Filtering, and those faded repeating items

A calendar showing five sources at once gets crowded quickly. The Filter Calendar popover is how you take control of it.

What is in the filter

It is divided into sections. Scope repeats the personal-versus-organisation choice. Show lets you switch whole item types on and off — hide meetings and appointments and you have a clean view of your own work, hide tasks and you have a diary. There are also status and category filters specifically for Appointments and Reminders, so you can drop cancelled appointments or completed reminders out of view.

Start by removing one type rather than building a view up from nothing. Most people find that hiding a single noisy category is all they needed.

Show recurring projections

A checkbox called Show recurring projections controls the faded entries you may have noticed in future weeks. These are the expected future occurrences of repeating tasks and reminders — a forecast, so you can see that every Monday is already spoken for.

They are genuinely not real yet, and that has a consequence people run into: you cannot open a projection. Clicking one does nothing useful, because there is no record behind it.

A repeating task becomes a real item on its due date. A repeating reminder becomes real once the current one is completed. Until then it is only a shadow of what is coming.

If the forecast is more clutter than help, untick the box. Your choice is remembered next time.

When there is simply too much

Ask for a very wide date range — a full year across every scope — and the calendar may show a notice asking you to narrow the dates or apply a filter. It is protecting you from a page that would take an age to draw. Shorten the range or hide a type, and it will come straight back.

Finding one specific thing

The search icon on the calendar opens the global command palette, already scoped to calendar items. That is faster than scrolling through months when you know roughly what the thing is called.