Automatically schedule Google Calendar events from Airtable

In your Airtable base, you should have a table (called “Interviews,” or something similar) that lists the specific interviews that you’re trying to schedule.

In this table, you’ll need the following:

• Two date fields, one of which will contain the start date and time of the event, and the other one which will contain the end date and time of the event. Call these fields “Start Time” and “End Time,” or something similar.

• A single select field that will contain select options designating the status of each interview. Call this field “Status,” or something similar. This status field should include at least these two options:

• “Tentative” or “Not yet scheduled” (To designate interviews that aren’t yet ready to be pushed to Google Calendar)

• “Scheduled” (To mark events that are ready to be synced to Google Calendar, when you’re ready)

If you’d like, your table can also include other optional fields with information about the interviews. You can mix and match different values from these fields to customize the title, description, and other optional attributes of the Google Calendar events that get created. For example, you could include:

• A text-based primary field (like a single line text field or a text-based formula field) to determine the name of the event as it will appear in Google Calendar.

• A linked record field, linked to a separate table of candidates, and maybe a lookup field or two to pull in relevant information on candidates. A collaborator field, to indicate which of your colleagues will be conducting each interview, and to invite them as an attendee of your meeting.

Open the base that you prepared following the base setup section above, then click the Automations button in the top left portion of your base. This will open the Automations configuration window. If your base already has some automations, you can create a new one by clicking on the + Create automation.

Once you’ve added a new automation, you can give it a name, and then begin by choosing a trigger. The trigger is the event that starts the automation. In our case, we want the trigger to fire when we mark an interview session as being “Scheduled.” So, you’ll want to choose the “When record matches conditions” trigger.

Now you’ll have to specify the conditions under which the trigger will fire. First, pick the specific table (“Interviews”) from the earlier setup you did.

Then, click the + Add condition button to add a new condition. If you’re already familiar with using filters in your Airtable base, the process of adding a condition is very similar: you pick a field, operator, and comparison value so that you can construct statements like "When [Status] [is] [Scheduled]." You can also add additional conditions if you’d like, although in this example, we’ll stick with just a single condition.

Make sure to run a test to ensure that everything is in order

Actions are the tasks that get performed after a trigger fires. In our case, the action we want to perform is to schedule an event in Google Calendar using the date parameters from the record that was just marked as “Scheduled.”

1. Click the + Add advanced logic or action button. A menu will appear with a wide variety of potential actions. Select the Google Calendar: Create event option.

2. Next, you’ll need to select a Google Calendar account from which you’d like to post. If you haven’t connected a Google Calendar account before, you’ll need to authorize Airtable Automations to connect your account.

3. Once you’ve connected a Google Calendar account, you’ll need to specify the calendar to which you’d like to add the events. The Calendar dropdown will automatically list the calendars associated with the selected Google Calendar account.

4. You’ll then also need to specify the start date and time as well as the end date and time of each event. In this case, we want the timestamps to come from the “Start Time” and “End Time” fields, respectively. In order to set this up, click the blue + button under where it says “Start Date and Time”—this allows you to insert variables from the trigger step. From there, mouse over “Record (Step 1: Trigger)” then click the “Continue” that appears. This brings up a list of potential variables from the record in the trigger step. In our case, we want to insert the time from the “Start Time” field, so mouse over the “Start Time” field and click the blue “Insert” button.

5. Repeat this step when specifying the “End Date and Time” for the action, but this time using the variable from the “End Time” field.

6. There are a number of other options available that will allow you to customize the event details. For example:

   1. There’s a box you can check called “All Day Event.” In this case, the interviews are not all-day events (thankfully) so you can leave this box unchecked.

   2. The “Title” section allows you to give a name to your event. In this example, let’s pick the value of the Name field in the record from the trigger step.

   3. The “Description” section lets you customize the event description text. You can mix static text with variables from the trigger step to create an event description that automatically incorporates information from your Airtable base into the Google Calendar event.

   4. The “Location” section allows you to specify the location of your Google Calendar event. If you’d like, you can specify a variable from the trigger step here as well.

   5. The “Attendees” section allows you to invite other people to your Google Calendar event using email addresses. In this example, we can insert the email address of the interviewer, using the variables from the “Interviewer” collaborator field in the previous step.

   6. Lastly, you can also add a video conferencing software from the dropdown menu, if you’d like.

7. Once you’ve customized all the components to your liking, make sure to run a test to ensure that everything is working successfully.

Note

Note that if you run this test successfully, an event will be created in Google Calendar based on your test data from the trigger step. Go check it out in Google Calendar to see if all the customized variables look good to you.

If everything looks good and you’re ready to post, go ahead and toggle your new automation on. Now you’re base is ready to automatically schedule meetings based on the conditions you set for the trigger.

The Google Calendar “Create event” action does not support the creation of recurring events.

Automations run on GMT since that is the default timezone that Airtable operates on behind the scenes. When setting up time-based conditions in Automations you may need to adjust times manually or create a formula to auto-adjust times so that the conditions evaluate according to your timezone.