Connecting Google or Outlook

How to connect

The calendar grant rides on the same connection as your email. There is no second consent screen and no second connection to manage.

1. Settings → You tab → Connected Accounts

2. Connect Gmail or Outlook/Microsoft 365 as normal.

3. In the same panel, find the Calendar section underneath Email.

4. Choose which calendar Workroom writes to.

5. Tick Show these calendars on the Workroom calendar for each calendar you want to read in.

6. Save.

"Reconnect to add the calendar"

If you connected your mailbox before calendar sync existed, your grant doesn't include calendar access. The panel will say so plainly. Disconnect and reconnect the account — your mail is unaffected — and the calendar section will come to life.

Google users may also see "Only your primary calendar is listed." Same cause: a grant issued before the wider calendar scope. Reconnect to pick from the full list.

What syncs, in each direction

Workroom → your calendar (push). Meetings only — things you have to be somewhere for. Specifically: events with a meeting/event/site-visit type, that you either created or are assigned to. Ship dates, invoice due dates and order-by dates are not pushed; burying your diary under four hundred procurement dates would make it useless, and they're already on the Workroom calendar.

Your calendar → Workroom (pull). Your events appear on the Workroom calendar under the Meetings layer, marked with the calendar they came from.

The ownership rule — read this one

Every synced event carries a record of who owns it:

• Workroom made it → Workroom's copy wins. It's pushed out; your edits here reach your calendar.

• It was pulled in → your calendar's copy wins. It is never pushed back, and it is read-only in Workroom. Editing it here would just be overwritten by the next sync.

And one promise that follows from it: Workroom never deletes anything in your Google or Outlook calendar that it did not create, and never edits an event it pulled in. Your own diary stays yours.

Timing

• Sync runs every minute, longest-unsynced account first.

• The window is 30 days back and 180 days forward. A first connect does not import four years of standups.

• Up to 400 events per pass, so one enormous calendar can't monopolise the queue.

• Sync now forces an immediate pass.

Events you haven't sent yet are always taken first, so every pass makes progress.

"Send earlier meetings" (backfill)

Meetings you created in Workroom before you connected a calendar have never been pushed — the sync only looks a month back.

Settings → Mailbox → Calendar → Send earlier meetings sends them. It's the same push over a much wider window: two years either side of today. Anything already on your calendar is recognised by its stored id and skipped, so running it twice is safe and running it after a normal sync costs nothing.

If you have more meetings in that window than one pass can send, you'll be told, and you can simply run it again — the next run picks up where the last one left off.

The connected-calendars rail

Once connected, your calendars appear in the left rail under the Workroom layers, each with its own tick box and event count.

• Unticking one hides its events. It's a filter, nothing more — the connection is untouched and the events come straight back when you tick it.

• Rename them. Your calendars almost always default to your full email address, which is useless in a list. Click the name to rename. This is a display name in Workroom; it changes nothing in Google or Outlook.

• Your choices persist between sessions, per browser.

Disconnecting

Turn off calendar sync, or disconnect the account, and every event Workroom pulled in from that calendar is removed from the Workroom calendar. It does not leave a frozen copy of your diary behind. Nothing is touched in Google or Outlook.