Can you add two isolated calendar web parts on a site, each calendar having it's own events?

Question

I would like to put 2-4 distinct calendars on my Sharepoint homepage. Each one will have its own events; not looking to overlay or have overlap. The purpose would be to collaborate across several departments that book events in their respective areas. We currently share all these calendars in various formats (word docs, excel, etc.)

I cannot overlay because there are too many events in a day (imagine 20 events in one day in diff locations at different times). It just wouldn't be visibly digestible.

Thanks!

Answer 1

List are "lists", and calendars are just a special view of a list. You can add as many list web parts as you need to a page. The only problem that you will have is the size of a calendar list web part when using a Calendar view. If it makes sense for your data, you may want to display custom views for the Calendars that display them as simple lists.

Answer 2

As Mike has pointed out, your biggest challenge will be screen real estate. You will be creating quite a cluttered view since the calendar web-part is not that easily customisable.

A possible solution would be to have each calendar appearing on a tab. This article will explain how to add tabs to a page HillBillyTabs2

However, your challenge is maintaining each of the calendars. A better solution would be to use a single calendar and filter each view based on the Category field (which you can modify to have the groups you require).

Here is a worked example;

• Setup your page to have 2 columns
• Insert the Calendar webpart in column 1
• Insert the Calendar wbpart again in column 2
• Save the page (you need to do this to prevent the webparts being lost; an annoying problem)
• Edit page again and select Calendar in column 1; click Calendar in menu bar (i'm using SharePoint 2013); click Modify View and change the Filter to the required Category. In my example I have set the filter to Category = Meeting.
• Repeat for Calendar in column 2 and set filter to other Category; in my example filter is Category = Business.

You know have 2 views for the same calendar showing different Categories. You could combine this with HillBillyTabs2 to give flexible and expandable calendar views all driven from one Calendar list.

Hope this helps.