There’s more to Google Calendar (GCal) than meets the eye. At first glance, it seems no different from the printed desktop calendars that used to dominate employee desks. You input your tasks, appointments, and other commitments on their designated dates and refer to the calendar every day. The difference is that with Google Calendar, even the smallest tweak can change it from a simple list of appointments to a comprehensive business tool. Here are some ideas you can start with.
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Like Simon, I use Google tools to manage just about everything I do. I keep most of my files saved as Google Docs. I use Google Calendar to schedule my time. I rely on Gmail to manage the several emails addresses I have. Having a fairly integrated set of tools makes managing my work a lot easier. I’m always looking for ways to use Google tools to manage a little bit more of my digital life, like using Google Calendar to manage invoices. A new, free Adobe Air application, Google Calendar Invoice Creator, provides the capability to do just that. Read the rest of this entry »
This recent debut of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview was exciting to many, including myself. However, as a long-time Microsoft Office user, the news that the online component of Office 2010, Office Web, won’t be ready for technical preview until later this summer was a bit of a buzzkill.
If you’re running Office 2003 or Office 2007 and you can’t wait for Office Web, there are some applications available that can help you get your Microsoft Office data into the cloud, via Google Apps or Zoho Business. These applications can give you piece of mind that your data is backed up and accessible anywhere, and can also help you test the waters for a full migration to a web office suite.
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We’ve covered many third-party Google Calendar hacks and add-ins in the past, but earlier this week Google announced the launch of Calendar Labs. Calendar Labs works similarly to Gmail Labs, offering “official” experimental hacks and extensions to Google Calendar. You can access it from your Settings page, which now sports a brand-new Labs tab.
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We’ve covered a lot of scheduling software here on WWD. For example, I wrote about When Is Good, a lightweight solution that offered very basic, easy-to-access scheduling for busy folks, and there are many other services available, too, as apparent from the “Calendars and Schedules” section of this post. A new service, ScheduleOnce, advertises itself with the tagline “Find a time in no time” and claims to deliver “more scheduling power for your Google Calendar.”
If I believed the hype from all of these scheduling services, I’d have to assume that we were all just careening around haphazardly, making and breaking so many appointments and meetings that we lose all sense of time and date. In practice, I think that most of the time the most scheduling software I need is my iPhone and its built-in Calendar application. That said, there are definitely times when scheduling using Google Calendar, which I already use for group-related activities, would make more sense. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Tasks, the simple to-do system built into Gmail (previously covered on WebWorkerDaily), has just been integrated into Google Calendar. Tasks with due dates will now show up in the Calendar, and it’s possible to enter tasks directly into it as well.
Go into your Calendar, and you should see a “Tasks” link on the left-hand side of the window. Click it, and you’ll see a new Tasks sidebar spring up on the right, with all your tasks synced from Gmail, and a new “Tasks” calendar will be added to your list of calendars.
This means that tasks with a set due date will now show up in your Calendar in the “All Day” section at the top of the window (as tasks can only have a due date, not a a time).
You can enter tasks with a due date directly into your Calendar by clicking in the “All Day” boxes at the top of the window in “Day” or “Week” views (or on the day in “Month” view) and hitting the “Task” link in the pop-up window. Read the rest of this entry »
As covered before, working with calendars is another one of those business necessities that is crucial to running a business. Managing multiple calendars is tedious, but necessary to staying in sync with those in your work and personal life. For example, you may have calendars for each of your co-workers, your personal calendar, and perhaps even your family events calendar.
FuseCal, a new web application, allows you to combine multiple calendars and create one master calendar. Ideally, this means you can take any iCal calendar such as Outlook 2003/2007, Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal, and Yahoo! Calendar and add them into FuseCal, granting you new functionality.
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Arranging meetings with co-workers and team mates can often be a very tedious task. The main issue with meeting scheduling the is time wasted trying to arrange meeting times. Microsoft Exchange tools help solve this inside the enterprise, but outside your own company efficiently scheduling meetings becomes difficult if not impossible. Another issue with scheduling meetings is having to work with timezones.
In conclusion, time is wasted arranging meetings because they involve multiple email transactions and/or phone calls.
A newcomer to the meeting coordinating scene, Tungle is an add-on application that tries to take some of the frustration out of arranging meetings.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
