Oct032012

Remove Google Calendar Default Alerts in OS X Calendar

If you use Google Calendar with OS X Lion or Mountain Lion's Calendar application, you may have noticed your default event alerts showing odd times. For example, when I create a new event, Calendar adds a default alert of 1150 minutes in addition to the Calendar standard default alert of 15 minutes.

The fix to this issue is actually pretty simple:

  1. Go to the Google Calendar website.
  2. In the top right, select the gear icon and then choose settings:
  3. Choose "Calendars" from the tab menu:

For the next few steps, you will have to do this for each calendar in your account:

  1. Click the "Notifications" link for the calendar you want to edit:
  2. Remove any default event reminders that are there:
  3. Save:
  4. Repeat for each calendar

Once you've completed those steps, try creating a new event in Calendar. It should only have the Calendar default alert:

Note: I can only imagine this would work for Google Apps accounts, but I have not tested it.