Recurring Meetings Get Sophisticated

Being able to schedule recurring meetings is a convenience, but managing them can be problematic when changes are needed to one or more of the sessions.  Google Calendar has gained new capabilities to deal with this dilemma.

Here are the details.

• In Calendar when modifying an event, when you change the time, title, description, location, or attendees of an individual meeting in a series, that meeting now remains part of the series.
• If you change the title, description, location, or attendees of a series of events, these changes will be applied to all events in the series, including those that have overridden fields. However, Calendar will intelligently keep track of what fields you override, and not change those fields e.g. if you change the location of one particular event instance in the series, then later modify the location for the entire series and give it a new title, the one particular event will be updated with the new title but the location will remain at what you had overridden.
• Changing the time or frequency of any series still resets all information in the series, even those that have been manually overridden.
• If you make any changes to a series and apply to “All Following”, it will reset all information in all future meetings, and the future meetings will be become a new distinct series.  This will override any fields that you may have manually overridden.

These features make it easier to manage recurring meetings.