We’re back with a dive into another new feature in Fantastical 2.2! If you haven’t done so already, make sure that you’re up to date and running Fantastical 2.2.4. If you purchased Fantastical from the Mac App Store you can update via the Mac App Store’s Updates tab. If you downloaded Fantastical directly from our store, simply select Check for Updates from the Fantastical menu in the upper-left of the menu bar.

In this blog post we’re going to be taking a look at Fantastical’s powerful Availability view.

Availability is a convenient, time-saving tool that helps you schedule event times with invitees and works with most major calendar services (with the exception of iCloud). Availability will save a lot of hassle when trying to schedule events with multiple invitees, leaving you free to focus on preparing for your event.

Quickly viewing invitee availability

As soon as you start adding invitees, you’ll notice a small icon next to their name. This icon denotes the invitee’s availability via a tick, cross, or question mark, and allows you to quickly glance at your list of invitees to see who’s free at the planned time of your event.

Checking invitee availability in detail

By clicking Check Availability you can dive a bit deeper into your invitees’ calendars and view a timeline of their schedules around the time of your planned event. If there looks like there’s an available slot close to the original time of your event, simply drag and drop your event into the available slot and Fantastical will automatically update the event time and the invitee availability icons accordingly. You can also set Availability to display an all-day view or just working hours, and switch between days by using the arrow buttons at the top of the Availability view.

Expanding the Availability window

If you have a larger list of invitees, it might be a little cumbersome to try and view everyone’s schedules in the event creation window. In this case, click the pop-out window icon in the upper right of the Availability section, and Availability will become its own window that can be resized or maximized as you like.

Auto-scheduling an event time

It can often be a nightmare to try and coordinate everyone’s schedules, especially if you’re trying to manage a large invitee list! Thankfully, Availability has a Next Available Time button that can be selected to have Fantastical automatically find the next free slot that you and your invitees have in your schedules. Pretty convenient, right?

Cancelling events with a message

After successfully scheduling a time to meet, something may come up that requires the meeting to be cancelled. Due to this possibility, deleting an event will provide an option to send a message to your invitees, explaining your reason for canceling the event and hopefully reducing the amount of follow-up email you receive if an important meeting has to be postponed.

If you’d like to see Availability in action, please be sure to watch our video walkthrough.

We hope you enjoy getting to grips with Availability and that it saves you a significant amount of time when scheduling your events! We still have a few more 2.2 features to cover in this series of blog posts, and next time we’ll be discussing printing. Thanks for reading and we hope you’re enjoying Fantastical!