Say you’re browsing the web in Chrome and you remember you need to add a meeting to your calendar. Instead of opening a new tab and accessing your calendar, or using the Google Calendar Chrome app, you can add an event to your calendar right from Chrome’s address bar with this trick.
This requires a few steps of setup, but once you’re done, you can type an event in natural language to the address bar—such as “meeting on Thursday at 10 am”—and a new event will be created. To accomplish this, you just need to create a special search engine in Chrome with a specific URL.
To create the new search engine, right-click on the address bar and select “Edit search engines”.
On the Search engines dialog box, under Other search engines, enter a name, such as “Add Event”, in the first box. In the middle box, enter a keyword, such as “cal”, to type into the address bar to activate this custom search engine. Then, copy the following URL and pasted it into the last box.
http://www.google.com/calendar/event?ctext=+%s+&action=TEMPLATE&pprop=HowCreated%3AQUICKADD
Press Enter when you’re done.
The custom search engine will appear under Other search engines. Click “Done” to close the Search engines dialog box.
Before we use this custom search engine to add events to our calendar, we need to make sure we’re signed into the Chrome profile that matches the Google account to which we want to add events. To do this, use the Profile Switcher in Chrome to either switch to the correct profile or create one for the desired Google account, if you don’t have one.
Once you’re signed in to the Chrome profile that corresponds to the Google account you want to use, type cal (or the keyword you assigned to it) in the address bar and press Tab or the Spacebar. “Search” and the name of the new search engine displays on the left side of the address bar. Using natural language, type the event you want to add to your calendar, like we did below, and press Enter.
The screen for creating a new event displays on the current tab with the appropriate data filled in, such as the event title and the date and time. Add or change any other information for the event, such as the location, and click “Save”.
The calendar displays with your new event added, and a notification also displays describing what was added. If you change your mind right after adding the event, you can click the “Undo” link on the notification to delete the event.
If you use Chrome for your web surfing and Google Calendar to keep track of your events and appointments, this is a very handy trick.