Google Calendar - Is it worth it?
At first I was skeptical. Why in the world would I want to leave my cozy little world of Microsoft Outlook? I’ve got all of my information in there including appointments, notes, tasks (a la “Getting Things Done”), and email. It’s all in one place and it all synchronizes with my Treo 650.
But it is Google, which means to me that it’s at least worth a look. So I dug in. I exported my calendar from outlook to a .csv file and imported it into my new google calendar. This was very easy. I created a second calendar (my mother’s pocono house schedule) to see how it worked, and was pleased with the results. My new calendar was a different color, and its events were displayed in that color along with my personal calendar. Very cool. This is a bit better than Outlook. In outlook you can create multiple calendars, and you can view them side by side, but you can’t overlay multiple calendars in the same display (I don’t think).
In thinking about the utility of this new tool, I’ve come up with a few uses (for me anyway):
- personal calendar
- work calendar (shared)
- family calendar (shared)
- java user group calendar (public)
- friends calendar (shared)
- professional group calendar such as IEEE (public)
This is pretty cool. If my local java users group maintains a public calendar, I can search for it and add it to my display so I always know what events are happening on which dates. Additionally, with Google calendar people anywhere can see my free/busy information if they know where my calendar is.
So there is some value in this tool, but it’s still not worth it. I can’t use Google Calendar exclusively yet for the following reasons:
- Can’t easily synchronize with my Treo
- No task support
- No memo support
April 23rd, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Thanks Brob, great post! I briefly looked into using Google Calendar but using yet another calendar application seems like an unnecessary burden. How much time can we spend managing our schedules, I’ll never get anything done? The overlay aspect could be very cool though but for now I’ll just continue using my pda to sync everything together. Which reminds me, when will man-purses be in style?
Is Google too late into the game to take market share from the hundreds of other ways to manage your schedule? I haven’t checked my Gmail account in probably a year so for me the answer right now is probably “yes”. Just my $.02.
April 24th, 2006 at 7:31 am
Google Calendar uses the iCalendar formag which is a nice standard, and I think all major calendering apps will go there soon. I wouldn’t use Google Calendar, because I wouldn’t want to have to go outside of Outlook. The extra step just isn’t worth it. Mozilla Thunderbird has a calendering extension called ‘lightning’ which also uses the iCalendar standard, and enables the same sharing features as Google Calendar.