Search
Open the panel and start typing. A short name or phrase searches existing events. Select a result to inspect or act on it.
The calendar window has a search of its own. Press Command-F, or click the toolbar's magnifying glass, and a Spotlight-style search opens over whatever view you are in: matching events and reminders on the left, the selected one's card on the right, and your Recent Searches before you type. Arrow keys move through the results, Return shows the event in the calendar, and Escape clears and then closes. The Full Calendar Window has the details.
Create an event or reminder
Type a sentence such as Lunch with Amara Friday at 1 at Lilia. InstaCal shows a live preview of the title, date, time, duration, location and destination calendar. Adjust the preview if needed, choose Event or Reminder, then press Return. The editor closes at once and the event appears while it saves; if the save fails afterward, InstaCal tells you.
As you type, Quick Add colors the words it understood — the time, the day, the place. Click a colored word to change just that detail without retyping the sentence.
Quick Add understands all 31 languages InstaCal speaks, reading dates, times and repeats in each one. On supported devices running macOS 26, Apple Intelligence can add on-device context and calendar inference. InstaCal’s built-in parser remains available and nothing you type is sent to an InstaCal server.
Add from Image
A school calendar, a club newsletter, an invitation or a gym's class timetable can go straight onto your calendar without typing a word of it. InstaCal reads a screenshot, a saved photo or a PDF of the page and lists every event and to-do it finds, for you to check and add.
There are several ways to give it a page:
- File → Add from Image… chooses a picture or PDF from disk. File → Add from Pasted Image reads what is on the clipboard — a screenshot taken with
Control-Shift-Command-4, or a picture copied from Preview, Photos or a web page. - The photo button at the end of the panel's quick-add field offers Choose Image… and Paste Image.
- Drag a picture or PDF onto the menu bar item or the panel.
- Share it to InstaCal from Safari, Preview, Mail or any app with a Share button — a PDF or a web page works as well as a picture.
The review window lists what was found, each with a tick, a kind and its date. Everything is ticked except what is already on your calendar, which is unticked and says so, so adding the whole page twice does not double it. Untick anything you do not want, turn a row into a reminder or back into an event from its menu, choose the calendar and the reminder list, and Add puts the ticked ones on your calendar. Any row can be opened in the full event or reminder editor first, alerts and invitees included.
For puts a name in front of every title — “Ava Pajama Day” — so two children's school days do not read alike. InstaCal remembers the name, and the calendar, for each school or organizer the page names, so the next newsletter from the same place lands in the same place. If something was missed or misread, Read Again More Carefully takes a slower second look before anything has been added.
Note: Add from Image needs macOS 27 on a Mac with Apple Intelligence; on other Macs the menu items and the photo button do not appear. The page is read with Apple's Vision text recognition and then with Apple Intelligence through Private Cloud Compute, which keeps it private to you. Nothing goes to an InstaCal server. Apple sets a daily limit on how much it reads, and InstaCal tells you when you are close to it.
Put one event on several dates
In a new event, click Add Another Date under Starts and Ends, then set that row's date and time. Add as many as you need; the list scrolls after four, and the red minus removes one. The button at the bottom changes to count them — Add 3 Events — and makes a separate event for each date, with the same title, location, alerts, notes and length, so any one of them can be moved or deleted on its own. It is not a repeating series.
With All-day on, each extra date becomes a date only. On a Google calendar with guests you are asked about emailing them once, not once per date, and with Zoom added each date gets its own meeting.
Pick an address from Contacts
Type a person's or a company's name in an event's Location field and their addresses from Contacts are offered above Apple Maps' places, such as Home · 12 Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris. Choosing one fills in the address alone, so the map, travel time and directions work from it. If InstaCal has never been allowed to read Contacts, the list ends with Find addresses in Contacts and a Set Up… button; typing on its own never raises a permission prompt.
Say it repeats
Put the repeat in the sentence and you get the series rather than one event. Run payroll every Monday at 9am saves a weekly event starting on the next Monday, with every Monday taken out of the title.
| How often | Phrasings it knows |
|---|---|
| Daily | every day, each day, daily |
| Weekly | every week, weekly, every Monday, on Tuesdays |
| Every other week | every other week, every two weeks, fortnightly, biweekly, every other Friday |
| Monthly | every month, monthly |
| Yearly | every year, yearly, annually |
Naming a weekday pins where the series starts, so every Monday typed on a Wednesday begins on the coming Monday rather than today. Each language InstaCal speaks has its own forms, inflections included — jeden Montag, tous les lundis, cada lunes, 每周一. A repeat reaches reminders made this way too, and the same phrases work from Siri and Shortcuts.
Times, days and places it reads out of the sentence
A time written in words counts as a time. at noon tomorrow saves a 12:00 event tomorrow rather than an all-day one at a venue called noon, and midnight is read as midnight rather than midday. The same holds in every language InstaCal speaks — Polish jutro w południe, French demain midi, Malay esok pada tengah hari.
Where a language names a part of the day rather than an hour, the hour moves to the half the words say and those words leave the title with it: Indonesian pukul 3 sore is 3 PM, not 3 AM. A day named after the time wins over the day the clock implies, so Vietnamese 12 giờ trưa mai lands tomorrow.
The title survives a sentence that is almost all date. Dinner on friday and Lunch on the 12th keep their titles instead of saving an untitled event.
Words after at that name a place are offered as places. Typing Lunch tomorrow at grassis shows matching nearby places in the location card as you type; pick one to fill Location, and deleting the words from the title takes it back out. Matches are drawn from near your last known position, which needs no new permission prompt.
Name a calendar or use the default
Star a default under Settings → Calendars. Quick Add uses it unless the sentence names another visible calendar. The preview always shows the destination before anything is saved.
Jump to a date
Type where you want to go
Click the date at the top of the calendar window — the title itself is the button, with a small chevron beside it — and a Go to date field opens in a popover under a month grid. Type a phrase and InstaCal shows the date it worked out; press Return to take it, or pick a day out of the grid instead. Today is always one click away in the same popover.
It understands a good deal more than a date: next friday, dec 25, aug 2027, 3rd Tuesday in October, last Friday of October 2027, end of the month, in three weeks, 2027 on its own, or a bare day number, which means that day in the month you are looking at. A date with no year means the next time it comes round, today included; give a year and you can go backwards.
Dates that cannot exist are refused rather than quietly rolled forward — Feb 30 clears the result and Return does nothing rather than landing you on March 2 — and this, next and last weekday count weeks from whichever day you set as the start of the week.
If the wording is something the built-in parser does not know, InstaCal can hand the phrase to Apple Intelligence on the devices that have it, and only then: a phrase it already understands never leaves the device, and neither does anything about your calendar. What is sent is the words you typed, today's date, the month on screen and your language. The date that comes back is shown for you to confirm, never jumped to on its own. This follows the same Parse quick entry with Apple Intelligence switch as quick add, so turning that off keeps everything local.
Change an existing event
English Quick Edit recognizes commands such as Move gym to Friday, Rename lunch to Team lunch and Cancel dentist. InstaCal finds the likely item and shows the proposed change. Confirm the preview to apply it; cancel to leave the calendar untouched.
Tip: If your words could be either a search or a new title, keep typing a date, time or edit verb. The preview makes the chosen interpretation explicit before Return does anything.
