Category: Google Calendar

Microsoft has quietly rolled out a new feature on their personal assistant Cortana that Android users will appreciate.  Now in Microsoft Cortana, you can set up the assistant to have access to your Google account, allowing it to access both your Google calendar as well as your contacts.  Previously calendars and contacts were limited to Office 365 accounts or to an Outlook.com account.

The addition of Google services means that users of Cortana on their Android phone, PC or their Harman Kardon Invoke, will be able to ask Cortana about events on their Google Calendar or make a call to a Google Contact, a likely scenario for Android users.

As you would expect, this new integration requires that you connect your Google account to Cortana and authorize it.  This is done via Connected Services which can be found in your Cortana Notebook section of the app or on your PC.

After months of testing by Google Top Contributors and Googlers, the new Material Design look of Google Calendar has gone live.  All accounts should be seeing the option to go to the new calendar look over the course of the next 48 hours.

The update brings a much needed refresh of the Google Calendar interface which, let’s be honest, was a bit “engineering looking” for the longest time.  The new look fits well into the overall Material Design look and feel that Google is after in their own apps for Android and other web-based apps.

With the 2017 Major League Baseball season underway, you may want to keep up with your favorite team’s schedule.  Given that the baseball season is at least 162 games (if your team doesn’t make the playoffs), who they are playing, where and when can be a bit of a challenge to keep up with day-to-day.  Google, however, has made it pretty easy.  In Google calendar, they have the schedule for all of the MLB teams but also for a wide range of other global sports such as cricket, rugby and football (or soccer as we call it in America).  While you can’t add these calendars from the Android app for Google Calendar, you can sync them with it so you have your favorite team in your favorite sport schedule with you all the time.

In this How To, I’ll show you were to go to add these calendars to your Google Calendar then how to sync them with your phone or tablet.

Most certainly file this one under finally!  Microsoft has announced that support for Google Calendar and Google Contacts is finally coming to Outlook for Mac.  For those on Windows 10 using Outlook for Windows, this is no big deal.  The support for integrating your Google Calendar into Outlook has been there pretty much from the beginning.  Not the case for Mac users.  While adding your Gmail account to Outlook for Mac was no biggie, your calendar and contacts from Google would not sync.  It just wasn’t an option.

In an announcement to the Office Insiders, Microsoft has started rolling out the support for Google Calendar and Contacts to those in the Insider Fast Ring.  The feature is certainly still in the test phase, so much so that Microsoft isn’t rolling it out to everyone who is an Insider.  Those who don’t get it immediately will be prompted at some point in the future to add their Google account so they can start testing.

Google Calendar for Android has an update rolling out that brings mostly one new but desired feature by users:  A monthly calendar view widget.  The updated version of the app, version 5.6.2 for those keeping score at home, allows you to add a widget that can be resized to show an entire month of your calendar without having to open the app itself.  This is a feature that many other calendar apps have already so it is very much a catch up feature.  Previously you only had one widget which provided you the schedule view.  It too was resizable but it would just stretch out the items on your schedule.  Not super useful if you need to see what you have going on a few weeks from now.

Google Calendar for Android has been updated and with it comes a new event conflict notification feature.  This feature shows you in the app as you try to schedule another event where you have conflicts in your schedule.  The idea is to prevent yourself from double-booking events only to realize it later.  This feature actually rolled out to those who use the app as part of Google apps for Work or Education last month as they were tied to domains associated with those services.  Google has now rolled it out to everyone although it does have some limitations.