Using Apple Shortcuts — Number 1
I was reading an article here about problems they were having with Apple Shortcuts. As someonewho uses Apple Shortcuts extensively, I thought I would take a look at some of the Shortcuts I’ve written to see if I could be helpful. With just a little modification, here is the result I came up with for collecting an overview of calendar events with the date, time, and title and printing it. Could it be improved? Absolutely. Possibly better ways to accomplish the same thing, but this works and will hopefully help others out with taking advantage of Apple Shortcuts.
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Steps 1–4: Ask for the start date to use for finding events and save it to a variable. Why am I subtracting 1 day from the selected day? When testing this, retrieving calendar events got events starting the day after you select, so rather than remembering to select the previous day, adjust the selected date to give you the expected results. I also format the date to remove the time since we don’t need it.
Steps 5–7: Ask for the ending date and save it to a variable. No adjustments are necessary to this one. Again, I am formatting the date to remove the time since we don’t want it.
Steps 8–9: Create an empty text (you could put something there if you wish) and set it to variable we will use to save event information.
Step 10: Get all calendar events between the selected start and end dates. This could be modified to add additional filters. If you wanted to ignore certain calendars for things like birthdays, this is the place to do it.
Step 11: Start a loop to go through each calendar event found.
Step 12: Get the current event’s date/time.
Step 13: Get the current event’s title
Steps 14–15: Create text that has all of our information and add a new line with the current event’s date/time and title; and update our output.
Step 16: End of our loop for calendar events.
Step 17: Show an alert with the calendar events.
Step 18: Print the calendar events. This SHOULD be all that is necessary to print. Unfortunately, there is a bug in shortcuts printing that goes back prior to iOS 15.2 that make it not work. A work-around is down below.
Step 18 — Fixed-ish: This solution to the broken printing in Apple Shortcuts is painful for me to have to do, but so far nothing else works. To get a way to print the output, first convert our output to PDF.
Step 19 — Fixed-ish: Bring up the share sheet to allow the user to manually select print.
As painful as it is that a hacky work-around is needed, at least it allows printing.
This shortcut can be downloaded here.
Hopefully this helps others out there. I’m looking forward to writing more to help others and see where this leads.
