Can you make a poll in Google Calendar? What Google offers instead

There is no poll in Google Calendar, and as of October 2026 Google has not announced one. When people ask in Google's own help forum, the suggestions are Google Sheets or another tool.

What Google does have is a set of features for finding free time and booking it. They work well when you can see the other people's calendars, and less well, or not at all, when you cannot.

Find a time, in the event editor, lays your guests' calendars side by side so you can pick a gap. It only shows the calendars you are allowed to see, which in practice means colleagues in the same Google Workspace organisation, or people who have shared their calendar with you. Guests outside your organisation show no availability at all.

Suggested times with Gemini, announced in January 2026, proposes slots automatically, on certain paid Workspace plans and, again, only from colleagues' calendars. Gmail's Help me schedule, launched in October 2025, puts your own free times into an email reply; at launch it was built for one-to-one meetings.

Appointment schedules are booking pages: you publish your free slots and people take one, first come, first served. Personal Google accounts get one booking page free, and the people booking do not need a Google account. It is the right tool for office hours and client calls, and the wrong one for a group, because the first person to book decides for everyone.

If you want to stay inside Google, you can build a rough poll in Google Forms: one checkbox question with each date and time as an option, a short-answer question for the name, and the responses collected in a Sheet. Then you read the Sheet, pick the time, and create the event yourself.

It works for a handful of people in one time zone. The times are plain text, so nobody sees them converted to their own time zone, nobody can answer Maybe, and the results are a list of rows rather than a view of which time suits most people.

Everyone is in your Google Workspace: use Find a time, or Gemini's suggestions if your plan has them. One person outside, booking a slot with you: use an appointment schedule. A group that includes people outside your organisation, or friends on personal accounts: use a poll link, because nobody's calendar is visible and the group needs to agree rather than book.

Decider is the poll Google Calendar does not have. You propose a few times, share one link, and everyone votes Yes, Maybe or No without an account, each seeing the options in their own time zone. When you lock the time, it goes into Google Calendar, or Apple or Outlook, in one tap for everyone.