It’s been a few years since the “modern” interface was first introduced in SharePoint Online. The calendar view in SharePoint lagged behind for a while, but now… how exciting! There is a modern calendar view for lists and libraries in SharePoint! The idea is that any list/library can be viewed in a calendar format, just based on any date fields.
Here are the steps to using the new modern calendar view on any modern list or library:
1. At the top right of the list or library, click the name of the All Items view, to get the View drop-down. Click Create new view.
2. Give your view a name, and under “Show as”, click Calendar.
The thing about calendar views, is that they’re going to be based on date fields in your list/library. By default, usually there are just two, Created and Modified. Notice in the above screenshot, it shows my Created date as both the start date and end date. This means that my calendar would end up just showing an event on the calendar to represent the day each item/file was created. Something more useful, would be a list of projects. We would have a column for “Project start” and “Project completion”. With this, the calendar would show items that span across multiple days to show the duration of projects.
3. To show a better example, using actual start and end dates, add the following date columns to your list “Project start” and “Completion target”.
4. On this new view screen, pick the start date as the start date, and pick the completion target as the end date. I’m naming the view “Project Calendar” here.
Notice that there are more options. The Title of items on calendar lets you select which field you’d like to be displayed on the calendar view, to represent each item/document. By default, it will show the title of the item. Click Create.
5. Now you’ll see the new modern view, with items in the list displayed as calendar events. Click on different days to see the details of the daily events display in the panel on the right.
Currently, modern calendars can’t be displayed as web parts on pages. You can set the calendar as the default view of that list/library if you’d like, though:
10/8/2021 Update: The calendar view *can* now be selected in a list web part, if you want to do something like display a calendar on your homepage.
Check out this full hour video of my demonstration of modern calendar views in SharePoint. I even include a few extras, like taking an existing classic SharePoint calendar and “converting” it to modern.
