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SharePoint calendar all-day events showing as previous day in content search web parts

Despite your regional settings being correct, all-day events for some reason are using UTC time when they’re stored and are likely showing as the wrong day in content search web parts and similar web parts.

Though they look correct as an individual item or on a calendar, the way they’re stored doesn’t acknowledge your regional settings and, when pulled through a search web part, render in UTC as beginning 6 (or other) hours earlier than they actually do.

For example, I have a content search web part that pulls all events in our organization and show’s “today’s events.” If there’s an all day event, it shows as starting 6:00 PM the day prior to its actual day.

I could not find a straightforward solution to fix all affected events. And my solution is not ideal, but it accomplishes a need. You could instead explore the possibility of creating a calculated column that adds hours to fix the alignment. But please share if you’ve encountered the same issue and have resolved it a better way.

To get around this issue, I created a SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow on calendars that:

  • Triggers on creation or modification
  • “Unchecks” the All Day Event box
  • Sets a specific start time on the start date (I chose 7:00AM)
  • Sets End Time to the original end time (if you don’t do this, it sets end time to blank).
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A better way to display “today’s events” from multiple calendars in SharePoint on your intranet home page

today at LMH

Below on the left are two traditional, out-of-the-box solutions for showing Today’s events in SharePoint. Notice how both take up a lot of extra space repeating today’s date (which we don’t need to see at all in a web part called “Today’s Events”) or showing gray space where there are no events. Soak that in – prime real estate on your home page goes to non-existent events. These also may require overlays and other manual labor processes that need adjusted every time a calendar is added or removed.

But on the right is what you could have. It uses search instead and displays events from all calendars a user has access to in one place. It shows only the necessary information on the home page and links to full details. And with a little CSS included in this post, it can look polished and themed. Imagine all you could do with that saved space on your home page…

Also seen above: Adding local weather to your SharePoint intranet home page
and a “this week’s menu” button for your intranet

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How to create a powerful date table or DateKey in Power BI

DateKeys are essential for relative time measures. In “manage relationships” you tie the ‘DateKey'[Date] to a date field in each of your data sources. Giles Walker shared an excellent solution for a robust DateKey that includes measurements and calculations you’re sure to find useful. Here’s that same solution I’ve modified and expanded to be as useful as possible.

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Use Power BI to create a dynamic/live meeting room schedule

confasched

I recently set out to create a “live” conference room schedule that could be presented constantly on an auto-refreshed screen outside conference rooms. This would replace printed schedules placed in holders outside the rooms. The following example uses a SharePoint calendar as the conference room calendar and can be refreshed constantly using Power BI’s scheduled refresh in O365 or Report Server.

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SharePoint Calendar Cleanup: Use one workflow to remove Outlook “Copy:” prefixes, standardize location names and delete canceled events

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We’ve all been there. One location on a shared calendar will be referred to by multiple people as 20 different things. Johnson Building Room 214 can be entered as “214,” “Johnson 214,” or “J214” to name a few. Canceled events stay on the calendar, sucking up real estate and waiting for someone to delete it manually. Items copied from another calendar make you pay for the convenience of a simple copy and paste by adding the “Copy: ” prefix to the item.

But with a single workflow, we can fix all of these and make our SharePoint calendars look more professional and polished without making more work for end users. This post will cover how we can use workflow to standardize naming of locations with workflow, delete events once they’ve been canceled and get rid of Outlook’s “Copy: ” prefix. You will need SharePoint Designer and appropriate permissions to create workflows to complete the following steps:

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Automatic iCal (.ics) hyperlinks for SharePoint calendar items using calculated column

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Updated 12/22/19

Important: This concept of using calculated columns will only work as a one-time trick. After adding the column, links will be correct. But because [ID] isn’t meant to be used in calculated columns, it removes itself from the formula if an item is edited after the column has been added. This method is only ideal for one-time uses, or for lists that are not expected to have content additions or changes. See this other post about how to get the same hyperlinks through workflow instead, for a more reliable method.

This project allows users a quick option to save something they see on a SharePoint calendar to their own calendar. Spend 5 minutes on these few instructions and your users will have a convenient way to get involved going forward.

Note that in modern calendar experiences, there’s a built-in “add to calendar” option for event items. This post is for classic experience calendars and calendar items/events.

Basically we’re going to add a calculated text column called iCal which will use the list’s GUID (easy to get, don’t worry) and the specific calendar item’s default ID number to generate a clickable .ics (iCal) file link. Let’s get started!

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Resizing multiple SharePoint calendar overlay links

Outcome:overlaysbeforeafter.PNGIntro:

So you’ve made a SharePoint calendar. In fact, you’ve even made some different views for it and then made those views into overlays. Hoorah!

But now, looking at the finished product, the unevenness of the overlay links leaves something to be desired. This post will show you how to take your overlays and, in just a few minutes, turn them into a more polished look as seen above.

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