Categories and filters

Categories group events in your own calendar. Use them for contexts such as work, personal commitments, or a project. A category controls organization and filtering; it does not grant other people access to its events.

Choose categories you can use to make decisions

Create a category when you need to show or hide a set of commitments together. For example, separate client calls from focused work if you compare those activities while planning a week.

Give categories distinct names and colors, then reorder them so frequently used contexts appear together. A color helps you scan the calendar, but it is not a permission level or an invitation status.

Filter without changing the schedule

The sidebar's category selection controls which events appear. Hide a category when you want a narrower view, then restore it to compare the complete schedule.

Filtering does not delete events, end their recurrence, or disable their reminders. Search also uses your selected categories, so a restrictive selection can hide the result you expect.

To investigate a missing event, check these possibilities in order:

1. Show the category that contains the event
2. Include uncategorized events if the event has no category
3. Search using a distinctive title or description term
4. Check the occurrence date and time zone

If the event came from an invitation, also confirm that you signed in with the invited email address.

Organize received invitations independently

Assign an invited event to a category in your calendar without changing the organizer's category. Another participant can organize the same event differently.

This independence is useful for cross-team meetings. You can place a shared review in your client-work category while the organizer keeps it under their project. Neither assignment grants permission to edit the shared schedule.

Retire a category deliberately

Deleting a category and deleting its events are separate choices in the confirmation. If you only want to stop seeing a category temporarily, hide it instead.

To keep its events organized, move them to another category before removing the old one. Removing a category without deleting its events leaves those events without that category; include uncategorized events when looking for them afterward.

The deletion dialog can also request event deletion. This option works from the events currently loaded in Calendar, not a complete account-wide inventory. Do not assume it removes every distant historical event that belonged to the category.

Review the affected events and recurring dates rather than treating category cleanup as a backup or archive operation. For important historical schedules, verify an export's date coverage first.

Keep sharing separate

Use invitations to share an event with another person. Renaming a category, matching someone else's category color, or showing every category does not share access.

For a meeting attached to an event, the Meet link has its own access rules. Category filtering is not a way to restrict who can use that link.