It is not uncommon for me to be asked how to create a calendar in a Team in Microsoft Teams. Most of the time, the need is about just wanting an overview of what will happen in the coming days.

• Should you use the group calendar in the Team’s M365 group?
• Is it perhaps better to use a channel calendar?
• Is there possibly an even better and easier way to solve this?

Below I will show you some different options.

If you intend to use the Team’s M365 Group

If you would choose to use the Team’s group calendar, you can do so in the following way:

Open your Team and go to the channel in which you want to place the calendar.

Click on the “Files” tab and then click on the three dots and select “Open in SharePoint”.

Click on “Pages” and create a new Site Page.

Name the page and then add the “Group Calendar” web part to the section below.

Click the Publish button to save the SharePoint page with the embedded Group Calendar web part.

Now go back to your Team and in the channel click the plus sign to add a new tab.

Since you want to add a SharePoint page to this tab, you therefore look up- and then click on SharePoint.

Click on the “Pages” tab and select the page you just created. A tip is that before you click save, you deactivate the box “Post to the channel about this tab” (unless you want to disturb your team members with an alert about this (so far) irrelevant information). When you’ve done that, click the Save button.

That’s what needed to be done to show the SharePoint page with the embedded group calendar in a tab in a channel in your Team.

Now we come to the disadvantage/disadvantages of this solution. As you can see in the picture below, there is no button or link to create a new event from here. You must therefore open this page in SharePoint. Already here, I think that most of you (like me) think that this solution is too cumbersome and requires far too many clicks and navigation.

If we manage to find the SharePoint page, we see here that we have a link called “Create a meeting”. We test by clicking on it and see what happens.

Would you look at that! Now we are taken to Outlook. Here I can click on a date

Believing I’m in the Team’s group calendar (which maybe I am? It’s not so clear) I enter a title for the event and add a description. Here, too, I think there are a bit too many clicks and options, but regardless, I fill in the information and then click the “Save” button.

If I now go back to my Team and my embedded page, I of course hope that my event will appear here and immediately, but unfortunately this is not the case. In my case here, my event is not shown and I am a bit puzzled as to why this is so.

To test further, I redo my exercise and create a new event. This time I create it as a Team meeting. Then I go back to my Team and that Event is then displayed.

It’s possible that I’m doing it the wrong way but if it’s not intuitive enough for me who has worked with Microsoft Teams since the beginning of time, it’s certainly not easier for an everyday user. That is why now I give up and think that I should consider another solution. Surely there must be a better way? I have heard about Channel Calendars, could that be a solution for me?

If you intend to use a channel calendar

Scaling a channel calendar is very easy. The question is whether its functionality is what I’m looking for. We’ll see. I start by going to the channel I want to add to the channel calendar. Then I click the plus sign to add a new tab. I click there on the icon for Channel calendar

I give it a good name and here too I deactivate the “Post to the channel” box and then click the Add button

That was easy! Now the channel calendar appears in a tab in my channel.

I click somewhere in the calendar view and a picture appears where I can enter a title for the event. I can see that the event will be placed in the channel (whatever that means, we will soon see). When I’m done with this, I click the “Send” button. (Yes, I know, you don’t want to “Send”, you want to Save, but as you can see, this will be a meeting, but without participants).

OK. This actually looks good. Here I see the event in a great calendar display It was actually (more or less) what I was looking for.

But is this solution exactly what I’m looking for or is there a downside?

Unfortunately, there is a downside. If you now go to the “Posts” tab, you will see that since you have set up a “channel meeting”, it is posted to Posts in the channel. The event you set up in the channel calendar might not be so important that you want it to also generate a channel post and thus be pushed right up in the faces of all the other members of the team.

It was here that I realized that this solution was also not completely optimal for what I wanted to achieve.

Conclusion – Solve it this way with a Microsoft List

Then we solve it this way instead!

I go to the channel i want to place my calendar in. Click the plus sign and find- and click on “Lists”.

When this image appears, i just click the Save button.

Here i select “Create a List”

And since there is no ready-made good template for my needs (yet anyway), I choose the “Blank List” option here

I give the list a name, enter a description, select an appropriate icon and then click the “Create” button.

The list is thus established, but I am missing a few simple things. I want to add a start date field and an end date field. I’ll start with the Start Date.

I click on “Add Column”. Next, I choose that the field should be of the “Date and time” type. Once I’ve done that, I click the “Next” button.

In the following image, I just enter the name of the field and then click the “Save” button.

I repeat the same exercise when creating the End date field. So click on Add column, select “Data and time” and click on “Next”.

I give the field a name and click “Save”.

But I don’t want to see a list display of upcoming events. Of course I want a calendar view. I solve that by clicking on the arrow to the right of the display name “All items” and then clicking on “Create new view”.

Here I give my view a name, choose calendar view and that it should have a weekly view. I can also specify which field I use as the start date and end date respectively. I want this view to be available to my colleagues in the team, so I choose “Make this a public view. When I have made these settings, I click on the button “Create”.

Now things look the way I want. All that remains is to test.

I can either click in the middle of the calendar display on the relevant day or I can click on the “New” button. Both variants result in this edit form being displayed. I enter a title for the event and select the start date and end date to finally click on the Save button.

And now I have achieved exactly what I was looking for. With Microsoft Lists, anyone can create a little wizardry and build very simple but useful solutions.

Of course, you can make this solution significantly more refined by adding times and maybe even connect some fun Power Automate flow that does one thing or another in the background, but that will be another blog post. 🙂

Those of you who usually read my blog posts know that I believe that the simple solutions are usually the best. My philosophy is that there is no need to complicate solutions. It’s best when it’s easy to build and easy to manage. Then there will be more time to focus on more important and/or more complicated things.

I think the picture below sums it up pretty well.