Google Calendar is making a significant change for anyone who manages shared schedules or secondary calendars. Google is forcing all owned secondary calendars to remain visible in your settings list, replacing the old ability to simply unsubscribe or toggle them off.
While a small tweak, this is a major quality-of-life improvement that guarantees owners retain access to settings and permissions. It makes sure that you, as the owner, always have immediate access to manage the calendar’s settings, adjust sharing permissions, and control the entire lifecycle of that schedule. Even if you hide them from your main view, these calendars are always accessible in your Settings. If you want them back on your daily schedule grid, just check the ‘Show in calendar list’ box.
This was mentioned late last year by Google, but it focused on the fact that there would be changes to secondary calendar ownership. Previously, secondary calendars, which are any calendars you create or are shared with you, could only be managed at the organization level. That structure was too broad for effective day-to-day management.
The new system defines a single, dedicated owner for each secondary calendar. When you create a new calendar, you automatically become the owner. For existing calendars, Google automatically assigned an owner based on the calendar’s current permissions. This move gives much more fine-grained control for anyone who needs to define specific policies for each calendar, such as data regions.
Defining a dedicated owner also makes transferring responsibility much easier. If you are the owner of a secondary calendar, you can transfer that ownership to another user right through the Calendar settings.
When it comes to managing the calendar’s lifecycle, you now have clear options. To get rid of a calendar now, you have two choices: nuke it for everyone, or hand the keys to a new owner. Transferring ownership lets you unsubscribe from the calendar while making sure it stays active and visible for the rest of the team.