Using Google Calendar

Do you find yourself wanting to be better organized? I have a busy schedule. My work and family time seem to merge too often. Like a lot of other business professionals, I strive to find balance. Google Calendar provides me the tools to balance my life. Let me show you how I use it to my advantage.

I’ve tried Microsoft Outlook’s calendar, but never quite grew comfortable with it. For many reasons, it felt like a chore to fill out the event details. You can now merge your Outlook calendar with Google Calendar. Before we dive into that, let’s review the basics of Google Calendar.Google Calendar is free. To access it, visit www.google.com/calendar. You need a Google account which is also free and only takes a few minutes to setup. Once you login, you should see a new calendar named after your name. You can actually create more than one calendar, so you can share data amongst friends or colleagues. But, we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s start out creating events, switching views, setting reminders, and integrating the system with Gmail.

The Google Calendar Basics

We need events in our calendar, and Google makes that task very simple. You can click any date on your current view to begin adding the information for it. 

The entry in the “What” field should also include the time of the event, unless it’s an all day one. For instance, “9am Dental Appointment” would give the time in the calendar too. When you prefix items on your schedule with the time, Google Calendar automatically sorts the events by the time. All day events appear at the top of the list.
Now that you know how to quickly add an event, we should learn the more advanced settings. Let’s take a look at our “9am Dentist Appointment”. The tasks in the calendar are hyperlinks, which open the dialog windows to alter the title. You can also select “Edit event details”. 

There are four major activities that take place in the edit event area: adding details to the event like location and a description, adding guests by email address to the event, creating reminders, and writing comments on the event itself.

NOTE: Comments do not appear in the Create Event menu.