Calendars can be confusing things. They are useless if it takes more than a few seconds to find the information that you need. With Google Calendars it's easy to make the calendar look just the way you want it to so finding out what you have to do isn't the hardest part of the task. Customizing the calendar starts in the settings. To get to the settings first click the Gear Icon in the upper right corner. Then click Settings.
General
The general time, date and location settings can all be found under the General tab of the settings. There are several other settings that can be found in here as well. Customizing how your calendar looks is all found here.
- Notifications: checking this box allows you to use Chrome's browser notifications instead of the calendar popup notifications
- Events from Gmail: Checking this box will add any event invites you get in your Gmail to your Google Calendar automatically. Changing the visibility changes who can see these events.
- Default event duration: This will change the default event duration when creating new events. Speedy meetings, will make hour long meetings end 10 minutes earlier so you can get to your next meeting on time.
- Week starts on: Will change the first day of your week to whatever is set here. If you like your weeks to start on Monday instead of Sunday this is where you change it.
- Working hours: Checking this box will send a warning email to anyone who tries to invite you to an even scheduled for times outside of the working hours you set directly below.
- Event dimming: will dim the events specified making them less visible and allowing your eyes to directly focus on upcoming important events. It doesn't delete them from your calendar just makes them less urgent looking in your calendar.
- Default view: you can change what view your calendar goes to when you open up Google Calendar. By default it is set to Week view.
- Custom view: You can change the custom view (which is an option in Default view above) to be a number of different options if you don't like any of the given options for default view.
- Show events you have declined: if set to yes your calendar will display events that you were invited to but declined the invitation for.
- Automatically add invitations to my calendar: Yes will add all events to your calendar, before you respond to them, and treat them like true events, you will get notifications about them. Yes, but... will add them but you won't get notifications until you respond to the invite with a Yes or Maybe. No, will not display events that you haven't responded to their invitations yet.
- Alternate calendar allows you to select a different calendar than the standard gregorian calendar such as the Chinese calendar or the Hebrew calendar.