How to use the Google Calendar Appointment System

Google recently improved their appointment system on Google Calendar, which allows people to book appointments directly on your calendar. It’s a great, simple system that may negate the need for 3rd party appointment solutions. However, as you’ll see below it does have one flaw, which means we can’t use it for all our situations.

Creating a set of appointments

Open your Google Calendar at calendar.google.com. Then click on “Create”.

Click on “Appointment schedule”.

This opens the “Bookable appointment schedule” where you’ll define your appointments.

Add a name for your appointments. Here, we’re going to set up a set of appointments at a school for parents’ evening.

Next, decide how long each appointment will be.

You can set anything from 15 minutes to 24 hours.

This is the one gripe I have about the system. In our situation, we have up to 12 parents coming in within the class time of 90 minutes and we need slots of 5 minutes. The old appointment system allowed this but in fairness, the slots didn’t look so good on the page with so many. However, this means we can’t use this system for our parents’ evenings, which is a big drawback for us.

Moving on, we can see the slots it’s creating on our calendar. Here, are the default 30 minute ones.

Next, we have the availability, i.e. when people can book appointments.

We can set them up to repeat weekly or not.

Here, I’m going to set up 4 slots, one on the 13th, two on 14th, and one longer one on 15th. Click on “Add a date” to add a new date.

Click on the times to change them.

Click on the plus icon to add another slot on the same day.

We can see our slots on the calendar.

Next, we can control when the appointment slots can be booked. First, is the maximum number of days beforehand and the second is the minimum number of hours beforehand.

Next, we have the option of adding buffer time in between the individual appointment slots, anything from 1 minute to 4 hours.

Clic “Next” to complete the second part of the set up process. At the top, it reminds you how the photo and name will look on the booking page. To change this you will need to open your Google Account.

Next, you can state where the appointments will be, either online via Meet, in-person, on the phone, or not stated.

Underneath, you can add a description of the appointments. This will appear on the booking page and in the confirmation and reminder emails.

Next, state what information you need from the person booking the appointment. By default, it’s their first and last names, and their email address but you can add extra items by clicking “Add an item”.

Here, you can add a phone number field or if you click on “Phone number” you can add a custom item and call it what you want. Note, it’s a text field.

Here, I’ve just added the phone number as an option and I’ve also made it a required field.

Here we have the 4 fields I want the appointment maker to fill in.

Finally, we can set up email reminders. By default, the appointment maker will receive an email the day before reminding them they have an appointment the following day.

To change that, click on “1 day before”. You can change it to minutes, hours, days, or weeks before.

You can also set up more than one reminder, just click “Add reminder”. Here, I’ve set it up to send them a reminder the day before and an hour before.

Click Save to set up the appointments.

You can view the appointments by clicking on the appointment slot on your calendar and clicking “Open booking page”.

To share the booking page link, click on the copy icon to the right of “Open booking page”, then share that via email, etc.

Both you and those who have received the book page link can see the appointment slots available.

Booking an appointment

To book an appointment, just click on a time.

A form will appear for them to fill out. If they have a Google account, it will automatically populate with their name and email address linked to that account. They can change this. Then they click “Book”.

They then receive a confirmation message, and will also receive an email.

The appointment maker will receive an email like this, which contains pretty much everything they need to know about the appointment. It has also added it to their Google calendar if they have a Google account.

If you have selected to do it via Google Meet, they will receive an individual Meet link, so there’s no chance of two people sharing the same link.

To see the appointment, click on the appointment on your calendar.

Here, you will see the Meet link, who’s booked and the details they entered on the form.

On the Booking page you will see that the slot booked at 09:00 has disappeared and is now not available.

Cancelling an appointment

Things change and sometimes people need to cancel appointments, and this is easy to do. They can cancel it from the email they’ve received by clicking on “Cancel appointment” or from the calendar event by opening the appointment and clicking “cancel appointment” at the bottom.

Click “Cancel your appointment”.

Confirm the cancellation.

The person will see a cancellation confirmation message.

You will also receive an email stating that the person has “declined the invitation”, in other words cancelled the booking.

You will see that the 09:00 booking reappears on the booking page again.

Rescheduling an appointment

If someone’s cancelled an appointment, it’s possible that they just want to change times. So, all they need to do is cancel the original appointment and then rebook from the booking page a new time.

Also, you have the option to reschedule the appointment for them. Click on the cancelled event and then click Reschedule.

For example, you could be talking to the person to reschedule it, and on the screen below you can move the appointment to another time by changing the times.

Everyone then receives an updated email with the new time.

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It’s good, simple-to-use system which will meet the needs of quite a lot of people and companies, although it doesn’t have more advanced features of some appointment systems.

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