If you open the right side drawer, there’s also a pull down menu in between the drawer button and the search bar that allows you to Show Tasks, Show Info Panel, or Show Both. Easy to find if you’re looking for it.
BusyCal uses iCloud to sync. I use it and Fantastical. Any time I’m using the calendar on my computer, it’s via BusyCal. I love the interface way better than the Mac calendar. Fantastical lives in my toolbar and I will glance at it throughout the day, but that’s the extent of it’s use on my Mac.
I use Fantastical as my calendar on iOS devices. I also use the widget to view my calendar items on my phone. When entering an event or item from iOS, I find it a lot nicer to work through Fantastical.
I have BusyCal on my iOS devices, but don’t use it much on them. Granted, it’s been a while, but it just wasn’t a smooth process to use them on my iOS devices… didn’t render as nice, was clunky, and always had problems syncing it with one server or another.
The reason I went to BusyCal over the stock calendar was because it allowed for much easier coordination of calendars across devices and calendar types. I use mostly Apple services at home, but have to share out some calendar items on a couple of Google calendars, and my job uses Outlook, with which BusyCal works well.
Also, I have a shared calendar with my family, and I’ve found that when I duplicate items on my work calendar, I can “switch” the calendar (ie if I have a meeting at work, I can duplicate the calendar item and switch it from work to the Fam calendar so they can see what I’m doing at a given time) and if I do that on BusyCal, it doesn’t send a notice to everyone else attending that I’m doing something with the event. When I tried that (in the past) using the Mac calendar, any time I duplicated an event to add to my Fam cal, it notified EVERYONE attending that I was doing something to the meeting. That got messy quick.
Long and short, I like both calendar apps and use them both for different reasons.
If you don’t want to pay for BusyCal independently, check SetApp to see if there is enough there to justify a subscription. I found that to be my answer - I subscribe to SetApp and have a few features that I regularly use that more than justify the cost. And I can try all their apps whenever I feel like it, even if I don’t always keep them.
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thx. Should have thought of that. Now I have Hazel opening ics files and then deleting them.
Sorry to have come late to this thread. Just thought maybe I could clarify about the different tick boxes above:
The boxes immediately to the left of your calendars (like the checked “Calendar” and the unchecked “Birthdays”) allow you to hide and display individual calendars.
The box immediately to the left of “Nomad Foods” controls all the calendars from that source — simply allowing you to hide and display all “Nomad Foods” claendars at once.
So if you want no Nomad Foods calendars displayed, you can quickly un-check all of them by unchecking the orange “Nomad Foods” box. But if, say, you wanted only the “Birthday” calendar, you could turn them all off via the “Nomad Foods” box and then override that by ticking “Birthdays” back on.
You have complete control over the colors of all of these things — just control-click on any of them and choose Color; or, better yet, choose Get Info and marvel at the wealth of options BusyCal gives you.
Further, within a data source, you can set up your own groups of calendars. For example, if you wanted Nomad Foods > Calendar and Nomad Foods > Tasks within a group called Important, you could create a new group (File > New Group) and click and drag those calendars into your new group.
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Thanks for the tip on Get Info for calendars. I’ve been a BusyCal user for years but I never noticed that before - it really does have a wealth of options.
Thank you for the tips, really really helpful 
Will give it a go.