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.

Customize Your Calendar

Like most apps, GCal isn’t “one size fits all”. You can customize several elements to make the calendar fit your needs. Here are some settings you can change:

• Custom views. By default, GCal gives you the following views: Day, Week, and Month. The day and week views can be too short for some, while the month view can be too long for others. You can create a custom calendar view by going to Settings > Custom View and select anything from two days to four weeks.
• Multiple timezones. Since most web workers have professional contacts all over the globe, it might be a good idea to include multiple timezones in your calendar. Just remember that you need to use the Day or Week views to see the timezones compared side-by-side.
• Aesthetics. Apart from the color of each calendar you set up, you can’t really change much of the visuals within GCal itself. Here are some alternative ways to change the calendar’s look and layout:
  • Helvetical. For a minimalist calendar design, you can install Ad Taylor’s Helvetical user script which gives GCal a simpler, cleaner look. If you’re working with a small monitor or a netbook, keep in mind that the large Helvetical header may lessen your usable screen area.
  • Better GCal. This add-on by Gina Trapani is handy for netbook users, as it allows you to collapse the header and the right sidebar, which is handy if you want to install some GCal gadgets but can’t afford to have them hog your screen. It also comes with a sleek gray skin for your GCal interface. I can’t seem to get some of the other features to work, though.

Use Your Calendar as a To-do List

This may seem like common sense — after all, many people use Google Calendar to record their tasks. But my approach helps to keep me organized and gives me a sense of accomplishment.

I created a new calendar and named it “Done”. Whenever I’m finished with an item on my list, I simply transfer it to the “Done” calendar. This calendar is hidden, so if I do all my assigned tasks for the day, my agenda for the day becomes clear and empty, giving me the same feeling of accomplishment when I achieve Inbox Zero.

To add a bit of fun, I uploaded a background image so that when my schedule clears, I can see the word “Done!” for that day (see screenshot below).You can upload your own image for this purpose via Settings > General > Calendar Background.

Use GCal an an Appointment Scheduler

It’s easy to book appointments with Google Calendar if your clients and colleagues have Google accounts, but what if they don’t? Some third-party tools can help:

• Darrell reviewed ScheduleOnce a few months ago, and the Firefox add-on can be found here.
• Earlier this month, Simon brought our attention to the Setster widget, which you can set up on your web site for appointment booking. You can integrate this with your Google Calendar.

Use GCal For Invoicing

If you want to use Google Calendar for invoicing, you can do so with Google Calendar Invoice Creator, a free Adobe Air application. To see how it works, check out the review and tutorial that Thursday wrote. gTime is a similar application, but you only need your web browser to use it.

GCal + Google Docs + Gmail = Collaboration

Apart from just scheduling meetings, you can also use a combination of GCal, Google Docs and Gmail for minimalist project management. The calendar sharing option makes this possible.

Here’s an example: When there’s a new design project for my team, I add a new event on our shared calendar and invite them all to it. I’ve enabled the “Attach Google Docs” feature from Google Calendar Labs, so I have the option of adding a design brief that everyone can refer to (see screenshot below). Unlike using Google Docs by itself, this allows you to attach group-wide email reminders and deadlines to your files. Just remember to share both the calendar and the file.

Also, if you need to add a calendar item while reading your email, simply click on the “More Actions” button, then “Create Event”. Gmail Labs also has Google Calendar and Google Docs gadgets for your sidebar if you need to refer to them often in one interface.

Integrating these three apps isn’t necessary if you already have existing, more robust collaboration software. But if your team is hesitant to use new tools or if you can’t afford to pay extra fees, this simple freebie approach is worth a try.

Search for Past Events

The search function is Google Calendar’s simplest and most overlooked feature. It comes in handy if you want to know the last time you did something, whether it’s a maintenance task for your car, cleaning up your hard drive, or sending greeting cards to your clients. Google’s own Matt Cutts uses this feature to keep track of his haircuts.

How do you use Google Calendar? Do you customize it in any way to suit your needs?

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.

