I use Google Calendar all the time. It is convenient for me to access my calendar, whether it is for work or play from the office, road or home, and the Google Calendar works great for what I need. Problem is, it doesn’t sync will with my Blackberry or my iPod. Google has provided a simple way around this solution. While you can’t sync directly with Google calendar, I can with iCal, and my information is constantly updated.

Log into your Google Calendar. Once logged in, you will notice a box with all your calendars listed on the left hand side of the page.

You will notice a little arrow to the right of the calendar name you want to add to iCal. Go ahead and click on it, and then click on the Calendar Settings. That will open up a new window showing the name of the calendar, along with some options you can change such as location, etc.

Down at the bottom of this page, you will see the last two options are entitled “Calendar Address” and “Private Adress”.

Now, I don’t share my calendar with anyone, so everything there is private. If you share your calendar, and it is open to the public, use the first option, calendar address. If you are a private guy like me, use the private address option. Go ahead and click on the green iCal box, it will bring up a box with your Google Calendar address in it:

There are now two options from this point. The easy way is to just click on that link, it will launch iCal, and the new calendar will be added. Howeve, this way, you miss a few options that can be important, so I prefer the long way. Go ahead and copy the link shown in the box, and head over to iCal (open it, of course). Under the Calendar Menu, select Subscribe. That will open up a dialog box where you can paste your previously copied address.

Once you hit subsribe, a new dialog box will open up where you can either import the Google calender into an existing iCal calendar, or create a new one. I chose to create a new one:

If you chooose a new name for the new iCal calendar, you will get a new box with naming options along with some options on what you want imported and when the new calendar should be updated:

And that is about it. Make sure you select to update the calendar, and make sure you open iCal prior to syncing anything, to give it a chance to update.

Good luck, and have fun syncing. Remember if you update your Private Addresses for some reason, you will have to start over for any Google calendars you subscribed to in iCal, as the addresses will no longer be valid. This trick works well for iCal, and any other calendar programs that uses the iCal format such as Mozilla Calendar (Mozilla Sunbird), 30 boxes, Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes.

google, google calendar, apple, ical, online

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