When you connect Google Calendar, beanies starts sending your beanies activities out to it. What it does not do on its own is bring your existing Google events IN. If you already have a year of swimming lessons, football and dentist appointments in Google, retyping them is a lot to ask, and typing them by hand leaves you with two of everything.
So there is a one-time import. You choose which calendars to read, beanies shows you what it found, and you tick what you want. Nothing is imported until you pick it.
The import itself runs once. It does not start watching your Google Calendar, and it will not pull in events you add there later. You can run the import again whenever you like, and it never re-imports anything it has already imported.
Importing your events
Go to Settings and open the Google Calendar card
On your connected account, tap Import my events
Tick the calendars you want beanies to read. Calendars you only subscribe to, like a holidays feed, are greyed out because beanies is not allowed to read them
Tap Find events to import. beanies reads the next 12 months. Nothing is written yet
Everything it found is already ticked. Untick anything you do not want imported
Tap Import N events, and confirm
What happens to each event afterwards
This is the part worth reading, because not every event can be treated the same way. Each row in the list tells you which it is.
- kept in sync — you created this event, so beanies can keep it in step with Google. Editing it in beanies updates the original event there. No second copy, nothing duplicated.
- copy only — someone else created this one, so beanies is not allowed to change it in Google. beanies takes a copy, the Google event is left exactly as it is, your beanies edits stay in beanies, and their later changes stay in Google.
- next date only — this one repeats in a way beanies cannot match exactly. Rather than guess and get your schedule wrong, beanies imports a single event on the next date the series happens.
An event marked "copy only" stays labelled in your planner afterwards, so months later you are never left wondering why an edit you made in beanies did not show up in Google. It is not a fault: beanies genuinely cannot change an event that someone else created.
Repeating events
A weekly swimming lesson is imported as one repeating activity, not as thirty separate ones. That holds even when the lesson started a long time ago: beanies reads the next 12 months, but a series that began two years ago and is still running is still found.
A few repeat patterns cannot be matched faithfully, usually because Google allows shapes beanies has no way to describe. Those are the ones labelled next date only. A series you have been pruning is treated the same way: if you have deleted the odd occurrence in Google, beanies will not put those back. Nothing is lost in Google either; the original series carries on exactly as before.
What beanies reads, and what it does not
- It reads the title, description, place, times and repeat pattern of your events.
- It does not read your guest lists. Other people’s email addresses are never requested and never stored in your family file.
- It reads only the calendars you tick. That can include a calendar someone has shared with you, as long as they have given you permission to edit it — a shared family calendar is usually the one you most want.
beanies never deletes an event it did not create. Deleting an imported activity removes it from beanies and leaves the Google event where it was. The same is true if you disconnect the calendar, or change which calendar beanies syncs to: nothing you imported is deleted from Google.
Things worth knowing
- beanies can only keep events in sync if they live on the calendar it syncs to. Events on your other calendars are imported as copies.
- If you later change which calendar beanies syncs to, events that were kept in sync become copies. They stay exactly where they are in Google — beanies simply stops claiming them, so you never end up with two.
- Imported activities arrive assigned to you and without a category, so you may want to tidy a few of them afterwards.
- If you have a great many events, beanies lists the soonest 200 that are new to it and tells you it has done so.
- Running the import again is safe. Anything already imported is shown but cannot be picked twice.
Once your events are in, they behave like any other beanies activity: they show up on the Family Planner, on the beanie wall, and in your daily briefing.