A shared calendar sounds simple enough—until you’re managing project deadlines across three departments, coordinating PTO for a 50-person team, and wondering why half your colleagues are still using sticky notes.
SharePoint calendars solve this by giving teams a centralized place to track events, deadlines, and schedules without the chaos of email chains or the limitations of personal Outlook calendars. Whether you need a team calendar for your marketing department or a project timeline visible to stakeholders, SharePoint offers flexible options that integrate directly with your Microsoft 365 environment.
This guide walks through everything you need to know about SharePoint calendars—from creating your first calendar to advanced techniques like overlaying multiple calendars and syncing with Outlook.
What Is a SharePoint Calendar?
A SharePoint calendar is a list-based app that displays events in a familiar calendar format. Unlike a personal Outlook calendar, SharePoint calendars are designed for group visibility and collaboration. They live on SharePoint sites where team members can view, add, and edit events based on their permissions.
SharePoint offers two main ways to display calendar information:
Calendar lists are dedicated calendar apps you add to your site. They function like standalone calendars with their own settings, views, and permissions.
Calendar views on existing lists let you display any list with date columns in a calendar format. This is useful when you want to visualize project tasks, content publishing schedules, or any date-driven data you’re already tracking.
How to Create a SharePoint Calendar
Creating a calendar in modern SharePoint takes just a few steps.
Navigate to your SharePoint site and select New from the top navigation. Choose List, then select Blank list or browse templates. For a traditional calendar, you’ll create a list and then configure a calendar view.
Alternatively, you can add the Events web part to any modern SharePoint page, which creates a calendar connected to your site’s events.
For a dedicated calendar list, add these columns to your list: Title (for the event name), Start Date, End Date, Location, Category, and Description. The date columns are what enable the calendar view.
Once your list has date columns, go to the list settings and create a new view. Select Calendar as the view type. You’ll specify which date columns represent the start and end of events. Save the view, and your list data now displays as a calendar.
Adding the Calendar Web Part to Pages
Modern SharePoint pages use web parts to display content, and the Events web part provides calendar functionality directly on your intranet homepage or team site.
Edit any SharePoint page and select the + icon to add a web part. Search for Events and add it to your page. This web part pulls from your site’s event list and displays upcoming events in a clean, visual format.
You can configure the web part to show events as a filmstrip, compact list, or tiles. For a full calendar grid view, you’ll link to the underlying calendar list or create a calendar view that users can access.
The Events web part works well for highlighting upcoming activities on your intranet homepage, while the full calendar list provides detailed scheduling capabilities.
Syncing SharePoint Calendars with Outlook
One of the most useful SharePoint calendar features is Outlook integration. Team members can overlay SharePoint calendars in their Outlook client, seeing team events alongside personal appointments.
To connect a SharePoint calendar to Outlook, open the calendar list in SharePoint. Select Integrate from the command bar, then choose Connect to Outlook. Outlook will open and prompt you to add the calendar. Once connected, the SharePoint calendar appears in your Outlook calendar list.
Changes sync both directions—add an event in Outlook, and it appears in SharePoint. Edit an event in SharePoint, and Outlook reflects the update.
This sync is particularly valuable for teams who live in Outlook but need shared visibility into project timelines or team schedules. Rather than forcing people to check SharePoint constantly, the calendar comes to them.
Overlaying Multiple Calendars
Organizations often need to see several calendars at once—perhaps a company events calendar, a team deadlines calendar, and a facilities booking calendar. SharePoint supports calendar overlays that display multiple calendars in a single view.
In classic SharePoint, you configure overlays through calendar settings, specifying which calendars to layer and what colors to use for each. This creates a unified view where events from different sources appear together, color-coded for easy identification.
Modern SharePoint handles this differently. The approach typically involves creating a consolidated view or using the Events web part to pull from multiple sources. Some organizations use Power Automate to aggregate events from multiple calendars into a single master calendar.
For complex calendar needs across departments, consider how your modern intranet structure supports calendar visibility and whether centralized calendars make more sense than distributed ones.
Color Coding and Categories
Visual organization makes calendars far more useful. Color coding helps teams instantly identify event types—blue for meetings, green for deadlines, red for company holidays.
In SharePoint calendar lists, you accomplish this through a Category or Event Type column. Create a choice column with your categories, then use view formatting or conditional formatting to apply colors based on category values.
Modern SharePoint list formatting uses JSON to customize how items display. You can define rules that change background colors, add icons, or modify text based on column values. Microsoft provides templates for common formatting scenarios, making it accessible even without JSON expertise.
Consistent color coding across your organization creates a shared visual language. When everyone knows that red means urgent and purple means training, calendars communicate more effectively at a glance.
Setting Calendar Permissions
Calendar permissions follow SharePoint’s standard permission model. Site owners, members, and visitors have different default access levels, and you can customize permissions for specific calendars when needed.
Owners have full control—they can create, edit, and delete any event, plus manage calendar settings and permissions.
Members can typically add and edit events. This is the appropriate level for team members who need to contribute to the calendar.
Visitors have read-only access. They can view the calendar but cannot add or modify events. This works well for organization-wide calendars where most employees should see events but only specific people should create them.
For calendars containing sensitive information—executive schedules, HR events, or confidential project timelines—you may need to break permission inheritance and set unique permissions. Be thoughtful about this; overly complex permissions become difficult to manage and can create confusion about who can see what.
Accessing SharePoint Calendars on Mobile
Teams don’t always work from their desks, so mobile calendar access matters. SharePoint calendars are accessible through the SharePoint mobile app, which displays lists and libraries from your sites.
For the best mobile experience, calendars synced to Outlook appear in the Outlook mobile app alongside other calendars. This often provides a smoother experience than navigating SharePoint sites on a phone.
If mobile access is a priority for your team, test how your calendar setup works across devices during planning. A calendar that looks great on desktop but frustrates mobile users will see limited adoption from field teams or traveling employees.
Common SharePoint Calendar Use Cases
Team schedules and PTO tracking. A shared calendar showing who’s out of office helps with coverage planning and prevents scheduling meetings when key people are unavailable.
Project milestones and deadlines. Display project dates in calendar format so stakeholders can visualize the timeline without opening project management tools.
Room and resource booking. While SharePoint isn’t a full resource booking system, simple room calendars work well for small organizations or departments.
Content and campaign calendars. Marketing teams use SharePoint calendars to plan content publishing, campaign launches, and promotional activities.
Company events. Organization-wide calendars for holidays, all-hands meetings, and social events keep everyone informed.
Making Your Calendar Strategy Work
A calendar is only useful if people actually use it. That means making calendars easy to find, keeping them current, and integrating them into existing workflows.
Place calendar web parts on frequently visited pages rather than burying calendars in obscure site corners. Connect calendars to Outlook for users who prefer that interface. Establish clear ownership so someone is responsible for keeping the calendar accurate.
Consider how calendars fit into your broader modern intranet strategy. A well-designed intranet makes calendars discoverable and relevant, surfacing the right events to the right people without overwhelming anyone with information they don’t need.
When SharePoint Calendars Aren’t Enough
SharePoint calendars work well for team scheduling and event display, but they have limitations. Complex resource booking, sophisticated scheduling rules, or integration with external booking systems may require dedicated scheduling software.
If you’re finding SharePoint calendars limiting, evaluate what’s missing. Sometimes the solution is better configuration or workflow automation. Other times, a specialized tool integrated with your Microsoft 365 environment is the right path forward.
Need help designing a calendar strategy that fits how your teams actually work? Reach out to discuss how we can help streamline scheduling across your SharePoint environment.