The idea is simple: If you’re already keeping track of the hours it takes you to work on specific projects in Google Calendar, the invoice creator can use the RSS feed from your calendar to automatically create invoices from your tracked hours. It’s easiest if you have a separate calendar for each project — rather than keeping all your projects and appointments on one calendar — but adding a new calendar to Google Calendar is a simple process.

Google Calendar Invoice Creator uses the titles of your specific “appointments” to group hours onto invoices for each project. It’s important to consistently use the same project names to keep your invoices updating correctly. As the application receives new information, it calculates the total hours you’ve worked on each project and generates an invoice for that project. You can create your invoices as either text or HTML files. In the HTML version of your invoices, you can control the layout for a more professional look. You can also create a summary report of how you’ve been spending your time.

There is certain information you’ll want to add to the system before you start creating invoices, like your hourly rate and your client’s details. Once that information is in the system, the application will be able to turn out invoices with minimal effort on your part. You can just attach individual invoices to an email in order to pass them along to the appropriate client.

There are some drawback to using Google Calendar Invoice Creator: It’s meant for just one user, so if you’re trying to generate invoices based on several people’s hours, it’s probably not the best option. Similarly, billing different tasks at different rates can be a bit tricky. More complex invoicing applications do have more features, such as the ability to send invoices directly from the application, and easy availability from any computer. It is also worth noting that this application is not an official Google product.

On the plus side, Google Calendar Invoice Creator can run on a variety of operating systems. It doesn’t take long to learn to use, unlike many more robust bookkeeping applications. As long as you’ve already figured out Google Calendar — not a difficult learning curve — coming to grips with Invoice Creator is easy. It’s also free to download and use. If you’re in need of a quick tool to crank out invoices, this application can be quite useful.

What invoicing tools do you use?

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.

Syncing Applications
While syncing can be a somewhat of a dark art (even with established applications, getting your data to sync properly can be tricky), here is a roundup of some of the more popular syncing apps:

• Google Calendar Sync lets you sync your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar data. Unfortunately, Google Calendar Sync does not yet support Google Tasks.
  
• Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook let you sync Microsoft Outlook email, contacts, and calendar with Google Applications Premier Edition. Unfortunately, installing Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook disables the ability to search Outlook data.

Microsoft Office Add-Ins and Windows Applications
There are a number of Microsoft Office add-ins that enable you to move your Microsoft Office data to the cloud, including:

• Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office enables you to access and edit Zoho documents and spreadsheets offline using Microsoft Office. You can also publish local documents to to the cloud via  Zoho Share.
  
• WebWorkerDaily covered OffiSync, which allows you to use Google Docs file storage and collaboration from a Microsoft application toolbar.
• Google Docs Uploader is a simple Windows application that enables you to upload Office documents to Google Docs using a simple drag-and-drop interface. You need to be running the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher.
  

Hosted Applications
Moving your Microsoft Office data into the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean using Google Apps or Zoho Business. We covered the launch of Microsoft Online Services, which provides hosted SharePoint and Exchange services. I like the thought of Exchange and SharePoint hosted in the cloud, although my experience with SharePoint hosted through third parties has been less than favorable. As Online Services is hosted by Microsoft, I’m hoping it will provide a better experience. Microsoft Online Services makes these services more accessible to freelancers and small- to medium-sized businesses that lack the personnel and resources normally required to run them.

Applications for Neglected Mac Users
I count myself as one of the Mac users stuck in Microsoft Office. As Darrell Etherington wrote about on TheAppleBlog, Mac users are going to have to wait for the Office 2010 goodness. However, there  are some third-party applications available that can help put your Office data into the cloud while you are waiting:

• Spanning Sync can sync iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts.
• MobileMe can sync Microsoft Office data from Office on the Mac to the cloud. Unfortunately, I encountered way too many issues with MobileMe after its amateurish launch so I didn’t renew my account. Apple tried to be everything to everybody and stumbled when it came to cloud computing; my plan is to revisit MobileMe in a year to see if Apple has gotten its act together. MobileMe is a fee-based service.
• GDocsUploader, previously covered by WebWorkerDaily, is nothing more than a small applet that enables you to upload documents to Google Docs via a drag-and-drop interface.

