We are happy to announce an expansion to our existing Google Calendar Automations triggers. Users can now trigger an automation when a Google Calendar event is created, changed, or cancelled.

If you are unfamiliar with Airtable Automations we recommend reading the Creating an automation support article before diving in.

Account authorization

As a prerequisite, you will need to already have a Google account. This account will need to be connected to the Airtable base that you are working in. After choosing which trigger you would like to set up, you will have the options to "Manage connected accounts" or "Connect new account". This authorization process is scoped to each individual Google service, so you will need to perform this process multiple times, at least once for each Google Workspace trigger, and also reauthorizations in the future as needed.

Google Calendar event created

Choose a trigger

For this section of the article we'll use the "When event created" trigger, but the essential set up steps will be the same for each trigger. 

You'll need to:

• Connect your Google account (or select an already connected account)
• Select a calendar
• Run a test to make sure the connection is configured correctly (at least one event will need to be present in the calendar you selected) 

Add an action

After you’ve configured and tested the trigger, it’s time to add an action. In the example below, we’ll use the “create record” action to create a new record in Airtable whenever a new Google Calendar event is created. Once you select the table where you want to create the records, you can configure which fields in that table you want to add in data from the Google Calendar event.

Note in the video above that we have a text field for storing the "Google Event ID" from the Google Calendar trigger.

Test and enable your automation

Once your action is configured and tested, make sure to turn the automation on. When a new event is added to the Google Calendar you selected, the automation action will run. In this example, a new record will be created in your base. 

Google Calendar event changed or cancelled

Choose a trigger

For this section of the article we'll use the "When event changed" trigger, but the steps for the trigger and action steps will essentially follow the same pattern for both the "event cancelled" and "event changed" triggers.

You'll need to:

• Connect your Google account (or select an already connected account)
• Select a calendar
• Run a test to make sure the connection is configured correctly (at least one event will need to be present in the calendar you selected) 

Add an action

After you’ve configured and tested the trigger, it’s time to add an action.

For this example we'll build off our previous example by finding and updating the corresponding record for our Google Calendar event. So to do this we need to do two things:

1. Find the record that corresponds to the Google Calendar event
2. Update that record with the new details from the triggering Google Calendar event.

This is where the field we created holding "Google Event ID" comes in handy! We can use the "Find record" action to find the record with the same Google Calendar Event ID as the one from our Google Calendar trigger.   

Now that we have found our record it's time to update it. We'll use the "Update record" action to update the record we just found with the new information from our Google Calendar trigger:

Then we can update all our fields from our original calendar. Here is what it looks like all together:

Note that we don't need to update the Google Event ID because that ID won't change—it is still a unique identifier for this event.

Test and enable your automation

Once your action is configured and tested, make sure to turn the automation on. Now when an event is changed in the Google Calendar you selected, the automation action will run. In this example, a change to the calendar will also update the corresponding record in our table: