Connect your calendar

Pulse syncs with either Google Calendar or a Microsoft (Outlook) calendar. With it connected, it can tell you about a meeting that is about to start through a notification, and use event details such as the title and attendees to improve the accuracy of your enhanced notes. It makes a real difference to how the app feels, so it is worth setting up correctly at the start.

#What appears under “Upcoming events”

Your next events appear under “Upcoming events” on the home screen. To keep the screen uncluttered, only five are shown by default. The arrows on either side move further ahead.

If you add or change an event in your calendar, it is reflected in the app within a few minutes. The following are not shown:

• events you have declined
• calendar entries that are not meetings (out of office, focus time, working location and similar blocks)

#Using more than one calendar

Your primary Google or Microsoft (Outlook) calendar is synced by default. Any other calendar has to be enabled individually in settings.

1. Click your workspace name at the bottom left of the screen.
2. Settings.
3. Choose Calendar in the sidebar.

This screen is where you choose which calendars appear in the app. How meetings are presented under “Upcoming events” is also adjusted here.

#Seeing a calendar from another account

Pulse reads the calendar of the account you sign in with. If you signed in with a Google account that means Google Calendar; if you signed in with a Microsoft account it means your Outlook calendar.

So to bring in events from another account, you need to share that calendar with the account you sign in with, and make sure the shared events actually appear in the calendar of the account you signed in with. Note that sharing to an email address alone is not enough. If, for example, you sign in with a Microsoft account and want to see Google Calendar events, you have to get as far as those events appearing in your Outlook calendar.

For the sharing permission, choose “See all event details” in Google, or the equivalent in Microsoft. A permission that only shows free/busy will not let events be imported.

• How to share a Google Calendar: Google's help
• How to share an Outlook calendar: Microsoft's support pages

Wait a few minutes after sharing and the events will sync. Google and Microsoft (Outlook) calendars are supported; Apple calendars are not supported at this time.

#Using several accounts side by side

You can add several accounts to Pulse and move between them from the account switcher in the bottom-left menu. This suits keeping calendars entirely separate — a Microsoft account for work and a Google one for personal use, say.

If you would rather bring everything into one account, use calendar sharing.

1. 1

   Share the calendar

   Share the calendar you want to bring in with the email address of the account signed in to Pulse.

2. 2

   Choose the permission

   For the sharing permission choose “See all event details” (Google) or the equivalent (Microsoft).

3. 3

   Check it appears in the destination calendar

   Confirm that the shared calendar's events appear in the calendar of the provider you sign in with (Google Calendar or Outlook). This check matters especially when sharing across providers.

4. 4

   Enable it in the app

   Open Pulse's Settings > Calendar and switch the shared calendar on. Events usually appear within a few minutes.

If you want to handle meetings from several accounts together, consolidate all the calendars into the account you sign in with, then enable them in settings.

#When recording starts

Connecting a calendar is a setting for importing events; connecting it does not by itself cause meetings to be recorded. Transcription starts when you click the notification before a meeting, open an event whose start time has passed from the home screen, create a new note, or leave the note for an upcoming event open as its start time arrives. No recording bot joins the meeting either. Each condition is explained in detail in How transcription works.

For a discussion that is not in your calendar, start recording from a new note rather than from the calendar. If a meeting does not appear under “Upcoming events”, work through Calendar is not syncing to narrow it down.

#How far back past meetings go

“Upcoming events” lists meetings still to come; past records are found in your notes list. What remains in Pulse is only the notes for meetings you actually recorded with Pulse. Notes are never created retroactively from past calendar events.

How far back you can look within the app depends on your plan. The free plan shows the last 30 days; notes older than that are not deleted and remain stored. For the differences between plans, see the comparison table in Plans and billing.

#How notes for related meetings are grouped

When you open the note for a recurring meeting, notes from previous instances of the same meeting are shown alongside it, so you can see what happened last time. Two signals are used to relate them:

• the recurring event ID from the calendar
• an exactly matching meeting title

If either matches, the meetings are treated as related. That means care is needed if you recreate a recurring event: deleting an existing series and recreating it under the same name assigns a new recurring event ID on the calendar side, so earlier notes are treated as a separate series. If the title matches word for word, they will still be related.

#When events or notes appear twice

If the same meeting appears twice under “Upcoming events”, or one meeting produces two notes, it is almost always because the meeting exists in more than one calendar — your own calendar and a shared copy of the same event, both enabled.

Settings > Calendar and switch off whichever calendar you do not need. If you want to keep both, simply delete the duplicate note.

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