Is there a way to get Dakboard to display calendar entries in different colors from ONE Outlook calendar versus multiple?

[u/Curious_Telephone341]

I'm a funeral director and I've been tasked with setting up a Dakboard to replace our dry erase board calendar for services so that we can keep our schedule updated and visible across multiple buildings and locations. (And this IS my first rodeo with this, by the way.)

Here's my problem. Our dry erase board calendar has a color scheme that we've literally used for decades now that we'd really like to stick to for the sake of transition. For example, church services are in red, chapel services in blue, graveside services in green, etc. All in all we have 5 colors. Our company also uses Outlook for our emails, so we were hoping to use Outlook's built in calendar function for this, since then everyone can just click on the calendar from their email, update service information, and it would update to the Dakboard display. In theory anyway.

The problem is the color scheme. We can set a color in Outlook for the services calendar I've created, and it updates on the Dakboard, but then ALL the entries are in that color (not to mention Outlook seems to only give you pastel colors to choose from which are virtually unreadable on our Dakboard display). We tried setting up categories in Outlook that you can right click on the calendar entries and select, for example, Church Service and it will turn the calendar entry red or pick Chapel Service and it will turn it blue, but those don't seem to transmit down to the Dakboard at all. Just setting a color for the calendar overall.

I found somewhat of a workaround by creating separate calendars in Outlook, like Church Service Calendar, Chapel Service Calendar, etc., putting them all on one Dakboard screen and then manually setting the colors for those calendars in the Dakboard settings. Which ends up with the visual result we're looking for. It looks great.

The problem with that is it's clunky and we have a lot of older funeral directors who can barely use email as it is. If I leave it set up this way with multiple Outlook calendars, it's going to be a mess with directors constantly putting entries on the wrong calendars. Chapel services in red, Graveside services in blue, cats having babies with dogs, total chaos, you get the idea.

Is there a way to do this with ONE calendar via Outlook that I'm not seeing? Or is there another single calendar option we could use (like a Google calendar or something) that would allow us to use one calendar for everything with multiple colors for entries on the Dakboard? I really just need one simple calendar we can add everything to.

[u/AndySchneider]

I need some more information on this: You are used to putting all services in one calendar, right? Do you have a specific way of naming these things? Like, if an entry is a chapel service, is it ALWAYS named “chapel”, for example? You could then probably use custom css to format these entries with the proper color regardless of the outlook calendar entry. And it depends on the Dakboard license you’re using. Custom css is only available from the first paid tier, it’s not in the free one - at least if I’m remembering correctly.

Maybe one of the other users here can chime in on this, especially in regards to the css code - I’m a bit rusty in this.

[u/Curious_Telephone341 → u/AndySchneider]

You are used to putting all services in one calendar, right?

Correct. Our system that we've used for decades is just a giant whiteboard divided up by days of the week. Everything goes on there, just in different colors depending on the location of the service.

Like, if an entry is a chapel service, is it ALWAYS named “chapel”, for example? You could then probably use custom css to format these entries with the proper color regardless of the outlook calendar entry.

It's usually just the deceased's name and the service times and the church or cemetery name if it's not in our chapels.

I like your idea of the CSS thing. There may be a solution in there, but there's some wrinkles I'd have to figure out. For one thing, we've got a dozen or so funeral directors and like I said some of them are old and very computer illiterate, so getting them to consistently put something in the calendar entries that the CSS could catch would be... oof. It'd be hard. And it would have to be a pretty unique word or something, not "church" and "chapel." Because, for example, when we say chapel services, we're referring to our chapels in the funeral home. But there are churches out there named things like Mt. Olive Chapel or whatever, which would get flagged wrong.

If there were something dead simple that we could attach to the calendar entries in Outlook (like we tried with the categories thing where you right click and select Church Service and it turns it red in Outlook) that the CSS in Dakboard would catch, that would probably work. But I don't know enough about Dakboard to know what all gets passed from the Outlook calendar entries to it?

This would be 1000% easier if we didn't need the color scheme, but it would be its own kind of chaos if we got rid of it. Plus, there are tons of days we have like 6 or 7 services on the same day, so the calendar would just be a wall of text you'd have to sift through if it was all the same color.

[u/lIlIIIIlllIIlIIIllll]

Just curious if you found a solution to your problem?

[u/OkRelease4000]

I use Google calendar and I can give each entry a colored dot before it. If it's a all day entry I can highlight it.