

Thank you!


Hi there @marinaangeli👋

In order to delete all the events you’d either need to multiple separate search steps (one to search each of the calendars) and multiple delete actions for all the different calendars. Or you could try using Looping by Zapier to run through the search and delete actions for each calendar. And you’d presumably need to set up duplicate Zaps to trigger for cancelled events in each of the calendars, right?

That’s possible to do but I wonder if it may be better to switch to using an app that’s specifically focused on scheduling appointments or bookings. Those type of apps should have the kind of functionality to prevent double-bookings built in. So the bookings would be handled by the book app which should help to simplify things. 

There’s so many different apps out there and they each have their own strengths. I can’t say which would be best for you to use but you can see all the scheduling/booking types of apps we integrate with here: https://zapier.com/apps/categories/scheduling. If it helps, we did a blog post just last year on The best appointment schedulers and booking apps in 2022 which you might be a good starting point for deciding which ones to look at first. Hopefully that helps!


I can't have people visiting an external calendar just to book meetings with me. Especially when the meetings have several people. They will use either Outlook or Google calendar, put all invitees, and see the overall availability.
This is why I need to have each calendar booked with the meetings.
All those suggestions were thoroughly thought before deciding to create multiple zaps.
Right now I would just need this delete action to work. It shouldn't be so hard, as this is a functionality available on Zapier.

Zap 1) If an event was added to calendar 1, a new event with the same data is created on calendar 2. - OK CREATED

Zap 2) Reverse it: if this event on calendar 1 is deleted or canceled, cancel the equivalent event (that was created on zap 1) on calendar 2. - CAN'T MAKE IT WORK.

 


Hey @marinaangeli hopping back in here! I hear you on this and I can see why it’s been frustrating to try and make this work. I think eventually, we could craft a system through Zapier that does this for you, however, I think a better use of your time, energy, and money (for this use case, specifically) would be to use something like Clockwise or my personal favorite, Reclaim.ai. That will block out times on your main calendar according to events on your other calendars. When one gets removed or changed on another calendar, it’s automatically updated on your main calendar. I believe you can make the sync multiple ways too, if you wanted to. 

Want to give that a go and see how you like it? I have been using Reclaim for about a year now and it’s been a game-changer for my scheduling!