Calendar app - share events but do not show details

[EliasM]

I would like to share my calendars with my secretary. This can easily be done with iCloud, so that's no problem. However, I also want her to see my personal events, but without the actual details. So she would only see that I'm busy, without seeing the event title, the location etc. I don't think that's possible with the standard Apple Calendar app. Is there any way to do this, possibly using a third-party app?

(My workaround for personal events during business hours so far is not share my personal calendar and create a second, empty business event to overlap with those personal events - but that's clunky and inelegant.)

 

[blackboxideas]

I'll assume your current personal calendar is an iCloud one, unfortunately you won't be able to directly share that calendar with another user and just show your free/busy time - the only option iCloud supports at this time are 'View' or 'View and Edit'.

You could consider using freebusy: https://freebusy.io/how-it-works - however that wouldn't integrate directly with your secretary's calendar app, and rather relies on a web preview.

An alternative could be to swap your personal calendar over to a Google or Exchange based one, either of these would allow you to set the visibility of information your invited users can view.

 

[EliasM]

Thanks for your reply! I thought it wasn't possible indeed, but I hoped there would be some third-party app that could sync with iCloud and that could only show busy/free time.

I can't help wondering how people at Apple go about this - do they really not need this feature, or don't they use their own product for their calendars?

I'll look into the Google solution, even though I'm not too fond of Google in general.