Getting started

Getting started

Fantastical enhances iCal, BusyCal, Entourage, and Outlook by allowing you to quickly and easily create new events using natural language input. You can also quickly locate the dates you're looking for via Fantastical's handy menu calendar, view your upcoming events in a convenient list, and search for past and upcoming events.

Natural language event creation

Quickly and easily create new calendar events with Fantastical's natural language input. Just click the menu bar icon or use the keyboard shortcut to open Fantastical, enter your event in natural English, and press return. Your new event will be added, just like that!

Fantastical's natural language engine is very powerful and very flexible. For suggestions and help on entering sentences, please see tips for entering sentences.

Find and manage your events

From the calendar, you can browse back and forth through months and find the date you're looking for. Today is indicated by a red circle. Hovering your mouse pointer over a date on the calendar opens a tooltip, which will display information about that date's events.

The event list under the calendar organizes your events in a very nice format. All-day events are displayed in a solid color (the color will reflect the iCal calendar the event belongs to). Timed events will be listed next to a dot (the color will reflect the iCal calendar the event belongs to). Events that have passed will darken, letting you focus on your upcoming events. Hovering your mouse pointer over an event in the event list will highlight that event in the calendar.

You can even edit and delete your events. Just click to select your event and then click the Edit button.

Anchor mode

Click the anchor button at the bottom-left corner of Fantastical to keep Fantastical open when you switch to a different application. Click the anchor again to disable this mode. You can also press command-control-A to toggle this mode.