A free Google or Gmail account also gives you Google Calendar, making it one of the most popular calendar apps on the planet. While it is loaded with features, it’s not perfect. These free apps and extensions make Google Calendar better and more productive than ever before
One of the best Chrome extensions for Google Calendar was a simple drop-down pane that showed a preview of upcoming events. There was one built by Google itself and then another by a third-party developer Manas Tungare. Unfortunately, both of these are no longer available. But there’s a worthy replacement in Button for Google Calendar.
In fact, the makers of Button say their open-source extension is a replica of Tungare’s original. Once you install it and sign in, click the icon in the extensions bar to see a pane with upcoming events today and tomorrow. In case of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, or Google Meet calls, you also see a link for the meeting room to click and join directly.
Button for Google Calendar also lets you create calendar events through a shortcut. Press the Plus icon to add name, date and time, location, links, and notification to create a new entry. The extension also supports push notifications to remind you of upcoming events without clicking the button.
GCalPlus (Chrome): Powerful Extra Features for Google Calendar
GCalToolkit is a paid desktop program for calendar power-users to fix many of the limitations of Google Calendar. The same makers developed GCalPlus, a free Google Chrome extension to add several powerful features to Google Calendar and fix many of the app’s annoyances.
Here’s a quick list of some of the best features of GCalPlus:
- Duplicate events / Create multiple events: Every event has a “Multiple Copy” option to duplicate it to a new date or to multiple dates across your calendar. It’s an excellent option for recurring events.
- Expanded titles on hover: Google Calendar doesn’t show the full title of events beyond a certain character limit. Whether it’s blocked because of the view or because of overlapping events, you can now hover over any title card to see the full title name.
- More ‘All Day’ events: View twice as many All Day events in the Weekly and Daily views.
- Group All Day events: All Day events will be grouped alphabetically since their time slot doesn’t matter.
- More events in Month view and L/R arrows: View twice as many events per day in the ‘Month’ view, and use the simple left and right arrow keys instead of ‘n’ and ‘p’ for the next or previous day.
- Show busy dates: The month’s icon in the left sidebar will show red dots to indicate dates with several events.
- Hide event illustrations: Remove GCal’s auto-added header images.