Create a Go To Date function in iCal

Sep 21, '02 09:28:35AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I was puzzled by the lack of some kind of "go-to date" feature in iCal. If you want to move forward or back beyond the mini-month display at left, it only moves one month per click. I have to click & wait (it's slow) 12 times just to look at last September??

I wanted to create events for dates that were quite a distance from the present (I do hope to make iCal my main calendar). Well, why not create dummy events in the calendar to facilitate navigation through a search? So here's a "go to" solution:

  1. Pick a year in the past that's the earliest date you need to jump directly to
  2. Create a new event on January 1 of that year.
  3. Give the event a special one-character name; my choice is omega, which is a special character entered by typing option-z.
  4. Make it a repeating event repeating every three months; ending "Never".
This creates a set of dummy events that are easy to search for, allowing you to then quickly "go to" any particular calendar quarter, with the following steps:
  1. In the search field, type the special character (in my example, option-z).
  2. In the list of search results, click the dummy event closest to desired date.
iCal will then "go to" the quarter closest to the desired date. There is one more step we should keep in mind though...
  1. Encourage Apple to add date navigation, so that no such kludge is needed
[Editor's note: Agreed on the 'tell Apple' bit; you can do so directly through iCal with the iCal -> Provide iCal Feedback menu item.]

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