Integrating Google Calendar Into Chrome OS: Complete Setup for Efficient Time Management

I cannot lie…I actually enjoy Chrome OS; the simplicity, the speed, the minimalist desktop. Having an OS that always “just works” can be a real treat, especially when you’re incredibly busy and on the go.

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So any time I can tweak Chrome OS to be even more efficient, I’m all for it.

Given my schedule lives and dies by Google Calendar, when I discovered a handy little hack that makes it easy to access your full calendar from the Chrome OS status bar, I knew it was a feature I’d want to have.

I was not wrong.

With this addition to Chrome OS, you can click the date in your Chrome OS status bar to reveal a full calendar with clickable dates to reveal any entry you have listed. For anyone who depends on both Chrome OS and Google Calendar, this will be a serious must-have.

Let me show you how to enable it.

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I’ll be demonstrating with Chrome OS 102.0.5005.6 (developer build).

Are you ready to super-charge your Chrome OS calendar experience? Of course, you are. Here’s how.

Enabling the Monthly Calendar view

Open Chrome on your Chromebook and type the following into the address bar:

chrome:flags

In the resulting screen, type calendar in the search bar and hit Enter on your keyboard. In the resulting window (Figure 1), click the drop-down and select Enabled.

Figure 1

The Chrome OS flags window is where you can get really granular with your configurations.

When prompted (Figure 2), click Restart.

Figure 2

Once enabled, you must restart your Chromebook for the changes to take effect.

After your Chromebook restarts, log back in and click the date in your system tray (bottom right corner of the screen). This will open the calendar overview (Figure 3).

Figure 3

The newly-enabled calendar overview in Chrome OS.

Click on any date that shows a blue dot to reveal all of your events for that date (Figure 4).

Figure 4

Clicking on a date reveals all events associated with that day.

If you click one of those events, it will open Google Calendar in either a tab or its own window (depending on if you have Google Calendar to open in its own app window).

And that, my friends, is how you make working with Google Calendar even more efficient on Chrome OS. Obviously, you can’t add or edit entries to your calendar from this feature, but if you’re constantly having to refer to Google Calendar on your Chromebook, this is the way to go.