Google’s recently rebranded Apps For Work, now known as G Suite, has a handy “Find a Time” feature through Google Calendar that helps with coordinating the schedules of multiple people to arrange events that will work for everybody involved. That feature was historically only part of the full-featured Android client for Google Calendar. This leaves people who either don’t have a smartphone for whatever reason or are rocking a non-Android device in the cold entirely, and makes things a bit inconvenient for those using the app suite on desktop PCs in a work environment that frowns upon cell phone use. Google has announced that will be changing in the near future.
The feature is out on iOS as of today, and should be available to all users today via an update to Google Calendar. While this covers business using iOS, those who aren’t allowed to whip out their phones at their desks may be more excited to hear that Google plans to bring the feature to the web version of Google Calendar by the end of this year. For now, users on either mobile client can access “Find a Time” within the Google Calendar app by adding an event as normal, adding in the guests they wish to invite to the event, then clicking on the “Find a Time” button below the guest list. This will bring up a list of times that should work for the guests, and allow the user to view the guests’ schedules and pick a time accordingly.
The feature looks over each person’s events to look for time gaps where everybody at the event could conceivably make it to the event, spend the length of the event with the other participants, and get back to business in a timely fashion. It also searches through the events of all participants to find anything that could easily be skipped, if it can’t find a good gap. For now, Google has not laid out any more detailed timeline for the rollout of the feature on the web version of Google Calendar, so users hoping to try it on their desktops will, for now, simply have to wait.