Automator & iCal – Scheduled Sending your Spouse your Weekly Calendar
by: George Starcher, Associate Editor
So I gave my wife my old G5 iMac a while back. I also installed BusySync. But does she look at the calendar? Nope. And you can imagine the look I get when I say “Well, it was on my Calendar.” And the response is “I won’t look in that.” So how to bring the information to her with the least amount of recurring effort on my part? Well, emailing it works since I know she reads that. Here is how you build an automator action to send a summary for the week for selected Calendars from iCal and have it run every Sunday night.
I was going to record this as audio for the show but then Victor told me how much Macworld content video etc he has. So I figure this is for those who read the blog. A bonus if you will.We have to start with the Automator Action.
- Open up Automator.
- Drag over the “Find Calendars in iCal” action for EACH Calendar you want to send events for. I have work, home, medial appointmens all in their own calendars so I can view or hide them within iCal. In order for her to know all events for the week I have to make it so each.
- Change the Find to :Events
- Change the Whose to Start Date: next week
- Press the + button under whose and add the Calendar is “xyz” where xyz is your calendar object to pull events from.
- Stack these for every calendar you want to show in your email.
- Drag over the “Event Summary ” action from the Calendar library underneath your stacked Finds. This will make a text summary of all the events.
- Drag over “New Mail Message” from the Mail Library. Put in the recipient email and a nice subject like “Scheduled Events for Coming Week”
- Lastly drag over “Send Outgoing Messages” from the Mail Library. This will send the email.
Ok so we have our automator. Now to save it so we can schedule it to run every Sunday night.
- Over in iCal I would make a new Calendar like “Scheduled Automators” This is so we can have anything we schedule easy to find, delete or hide within iCal.
- Come back to the Automator window, click File and choose “Save As Plugin”
- Give it a suitable name like “Mail-WeeklySchedule”
- Pull down the “Plug-in for” box and choose iCal alarm.
- Go back to iCal and you will see a new event created on the current day. You will want to edit the event to set the desired time such as late Sunday night, to repeat every week and move it into the “Scheduled Automators” calendar.
That should do it. Now at that time every Sunday it will mail a summary for the coming week. Note if there are zero events the person will receive a blank email. Also if for some reason you need to add the alarm by hand choose “Open File” and the iCal Alarm plugins are saved by default in your user home folder/Library/Workflows/Applications/iCal location.Here is what my automator looks like.
Very cool. Always wanted to play in Automator. Thanks
Comment by Michelle — January 20, 2008 @ 1:52 pm
Very Cool!! Thanks, I always wanted to play in Automator.
Comment by cntrysigns — January 20, 2008 @ 1:53 pm
I think that Automator s something I really need to play with more, and snippets like this really help thanks good stuff
Comment by Gazmaz — January 20, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
I know how you feel, Victor. My lovely wife, Robin, is the same way. I use my .Mac account to sync all our calendars. Seems to work for her.
Comment by Ross Judice — January 20, 2008 @ 4:23 pm
No problem. it is cool stuff. I am sure I will make more of these.
Comment by georgestarcher — January 20, 2008 @ 5:18 pm
I can't fine “Find Calendars in iCal” in automator. Am I looking at this wrong?
Comment by Steve — January 20, 2008 @ 7:44 pm
I tested this and it worked if done as above, but it skips recurring events. Any suggestions how to get those added?
Comment by Anton — January 21, 2008 @ 10:14 am
Looks like Automator won't include recurring events (?).
Comment by ajm — January 21, 2008 @ 12:05 pm
I love the idea, and was eager to get it working. The problem I am running in to is that I can't figure out how to have it remind me of All Day Events that have a Start or End date outside of the Next Week. Any ideas?
Comment by Randy — January 21, 2008 @ 8:15 pm
I tried this,but it did not pick up my recurring events (say weekly meetings). Anyway to do this?
Comment by Anton — January 22, 2008 @ 7:23 pm
This is great. Just what I needed. The only issue with this is that the result is not sorted by date, it is sorted by calendar in iCal. Do you think there is a way to sort by date?
Comment by Alexander Balakersky — February 2, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
Beautiful! When I get bills in the mail, I pop the due date and amounts into iCal. This is a great way to get automatic email reminders for the week's due bills. Thanks for sharing!
Comment by LRHB — February 26, 2008 @ 11:46 am
Neat little tool – thanks!
When I built this as described it works but only returns events in the first calendar in my list of 6 and only for the Monday of the week. Where might my error be?
~ David G
Comment by David G. — March 2, 2008 @ 8:38 pm
When I run this manually in Automator, it runs perfect, sending me a summary of 2 calendars. When run via the plugin, I get an e.mail, but the body is empty. It's like Automator never got time to populate the body of the message. This is in 10.5.2. Anyone else have this issue?
Comment by Vince LaMonica — April 7, 2008 @ 3:14 am
Same problem, won't work in 10.5.2 – creates the email empty bodied, and the same happens if, instead of an email you ask it to speak out the events: it does so in automator, fails in the real world.
any ideas why? any good applescript substitute? my flatmate is getting there, will post if he does manage.
Comment by VA — April 18, 2008 @ 5:01 pm
When I run this manually in Automator, it runs perfect, sending me a summary of 2 calendars. When run via the plugin, I get an e.mail, but the body is empty. It's like Automator never got time to populate the body of the message. This is in 10.5.2. Anyone else have this issue?
Comment by Vince LaMonica — May 4, 2008 @ 11:05 pm
Did your flatmate figure it out? I too am still trying to automate it. It works great manually, but that isn't the point.
Hope you have some good news for us 10.5.2'ers out there!
Comment by Vince LaMonica — May 4, 2008 @ 11:08 pm
Hi. I really like this app and would like to use it. However, the new Automator 2.1 (246) does not work the same way. Can you update it for us?
Comment by brownpanda — May 30, 2010 @ 6:46 pm
Hi. I really like this app and would like to use it. However, the new Automator 2.1 (246) does not work the same way. Can you update it for us?
Comment by brownpanda — May 31, 2010 @ 1:46 am