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I am looking for a Windows desktop calendar solution to make schedules for landscaping crews. It does NOT need to have a mobile component. Google Calendars and MS Outlook both allow me to combine multiple calendars or to color code appointments, but there are a number of formatting issues which make them a bit less useful than they could be.

What I'm looking for:

  1. Ability to put the schedules of 5-6 crews on the same calendar.
  2. Appointments from one crew do not spread across to the columns of other crews (see green and blue entries in image below). This spreading to fill the whole width when there are no other appointments for a given time of the day seems to be the way virtually every calendar I've tried works. And it is very unhelpful in my case.
  3. Items from one crew should remain within their own column. (again see green and blue entries from image below)
  4. Should either permit the creation of repeating events (weekly/every 2 weeks, etc.) OR the importation of appointments from Outlook or Google Calendars.

Some of these formatting issues can be worked around by adjusting start times by a minute so that things line up, but that is so bush league and doesn't work reliably all the time anyway.

Now for bonus points: Crews are of different sizes. It would be incredible to be able to adjust the widths of each crew column to reflect the crew size so that appointments for a 4-man crew occupied twice the horizontal real estate that a 2-man crew occupied.

This seems like such a simple feature set that I can help but think I'm missing something obvious.

Finally I am open to suggestions of other types of software that would work - not limited to calendars.

Calendar Problems

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  • Google Calendars #2. Instead of creating an event that the 1st till 4th, leave the start and end date the same check the repeat box, and indicate which days you want it to repeat on. The cells will not be joined. This in and of it self demonstrates #4. I would create 6 calendars on 1 account and then just make them all visible.
    – cybernard
    Commented Mar 4, 2016 at 23:55
  • If you, or someone you know, knows how to program, Google Calendars has an API which they could download the events, and re-display the output look any way you wanted. I don't use the API to change how it looks, but I do use it to programmatically add hundreds of events to multiple calendars.
    – cybernard
    Commented Mar 4, 2016 at 23:59
  • These are all "one-day" events. The repeat function works fine. It's within the single day that they spread out to occupy the entire width if there is nothing else scheduled for that time slot. The real problem is that the end users are not tech-savvy and on some cases have very little experience with graphical representations of schedules. The image above is confusing to them. It would be less so if each color (crew) was confined to a single column. In this case there are 5 colors, but the colors are mixed and spread across under other colors or are shifted under other colors.
    – That Idiot
    Commented Mar 5, 2016 at 1:03

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