I R Blogging

Google Greatness: Calendar

We’ve covered RSS feeds with Google Reader, your mail with Gmail and news with Alerts over the past few days; but what good is that if you never have time to do it with your busy schedule? In comes our next product: Google Calendar.

Google Calendar (GCal) is a great product, it has all the needed elements that most people look for in a calendar. We have the different view types (Day/Week/Month/Agenda) but that’s nothing new for calendar programs. When you add an event it has all the routine What/When/Where/Description, again nothing new. One of hte most useful features about GCal however is the ability to have multiple calendars as one.

By creating a new Calendar (Click the Add button located on the left of the screen) you can easily categorize events by type, or by who is doing them. For example, I’ve added the work schedules of some of my friends, so I know when they’re off (Yeah, I’m a stalker like that), dates jotted down when I plan on blogging about a certain topic and even when I should go get groceries or do laundry (insufficient memory). Adding all of these things are colored-coated and all appear on the same calendar so you can see when things over lap. If things get too crowded, you can always uncheck a calendar to make it invisible on the calendar. All events are also Drag-and-drop once created, which helps for people with rotating schedules.

Google Calendar also allows users to make the calendars public. If you wanted users to your site to know for instance when an event was going to happen, you could allow that calendar that it’s attached to be set as public. This does not mean your entire calendar will be public, just the one you’ve set as public. Because Google permits you to do this, they’ve also made it so you can ‘play’ with it a lot. This includes being able to have notifications on your Firefox browser, having your GCal show up on your desktop and much more. I’ll include the links at the bottom of this post.

GCal also has some nice features like emailing you before an event, which is handy for having time to prepare and access from mobile phones (which is all the rage these days). More than features though it’s simply, which Google is best at.

Some Helpful Links:
Tweak Google Calendar @ Firefox Facts
How to make your Google Calendar your PC’s desktop wallpaper @ LifeHacker
Best of Google Calendar (Addons + Tips) @ Makeuseof