Shawn’s Thoughts

Several folks have been asking about Google Calendar and Windows Calendar, and how to link them together.  They’re both using the icalendar format to store their calendar entries, so subscribing to a Google calendar should be pretty straight-forward.  It is, once you know how to find the correct URL.  In this exercise, you’ll be sharing out your Google calendar, and subscribing to it inside Windows Calendar.

Fire up your favorite browser, and navigate to your Google calendar.  Once you’re in your Google calendar, look for the calendar pane, and then click on the “Manage calendars” link.  This will take you to the magic page that will show you the correct URL.

On the “Calendar Settings” page, look for the calendar you want to share out, and click on the “Shared: Edit settings” link:

Now you need to make a choice about how much of your calendar you want to air to the world – don’t share anything, share only my free/busy information, or share everything with everyone.  You can also select to share either free/busy or all calendar information with selected email addresses, and I won’t be going there (to reduce complexity here…).

Once you’ve decided how much of your life you want exposed, click on the “Calendar Details” link:

For this exercise, you can skip over most of the information on this page.  You’re looking for the green “ICal” button in the “Calendar Address” section:

When you click on the green “ICAL” button, a popup window will come up, displaying the URL for your calendar:

Copy this URL to the clipboard.  You’re now done with the Google Calendar part of this exercise.

Launch Windows Calendar (Start->All Programs->Windows Calendar), and select Share->Subscribe from the menu:

The “Subscribe to a Calendar” dialog comes up.  Enter the URL from your Google calendar here:

When you press “Next”, Windows Calendar goes off to have a quick chat with the Google calendar servers.  Assuming all goes well, you will see the Subscription settings pane.  There’s two entries to pay attention to here.  The Calendar Name is the name that will show up in the Calendars list in Windows Calendar.  The refresh rate tells Windows Calendar how often (or not) it should go check for updates to the Google calendar. 

After you’ve selected your choices, press “Finish”.  In the Calendars pane of Windows Calendar, you should see a new calendar subscription.  You can tell it is a subscription by the “+” symbol next to the calendar name. 

You’re done!  If you selected an automatic refresh rate, any changes you now make in your Google calendar will be automagically copied to your Windows Calendar…  Have fun with this!