iCal Missing AM/PM Option? Change to 24-hour Mode!

Am I crazy or is there no way to make iCal show AM/PM when editing a calendar entry?

iCal Missing AM/PM Option

The AM/PM option IS there, because if I use the arrow key to move over to next field, there's a hidden AM/PM field which I can change. However, unless I know what it's already set to, I have no way of knowing what I'm changing it to. Very annoying.

My fix for this is to simply use 24-hour mode, which I already use on my main system clock anyway. (By the way, if you have trouble converting 24-hour time to 12-hour time, you might want to check out my post on Learning to Interpret Military Time.) Unfortunately, enabling the "Use a 24-hour clock" option in the Date & Time settings does not enable 24-hour clock mode in iCal. To do this, you must modify the International settings (!?).

System Preferences -> International -> Formats -> Times -> Customize

Changing time format

From here, you can select and delete the AM/PM option from the white field and then click the little arrow on the hour field to change it's format to 24-hour (this screen is very non-intuitive for something made by Apple). I made the changes to Short, Medium, Long, and Full time formats and then clicked OK and WHAM! iCal showed 24-hour time and made it possible to easily change the time on an entry.

iCal 24-hour format

Welcome, time traveler, to the slipstream.

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43 Comments

  1. Thanks, it is one of the first thing that I see from apple that is really difficult to set up. I could not made it without your guide. Thanks a lot.

    Reply to Juan

  3. Thanks, that helped. I was stuck with AM/PM which is so unintuitive for a european. We don’t use that. EVER.

    Reply to K

  4. K,

    I don’t use AM/PM either… I find 24-hour time to be so much more intuitive! I also prefer my dates to be written like YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (e.g., 2008-11-03 16:34:02), since that easily represents greatest to least measurement of time from left to right. 🙂

    Reply to Raam

  5. Thanks for a solution that has been bugging me for months.

    I am retired military and can state that the whole of the US should go to 24 hour clock. It solves so many mistakes and misunderstandings!

    Reply to Walt

  6. Walt, I totally agree with you! Moving to a 24 hour clock makes a lot of sense and would simplify so many things. The ISO 8601 standard is a great guide to writing dates and times in an easily understood format.

    Reply to Raam

  7. Thanks very much, was finding it tricky myself. As you say not very intuitive for an Apple-designed app.
    Anyway, sorted!

    Reply to Keith

  10. Raam,
    New to Apple. Trying to set up my iCal 3.0.7 I find Preferences under the iCal column but not the
    System Preferences -> International -> Formats -> Times -> Customize route that you show. Where to I find this? thanks for any help.

    Reply to marty

  13. Thank you! I didn’t realize that I had to change all those options to make it work. It was driving me crazy why I couldn’t type in 9 or 09 to get the morning hour and it kept showing 21. Fixed now!

    Reply to Me

  14. My husband and I thank you very much! Wanted to let you know that we found our change in “Language & Text” > “Formats” > “Times”. We are running OS X 10.6.2.

    Reply to Amanda

    • You’re welcome, KM! I wish I could make this solution more easily available to those looking for it! I remember how frustrated I was and it wasn’t fun!

      Thanks for stopping by. 🙂

      Reply to Raam

  21. Like much in life, it is simple…
    once you know how!
    Thank you for a great tip.
    Now, how about a tip to add ISO 8601 numerical calendar weeks?

    Reply to Tygerklaw

    • Hi Tygerklaw,

      I’m glad you found this tip helpful. 🙂 I’m not sure how to add ISO 8601 numerical calendar weeks, but I can see how that would be useful!

      Reply to Raam

  23. I set my regional settings to United Kingdom, has the same effect (running Lion). Best part: this also works on the iPhone (iOS5) and probably iPad. Beware that this also changes the way the date is shown (it says 5 january and not january 5 with UK settings)

    Also, the clock on top of my screen doesn’t say 19:00 PM but just 19:00 now, even though I did not have to delete the AM and PM in the other fields.

    I only had to change the currency back to Euro. I’m in the Netherlands but I prefer my computer to speak English to me 🙂

    Reply to Bas

  25. Changing the mode isn’t much of a fix, I guess!
    Here is what I figured out:
    Just go into week view and and you can just pull the event to the desired time (;

    Reply to Christoph

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