How to roll up calendars in SharePoint

Ever wished you could aggregate multiple SharePoint calendars in one place? Usually, when you need to roll up content from multiple SharePoint sites – it is somewhat of a challenge. There is no web part that allows you to easily roll up documents, tasks or other content. However, SharePoint Calendar has a wonderful built-in feature called “Calendar Overlay“, allowing you to roll up calendars from various sites all in one place. Moreover, you can color code all those calendars as well! Let me show how to do this!

Aggregate multiple SharePoint Calendars using Calendar Overlay

1. Create all calendars you plan to roll up (I trust that you have already completed this part)
2. Create a “Master” Calendar – a calendar where you will roll up all other calendars. All calendars can reside on different sites, but they have to reside on same site collection (you cannot roll up calendars from other site collections)
3. Once the “Master” Calendar has been created, click on Calendar tab, then Calendar Overlay
4. On the next screen, click on New Calendar
5. On the next screen, give the calendar you are adding a name (does not matter what it is), leave SharePoint radio button checked, choose the color code (you have 9 colors to choose from). For Web URL, paste the URL of the site calendar resides on (NOTE: it has to be the site URL, not the Calendar URL), once you paste your website URL, click Resolve button. This will display all calendars that it can find on your site. Choose the right calendar, then Calendar View, then click OK
6. Repeat steps 4 & 5 for other calendars. Click OK
7. All of the rolled up calendars will now appear on a single “Master” Calendar

Things to keep in mind when you roll up calendars in SharePoint

1. You can only add/roll up to 10 calendars max
2. All calendars you are rolling up need to reside in the same site collection
3. Visitors to the site where aggregate calendar appears also need to have access to all the calendars being rolled up. If they don’t have access to at least 1 calendar, they will get a nasty error message when they try to view aggregate calendar. So make sure they have at least Read access to all the calendars.
4. You can even use above instructions to color code different categories of events in SAME calendar. To do this, create different views of same calendar, 1 filtered view for each category. Then, when you add calendars using Calendar Overlay, for every calendar added, choose same calendar, but different view. So essentially you will be rolling up same calendar over and over, just different views!
5. Above instructions apply to SharePoint Team Sites. If you use Calendar functionality as part of Office 365 Groups, you can easily overlay multiple calendars along with your personal calendar in Outlook Web App (will try to write a blog post on this down the road)