How to get the school calendar onto everyone's phone

Why does the school calendar never make it onto everyone’s phone?

It arrives in a format nobody wants to retype. A term calendar as a PDF attachment, a paper flyer that comes home in a backpack, a newsletter forwarded from one parent’s inbox, or a portal link buried in a “welcome back” email: each one needs manual copying into a calendar app before anyone else in the house can see it, and that copying is the step that gets skipped. The dates exist somewhere, just not on the calendar the rest of the family looks at.

What format did the school send it in?

The format the school used decides the fastest way in. There is no single “import the school calendar” button because schools don’t send one consistent format, so the method has to match what landed in the inbox or the backpack.

What the school sent	Best way in	What lands on the calendar
A PDF term calendar or newsletter	Share the file with Plannie	One event per date on the document
A paper flyer or printed schedule	Photograph it with Magic Import	Each date read off the photo, with Undo
An email newsletter	Forward it to the Family Inbox	Every date in the email and its attachments
A portal link or webcal feed	Subscribe it as an ICS feed	A self-updating, view-only layer

How do you forward the school’s email newsletter?

Forward it to the household’s own Family Inbox address, found or changed under Settings → General → Family inbox. Every Plannie household gets a dedicated @mail.plannie.io address at creation, and forwarding the school’s newsletter there, attachments included, gets every date in that email onto the calendar without anyone typing them in by hand. Naming a child in the forwarded subject line assigns those events to them instead of the whole family. The first email from a school’s address is held until the household owner approves it with one tap; after that, later newsletters from the same sender are read automatically. A held email nobody approves is deleted after 30 days, so nothing lingers half-processed.

How do you get a photographed flyer or paper schedule onto the calendar?

Open Magic Import and photograph it. The backpack flyer, the paper term calendar pinned to the fridge, or a screenshot of a class group chat can all be photographed or picked from the photo library, up to four images in one import. Plannie reads the photo in the background, so there’s no need to stay in the app while it works, and it sends a summary message once it’s done. Because a photo chosen on purpose counts as trusted, each event applies immediately rather than waiting for review, with one-tap Undo on everything it created. When a page shows more than one date, such as a term calendar listing every inset day, Magic Import splits it into a separate event per date rather than one blob covering the whole term.

How do you import a PDF term calendar?

Share the PDF file with Plannie and it reads it the same way whether the text is selectable or the page is a scan. Term calendars and club schedules usually arrive as PDFs, and Magic Import handles both a typed original and a photocopied newsletter someone saved as PDF, up to four files at once, 10 MB each, however many pages a single document runs to. A PDF that arrived as an email attachment doesn’t need a separate step: forwarding the email itself to the Family Inbox covers it, since Plannie reads the attachment as part of the message.

How do you subscribe to a school portal’s ICS or webcal feed?

Paste the portal’s webcal:// or .ics link under Settings → Family & access → a member → Sync & calendars → Connect a calendar → Calendar feed (ICS). Many school portals, sports clubs and activity providers publish their calendar as a subscribable feed and don’t send emails at all. Once it’s connected, the feed is a self-updating layer in the shared, colour-coded calendar, not a one-time import. Feeds are view-only, since Plannie never writes back to a calendar it doesn’t own, and they refresh roughly once an hour, so a date the school moves shows up on its own without anyone re-subscribing. This method is free on every plan, unlike email and photo import, which are Plannie Premium features.

What happens after the dates land on the calendar?

Every imported event carries a sparkle badge marking it as agent-created, and it’s editable like any other event from that point on: reassign it to a different child, correct a typo in the location, or delete it if it duplicated something already on the calendar. Because Plannie syncs two-way with connected Google and Outlook calendars, a school date imported here also shows up in whichever calendar app a parent already checks out of habit, and nobody has to push it there separately. The shared family calendar is where everyone sees it, and a kitchen tablet running in wall-display mode puts the whole term in view without anyone opening an app.

Full details on every import method are on the add-to-calendar overview, or go straight to the page for the format in hand: email, photo, PDF, or ICS feed.