Calendar & Events

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Calendar overview

An event is an occasion like a meeting or lunch, which doesn’t require a responsible party or a deliverable. Events are good markers for meetings or travel plans in addition to celebrations. Events won’t shift when you shift a milestone and can’t be marked “completed."  Events are not a part of templates.

In the Global Dashboard, you’ll see all the milestones and events from all projects while the calendar tab in a specific project will show those for that individual project. With the Basecamp calendar, you’ll see milestones and events laid out in a typical calendar view. 

To add an entry, click either the Add a new event button or just click on the correct date in the calendar. 

When you add something to the calendar you’ll see two options: You can make the item an event or you can make it a milestone. A milestone has a checkbox and is marked late if the date passes without the checkbox being checked off. Events don’t have checkboxes and aren’t marked late.

An event might be “Manager meeting” while a milestone might be “Bakery“Launch." You can use events or milestones any way you’d like, of course.

You can also set up spanned events. Spanned events let you designate events that last more than one day. You can even use spanned events to label project phases.

You can also add events or milestones to any project on the calendar on the Dashboard. When you add an event or milestone from the global Dashboard calendar, you’ll see a pulldown that lets you select the appropriate project. You don’t have to go into a project to add an item to that project’s calendar.

Adding and editing events

To add an event to the calendar, just click on the day you want it added, fill out the popup window, and click “Add this event." If you need to move that event, just click on it, change the date, and click that add button again. If you need to delete it, click on the event and use the small trashcan icon in the bottom right of that window.

Phases and spanned events

Events and milestones can be spanned across several days so they’re perfect for project phases. To do that, just click on the Calendar tab to pull up this month. Let’s click on the day we want it to start and then give it a phase title. Since we want it to span a few days, click the multi-day event link and choose the end date. The event setting is fine so we’ll add this event to the Calendar.

That gives us a spanned event that covers all the days of the project phase we need it to.

Spanned events as a Gantt chart

Basecamp supports spanned milestones & events, which can be used to create Gantt-style charts. To create a spanned event or milestone, click the “Add a new event button”.

On this menu, you can choose the ‘Make this a multi-day event’ option. This will let you set an end date for the event.

Enter the end date, and Basecamp will create a spanned event. Your spanned events can even overlap.

Syncing, integrating with external calendars

iCalendar

To subscribe, click on a project, then on the “Calendar’ tab.

Then click the “Subscribe to iCalendar” link at the bottom left side of the page.

You can also subscribe to the combined feed of milestones and events across all of your projects by clicking the “Global iCalendar” link at the bottom of the Dashboard page.

Your calendar might only check the iCalendar feed every 30 minutes or some times even only once per day. It depends on the calendar and the settings. But if you don’t see changes showing up immediately, this is why.

It's not possible to move events from one project to another.

Outlook

Basecamp Classic’s iCalendar feed for Milestones works with Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 for Windows (but not previous versions, so make sure you’re using Outlook 2007+). The iCal feed can be found at the bottom of the Dashboard Overview. It’ll look like this:

Each project will also have its own iCal feed at the bottom of the project’s Calendar tab.

When you click on the link, it will automatically add it to your Outlook Calendar.

Outlook has not added support for iCal feeds in Outlook for Mac at this time.

Google Calendar

To add the iCalendar of milestones and events to Google: 

  • Right click the Global iCalendar link and choose the Copy Link Address option.

  • Go to your Google Calendar 
  • Look in the sidebar 
  • Click the link + symbol next to Other Calendars

  • Choose the From URL option 

  • Paste the URL of the calendar then click on the Add calendar button

Troubleshooting sync errors

There are a few possible reasons for this with iCal specifically: 

1. You don’t have an iCalendar-compatible calendar program installed on your computer. iCalendar is a file format and if you don’t have a program that can read it then you can’t subscribe to it.

2. You have an iCalendar-compatible calendar program BUT your computer isn’t set up to launch the program when you click on an iCalendar URL on the web. In this case you need to copy the iCalendar URL and manually subscribe to that URL from within your iCalendar-compatible program. If you don’t know how to do that please consult the manual or help files that came with your iCalendar-compatible program.

3. You changed your Basecamp password. When you change your Basecamp password your iCalendar URLs are reset for security purposes. So, if you were subscribed before, but now you can’t get to your iCalendar calendars, you may want to just resubscribe again.

4. If you try to subscribe to your Basecamp Milestones in iCalendar format, and your computer tells you it doesn’t recognize “webcal://” you’ll need to manually subscribe to the milestones calendar in your calendar program by replacing “webcal://” with “http://”.

For more information on the iCalendar format, see the iCalendar entry at Wikipedia.

Global view

The Calendar tab on the Dashboard lets you see a list of milestones and events laid out in calendar view, across all projects. You can see the items belonging to an individual, a company, or just view all of them. On the Calendar tab, you can sort by assignee, too. It's an option on the top right side of the calendar.

These tabs will only show tasks assigned to people in the account owner’s company, so you can’t use them to see tasks for clients.