Getting Started: Your First 5 Minutes With manyCalendars

You installed it. Now what?

You grabbed the extension from the Chrome Web Store, you see the little calendar icon in your toolbar, and you are wondering what happens next. Good news: you are about 4 minutes away from seeing every one of your calendars in a single view. No accounts to create, no servers to connect, no IT tickets to file.

This walkthrough covers the basics. By the end, you will have your calendars loaded, conflicts highlighted, and a clear picture of your week across every client.

Step 1: Open your calendar tabs

manyCalendars works by reading the calendar tabs you already have open. So the first thing to do is open each of your calendars in its own browser tab. That means your Google Calendar for Client A, your Outlook calendar for Client B, and whatever else you are juggling.

You do not need to log into anything new. If you can see the calendar in your browser, manyCalendars can read it. That is the entire authentication model: your existing browser sessions.

Arrange your tabs however you like. manyCalendars does not care about tab order. It just needs them open.

Step 2: Run your first sync

Click the manyCalendars icon in your toolbar, then hit the "Sync Calendars" button. manyCalendars will scan your open tabs, identify the ones that contain calendar data, and pull in every event it finds.

This usually takes a few seconds. You will see a progress indicator as each tab gets processed. When it finishes, your calendars appear in the sidebar, each with its own color so you can tell them apart at a glance.

If a tab does not get picked up, make sure it is showing the actual calendar view (not the settings page or an email inbox). manyCalendars looks for calendar grids and event data, so the calendar needs to be visible.

Step 3: See your unified view

Once the sync completes, you are looking at your unified calendar. Every event from every client, layered on a single grid. Events are color-coded by source, so you can instantly see which meetings belong to which client.

If any events overlap, they will have a red outline and an exclamation badge. The topbar shows a conflict count. This is the moment most people have the same reaction: "Oh. I had no idea those two meetings overlapped."

From here, you can toggle calendars on and off in the sidebar, switch between day, week, and month views, and click any event to see its full details. Your data stays local, read and merged on your device, not in our cloud.

What to explore next

Now that you have the basics down, a few things worth trying in the next few days:

Set up an ICS feed. If any of your calendars support ICS export, you can add the feed URL in manyCalendars settings. This gives you background sync without needing to keep the tab open.

Try the availability export. Click "Export Availability" to generate a plain-text summary of your free time across all calendars. Paste it into Slack or email when someone asks "when are you free this week?"

Enable Privacy Mode. Before a screen share, Privacy Mode swaps your view for a neutral, generic calendar with a plain "Calendar" tab title, so another client's meeting details stay off the shared screen.

That is it. Five minutes, no configuration files, no admin access, no syncing nightmares. Just your calendars, together, in one place. Install manyCalendars for free and stop pretending your brain can do what a calendar tool should.