Can Microsoft Office and Web Offices Coexist?
While these third-party and vendor applications, add-ins and services may seem like a rag-tag bunch, they do build a case for coexistence of the desktop-bound Microsoft Office and the various web office suites, although sometimes there are incompatibility problems. I’m hopeful that the interaction between Office 2010 and its web components will provide a smooth round trip for my documents from Microsoft Office on my desktop to Office Web, without the file compatibility issues from using third parties.

How do you use Office with the cloud?

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.

Here is the current lineup of hacks and extensions available in Calendar Labs:

Background image. Enabling this feature lets you choose a background image for your Google Calendar. You can choose which image to use from your General Settings page.

Attach Google Docs. This feature lets you attach a document, spreadsheet, and or presentation you create in Google Docs to any event you create in Google Calendar. You must share the documents you attach to a Google Calendar event in order for others to view them. If you are on a project team that uses Google Docs then this could be a very useful feature as you will able to attach media agendas and other project documentation directly to a Google Calendar event for review by the team.

World clock. This Labs feature places a reconfigurable world clock on the right-hand side of Google Calendar, with adjustable settings that let you choose the World times you want to appear in your calendar view. With many colleagues spread out across the world, I set up World Clock on my Google Calendar so I can get a better appreciation of my colleagues’ time zones.

Jump to date. Enabling this Labs feature lets you jump to any date with ease.

Next meeting. This feature provides a countdown to your next Google Calendar event.

Free or busy. Enabling this Labs feature lets you view which of your friends are free or busy (note: you and all your friends must share your Google Calendars in order for it to work). If you are on a project team where members use Google Calendar, this experimental feature should come in handy to help better communicate everybody’s availability for conference calls and meetings.

What features do you want to see join Google Calendar Labs?

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.

Using ScheduleOnce’s Google Calendar Firefox Add-on, that’s exactly what you can do. Just install the add-on via the ScheduleOnce web site, restart your browser, and then log into your Google Calendar to get started. From there, you can use the ScheduleOnce control panel in your sidebar to pick Tentative Availability times which are then optionally connected back to your Google Calendar. Once you’ve chosen your available times, ScheduleOnce generates a link that you can email to other potential attendees so that they can choose from the times you suggest.

Once invitees reply, you’ll be notified in the ScheduleOnce sidebar window. You’ll also receive a notification email from the web app with a direct link to allow you to view what times your invitee has chosen. When you click on it, you’ll be presented with a view of which times overlap, as indicated by a green block on ScheduleOnce’s daily agenda display. Connecting to your Google Calendar, selecting a time, and clicking “Schedule Meeting” will confirm the chosen slot and send a notification to all attendees. It’ll also add the event to your Google Calendar and those of your fellow attendees, so long as you all have the ScheduleOnce add-on installed.

It doesn’t sound complicated, and it isn’t in theory, but in practice I had to do a whole lot more reloading and reauthorizing than I should’ve probably been required to do. Whether this is a problem with the way ScheduleOnce is written, or with the Google Calendar developer API, I couldn’t say. All I know is that I found myself thinking somewhat wistfully back to the days of When is Good, when times were simpler. But if you absolutely abhor manually entering things into your Google Calendar, give ScheduleOnce a try. It is free, which definitely helps make up for its little quirks.

Do you use scheduling software, or, like me, do you prefer to do things manually?

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.

After starting out as a simple and somewhat useful addition to Gmail, Tasks is becoming a very handy product in its own right, and while not as capable as full-featured to-do list apps like Things or Remember The Milk, it’s possible to use it in some quite powerful ways (for example, see my previous post on using Tasks as part of a GTD system).

Calendar integration was a no-brainer, as not being able to see Tasks due dates in your Calendar was quite annoying, but further integration with other Google products, like Docs, for example, could make the product even more useful.

Have you tried the new Tasks/Calendar integration? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

(via Google Operating System)

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.

