How to Create a Calendar Event QR Code

Introduction

A poster announces a town hall meeting, and half of the people who read it forget the date before they reach their desk. A calendar event QR code closes this gap: a person scans the code, and the smartphone offers to add the event — with its title, place and time — to the calendar. This article shows how to make such a code with QR Code Generator.

Step 1. Open the Event tab

Open the page with the QR Code Generator web part and select the Event tab. If the tab is not visible, click the … (more) button at the end of the row of tabs.

Step 2. Enter the event

1. In the Title field, type the name of the event. The field is required and accepts up to 200 characters.
2. In the Location field, type the place: a room, an address or the words Online.
3. In Start, select the date and the time when the event begins. The field is required.
4. In End, select the date and the time when the event ends. The field is optional, but without it the calendar app chooses the duration by itself.

Step 3. Mind the time zone

The date and the time are written into the code exactly as you enter them, without a time zone. The calendar of the person who scans the code treats them as local time.

• For an event in one office or one city nothing else is needed: 10:00 on the poster is 10:00 in the calendar.
• For an online event with participants in several time zones, add the time zone to the Title or Location field, for example Town Hall Meeting (10:00 CET). Otherwise a participant in another time zone gets the event at 10:00 of their own time.

Step 4. Test the code

Scan the preview with a smartphone. The phone should offer to add the event to the calendar; open the prompt and check the title, the place, the date and the time.

Step 5. Use the code

• Poster or printed invitation. Click Download and choose SVG or a large PNG. Print the date and the time next to the code as well, for the people who do not scan it.
• Email, slide, digital screen. Click Copy and paste the image.
• Page of the event on the intranet. Set up the code on the page in edit mode and republish it. See KB10269. Publishing a Preconfigured QR Code on a SharePoint Page.

The formats and the size of the image are described in KB10268. Downloading and Copying a QR Code: PNG, JPEG, SVG and WebP.

What the code does not contain

An event code holds four things: the title, the place, the start and the end. It has no description, no reminder, no list of participants and no link to an online meeting, and it does not create a recurring or an all-day event. The person who scans the code adds a personal copy of the event to their own calendar:

• the organizer does not see who added the event;
• if the event is moved or cancelled, the copies in the calendars of the participants do not change.

For meetings where the responses and the updates matter, send a regular invitation from the calendar and use the QR code as an addition.

Summary

Select the Event tab, enter Title, Location, Start and End, state the time zone when the audience is spread across several, and test the code with a phone before it goes to print.