Add Upcoming Facebook Events And Birthdays To Calendar
If you linked your Facebook account to your Mac running OS X 10.8.2, Mountain Lion, you would have noticed there was an option to import your Facebook friends to the Contacts (previously called Address Book) app. As far as automatically importing data from your Facebook account to Mountain Lion goes, this is the full extent of it. There is still other information, like Facebook events that you could do with viewing in Calendar (formerly known as iCal) but there isn’t an apparently easy way to do it. It is extremely easy to import your Facebook events to Calendar and the process only seems obscure because you can’t import them to Mountain Lion from Calendar; rather, you have to export them from Facebook to Calendar. You’ll need to open Facebook in your browser on Mac, not necessarily Safari, but you will need to be using your Mac. This isn’t something you can do by accessing Facebook on your iOS device.
Head over to your events page (click ‘Events’ in the left side bar of your Facebook feeds) and click the little cog wheel button at the top right. You should see an ‘Export’ option there.
In the alert that opens, click ‘upcoming events’ and allow your browser to launch Calendar. When Calendar launches, it will do so with a dialog box already open and a URL added. Click ‘Subscribe’ without altering the URL and manage the settings for the calendar in the next box. Your Facebook events should now start syncing with Calendar and a new calendar [Your Name]’s Facebook Events should be added to the right side bar.
This will, of course, only add events to Calendar and if you want to see birthdays as well, repeat the process with the minor change of clicking ‘export your friends’ birthday’ instead of ‘upcoming events’ when you export from Facebook. Birthdays will be added as a separate calendar to Calendar. Most users might like to keep the events and birthdays calendars separate since you might have alerts disabled for one of them, but if you would like to merge the two calendars, drag one out to your desktop and then drag & drop it back on to an existing one to merge them.
If you sync Calendar over iCloud, you will be able to see these events and birthdays on your iOS device as well. If friends in your Facebook network frequently use Facebook events as a means of inviting you and others to events, this is an excellent way to keep track of them and set reminders when you need to.