Specifically, once the individual calendars are imported into FuseCal, you can choose which events you’d like to add, filter events by keyword, and then add those into your master calendar. Once you have your master calendar built, you can easily import this new filtered and personalized calendar into Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or whichever calendaring application you use.

Another feature of FuseCal is aimed at those who have their own websites and want to publish calendar data, such as a business who wants to publish upcoming events or a softball team who wishes to display their game schedule on their website.

To get started, sign into FuseCal and click on the “Publish Calendars” link. Follow the on-screen instructions for building your FuseCal calendar for publishing. The final step will provide you with an embeddable snipped of HTML to put on your website. If there are any changes to your embedded calendar, users subscribed to your calendar will automatically be notified in their calendaring application.

FuseCal is currently in “Alpha” and the service is free. Considering how new it is, I wouldn’t suggest keeping business critical data within FuseCal’s system. However, in my initial testing the services has worked as promised.

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.

The Tungle Client

Tungle is a downloadable application that looks very much like an IM program. The application reads your calendar and shares your availability with your Tungle peers. One benefit of Tungle is that it doesn’t change or alter your Exchange calendar, just reads it for the purpose of allowing you to share your free/busy data. Tungle also allows you to see your contact’s free/busy data within Outlook, sans having to fire up the Tungle client.

At this point in time, Tungle only supports Microsoft Outlook (with or without an exchange server) on Windows Vista and XP.

Interoperability

If you want to schedule a meeting with someone who you know doesn’t have Outlook or Exchange, you can create a Tungle Space. A Tungle Space is simply a temporary web site to arrange a particular meeting. In the Spaces tab, you’ll see a grid representing the coming days. You click a zone that represents times that you’re free. An email is sent to those who you invite and they get a link to your Tungle space where they’re able to see your open times. The invitees select a block of time and the meeting is then booked.

When I asked Tungle CEO Marc Gringas about future plans to support other calendaring platforms such as Apple’s iCal and Google Calendar, he replied by stating these are the next two platforms are the next to be launched, with the same functionality as the Windows client.

Monetization

When asked about how they are going to monetize Tungle, Gringas said the basic client will always remain free. However they will eventually introduced premium services that will be billed monthly or yearly. Premium features will likely include detailed calendar information (rather than just free/busy data) and the ability to schedule meeting resources such as projectors, food, microphones, etc.

Conclusion

Tungle is an easy to use application that takes some of the trouble of scheduling meetings. However, until other calendaring applications are supported, I cannot see recommending this product for your scheduling needs. Those on Outlook 2007 already have the ability to share their free/busy data with those not on their Exchange system via the Internet Free/Busy functionality. There’s no reason to install and configure a third-party application when Outlook 2007 supports this out of the box.

Tungle’s true value will be realized when it serves as a cross-platform calendar scheduling system; bridging the gap between not only Outlook users across enterprises, but across operating systems and other calendaring platforms.

Tungle advertises that no data is kept on any central servers. Gringas, in our interview, told me Tungle works in a P2P fashion, similar to Skype. When I addressed the issue of privacy, I asked him if scheduling data is sent over the wire in clear-text. He responded by saying the beta build I was using did use clear-text but upon release, they’ll be employing encryption (off the top of his head, he thought it was Blowfish). I feel a bit uneasy about any type of clear-text communication of my data, so it I hope this encryption promise manifests.

It’s time once again to welcome the week with a handy tip to save a few precious minutes. Today we’ll be checking out a handy way to print and share your Google Calendar.

Printing your GCal

Chances are if you are a user of Google Calendar, at some point in time you’ve wanted to share your calendar with someone. Whether it be your husband/wife who wants to know what your week looks like, or a business colleague who you want to schedule a meeting with, easily sharing calendars can be a bit tricky. Sure you can always share your calendar with them via their Google Calendar or iCal, but what about the times you just want to easily give a snapshot of your day/week’s schedule?

Tech-Recipies.com shows us how to do this. First, click on the Print link at the top of your Google Calendar. Then, in the printing preferences, use the dropdowns to adjust the Font Size and Orientation. Check the Black and White checkbox. Now that you are done, click the “Save As…” button to easily download your newly created PDF calendar.