There may be times when you want to share your calendar with others, but not show the exact details of the events on your calendar. Our "Free/Busy” feature allows you to do exactly this. Anytime that you use this feature on your calendar, all of your event content will show as “Busy” rather than showing the actual content of the Event. This feature will apply to Calendar Overlays, embedded Calendars, RSS Calendar feeds, and public iCalendar feeds.

Note: Being about to use “Free/Busy” is a feature available only to paid Solo and Team accounts.

If you currently have a free Basic account, you can try a 15-day free trial of our Solo plan to try out all of our premium features.

If you want to turn on this feature for your entire calendar, you can access this feature in the “Who can see my calendar?” tab in your Calendar’s “Customize” screen. However, you can also turn this feature on only for select Calendar Overlays. When you click on a Calendar Overlay in the Navigator for your calendar, you will see a pop-up dialog with a field labeled"Show as 'Busy'" which lets you force that overlay's contents to be shown as “Busy” to any viewer who does not have edit rights to the calendar.

How to display your Overlays Events as “Busy”

First, you will need to add a Calendar Overlay to your calendar. Once you have done that, follow the steps in the image below:

Once you have turned this feature on, see the image below for how your calendar will appear to your calendar visitors that do not have edit rights:

Note: This does not replace or change the original busy flag setting right on a calendar's "Who can see my calendar?" screen. Instead, it complements that original setting.

This feature is especially powerful with any iCalendar feeds that you are using as overlays in your account since you are unable to use the “Customize & Share” screen to force iCalendar feed events as “busy.”

If you want to make only select events show as "busy" rather than all of the events from one calendar you also have the option of using hidden details. This advanced technique would allow you to hide event text from read-only viewers of a calendar, but as the editor of the calendar, you would be able to see what the event was about.
Instead of an event having this text:

  • Lunch with John Doe

You would enter this exact text:

  • [  Lunch with John Doe  |  Busy ]

The text to the right of the vertical bar will be shown to read-only visitors.  The text on the right can say whatever you want.

  • [  Lunch with John Doe  |  Not Available This Time  ]

Learn more about hiding event details.