As people’s lives become more hectic the need to keep a record of your activities and events is increasing. In many cases it is no longer faesible to use a paper calandar on the kitchen wall to plan out your life for the times ahead. More and more people are now keeping electronic calandars on their computers or smartphones so that they can quickly refer to it when planning meetings or social events. The problem with this approach is that you are dependant on a single piece of equipment to manage your time. What if your phone or laptop were to break or be stolen? What if you need to add something to your calander and your battery runs flat? These are the shortfalls of having your calander in an electronic form.
A better way to implement this would be to have your calander stored on a computer or sercver and then interfacing with it using pretty much any device that has an internet connection. There are many commercial solutions available for this, but these are often restricted to business use and often prove to be expensive solutions. However, with a bit of tweeking it’s possible to have a working solution that interfaces properly with almost all of your internet capable devices using a free service from Google: Google Calandar.
Step 1 – Creating an account on Google Calandar
Before we can do anything else, we need to set an account up with Google Calandar so that we can begin to work with it. To do this, head over to the Google Calendar webpage. If you already have an account with Google (for Email etc.) you can use this to login to Google Calender, if not you’ll need to set up an account using the “Create An Account” button as below:
Logging In to/Registering with Google
To register you’ll need to provide an Email address, a password, your name and location, your D.O.B and agree to the terms of service for Google Calendar. You’ll then be asked for your phone number so that an automated call or text message can be sent to you to confirm your identity. Once you’ve done this you’ll be ready to go and can log in in future using your Email address and the password you selected.
Once registered you should be able to proceed to Google Calendar, you’ll be presented with a screen like the one below:
Google Calendar
From here, the process of adding appointments is quite straight forward. However, at this point we are still required to log into Google with our web browser in order to make changes to the calendar. To work more effectively, we need to be able to access our calendar from our mobile devices. We will now look at how to do this for some of the most popular devices and programs.
Step 2 – Accessing Google Calendar from a PC or Mac.
If you already use an Email or calendar program on your PC or Mac (such as Outlook, iCal, Thunderbird or Entourage) then you already have the ability to access your Google Calendar from your PC. Below are instructions for setting up access on each of the programs mentioned previously:
Microsoft Outlook – full details on how to set up Google Calendar are supplied by Google here
iCal for Mac – full details on how to sync Google Calendar with iCal are found here
Thunderbird – There is a third party plugin available for Thunderbird here which allows full bi-directional access to Google Calendar
Microsoft Entourage – Currently no official support from Google or Microsoft, but a workaround can be found here
Step 3 – Accessing Google Calendar from a mobile device.
It will be possible to access your Google Calendar using any mobile device that features a web browser, however for several devices there are better ways of doing so. See below for the best way to access your calendar on these devices.
Apple Mobile Devices - Google provides full setup information for iOS devices here.
Blackberry – Blackberry users can download an application from Google here (right hand side of the page)
Nokia S60 – Google provides full setup information here.
Android phones – Google provide applications for Android based devices, further information is available here.
As time goes on, Google will likely provide bespoke solutions for more mobile devices, and the open-source community will likely develop better and more reliable solutions for accessing your Google Calendar. Once you begin to use some of the services and methods above the advantages of having your calendar stored in a central location will become evident quite quickly. No longer will you need to constantly update your phone or sync it with your PC or Mac in order to stay up to date, all information will be updated in the background with little to no involvement from you: just update an appointment from any of your devices and applications, and the changes should filter down to all your other devices.
