End of month repeating event on Google Calendar

Historical post, kept for reference only. Google Calendar’s recurrence UI has evolved significantly since 2011 — check the current recurrence options in Calendar before falling back to the iCal-import workaround below.

I run different google calendars for different organisations, and many of them have regular repeating meetings in the calendar. It is relatively easy to set up repeating meetings in a google calendar but unfortunately the week (or day) that they repeat on is anchored to the start of the month, so if you want to say “lets meet on the last Thursday of the month” there’s no obvious way to do this with a google calendar.

Google could fix this with a little radio button option to set which end of the month to anchor repeating fixtures, but I guess they’re tad on the busy side (I’m quite the google fan actually!).

After a bit of trawling I found there is a workaround. If you want to insert a regular meeting on say the last Thursday of the month then you have to insert the repeating fixture on a month where it is the 5th occurrence of that day (day 29-31), and of course set it as a repeating event. If the 5th Thursday isn’t this next month then set up the meeting using a 5th Thursday in the past and then delete the individual instances of the meeting before today’s date (or do it in the future and set the interim meetings by hand).