Turn an appointment, class or deadline into a code people can scan to put it straight in their calendar.
Support for saving an entry straight from the camera is patchier than it is for contacts, and it varies by platform and version. Test on an iPhone and an Android phone before committing anything to print, and put the date in words beside the code as a fallback.
Enter content to generate QR code
Like the event type, this encodes an iCalendar VEVENT (title, start, end, optional location and description), and the phone offers to save it. The difference is intent rather than mechanism: this one is shaped for the appointment card a person is handed, where the useful fields are a title, a time and a note, and the venue is often already obvious because they are standing in it.
An appointment with a note, and the code holds:
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Dentist - check-up\, Dr Ellis
DTSTART:20260304T090000Z
DTEND:20260304T093000Z
LOCATION:Northside Dental
DESCRIPTION:Bring your referral letter
END:VEVENTNote the backslash before the comma in the title: comma separates values in iCalendar, so it is escaped for you. The description travels into the calendar entry, which is where the person reads it when their reminder fires.
It will sit in their calendar for weeks among everything else. "Dentist — check-up, Dr Ellis" is findable; "Appointment" is not. Put the business name in the title rather than only in the location, because most calendar views show the title alone.
The description travels into the calendar entry, which means it is in front of the person when the reminder fires. That is the right place for "bring your referral letter", "arrive 10 minutes early" or a booking reference. Keep it to a line or two; it is encoded character for character.
An end time is required, so pick a realistic one rather than repeating the start. A zero-length entry is displayed inconsistently, and a slot of the right length also stops the person booking something else over the top of it.
The mechanism is the same iCalendar entry. The difference is what it is shaped for: this one suits an appointment or reminder handed to one person, the event type suits something promoted to an audience with a venue.
No. The alert comes from the person’s own calendar defaults once the entry is saved. What you can do is put anything they need to remember in the description, which they will see when their reminder fires.
Keep it to a single occurrence. Recurrence rules are handled inconsistently between calendar apps, and a code that produces a wrong series is worse than one entry the person repeats themselves.
Enter the local time of the appointment. It is converted to UTC in the code, so the entry appears at the right local hour wherever the person’s phone is set.
No. The entry is inside the pattern and no web request happens when it is scanned. For appointments that move, print a link to a booking page instead and let the page hold the current time; a dynamic code makes even that link changeable later.