BillTrack50 Help Center

You can see your BillTrack50 Event Schedule on your own Google or Outlook calendar, or using any other tool that allows you to subscribe to a public calendar feed. You can watch Karen set hers up in 90 seconds here, or go through the step by step instructions below.

The Exciting Details

The calendar feed is based on your personal Event Schedule. Remember you add bill sheets to your event schedule from the alerts tab of your bill sheet. You will not see any hearings unless you add at least one bill sheet.

The event calendar knows what time zone the events are in, including taking daylight savings into account, and your google or outlook calendar should know what time zone YOU are in, so your events will show on your google or outlook calendar in your own local time.

The Event Schedule Calendar will update when you add bills or bill sheets to your Event Schedule, and will update the date, time, and location if the event changes. Note: we update events every day at 4:00 am and again at noon (mountain time).

There are three easy steps to set up your calendar:

1. Make Your Event Schedule Public

You will find this setting by choosing Manage Account on the account menu and opening the new preferences tab.

2. Grab Your Calendar URL

Now you just need to open your event schedule and click on the feed icon to retrieve the feed URL.

Clicking on the feed icon will bring up a box with the URL and a handy button for copying the URL. Here’s my feed if you want to practice with my calendar: https://www.billtrack50.com/webapi/events/feed/ldkuj-5konhm

3. Subscribe to URL in Your Calendar

If you are using the Google calendar then go down to Other calendars on the left hand side and click the + then choose the “from URL” option. Once the calendar is added you can give it a name, color, etc. You can watch me do this for Google Calendar here.

Instructions to Subscribe to a calendar feed in Outlook are similar. Open your Outlook calendar and in the navigation pane choose Add Calendar, pick “Subscribe from web” from the option list, paste in the URL you got from BillTrack50, click import, and bada bing. See the video linked in Google paragraph to see me walk through the BillTrack50 steps and then the very similar steps for Google.

Subscribing on Apple Calendar follows similar steps. In the Calendar app choose File > New Calendar Subscription. Then you can enter the URL you got from BillTrack50 and click subscribe. Once that is set up you can enter a name and choose a color and otherwise customize how you want it to look.

Remember these events are listed in your own local time, which is why my Denver based calendar shows a MI hearing at 7:00 am. The event details will also show the location of the hearing along with the full name of the bill.

Other calendar tools should have similar steps to subscribe to a calendar. If you need the actual .ics file for your chosen tool then simply paste the URL you go from BillTrack50 into your browser and it will download the .ics file for you.

 

Cover Photo by Nadeena Granville on Unsplash