Last week Pointers covered scratching an itch that had come up for us: the need for certain people to see our calendars despite their being on Google and our being on Apple Calendar. The short version is that
you can do it but it's a bit fiddly and involved a workaround. It turns out, though, that we need a longer version because all that worked fine when these people were in our group company Google Calendar. Now the people who needs to see it the most are not: they're remote workers and what they really require is to have our calendar appear alongside their own.
If it weren't important, you wouldn't do this. Getting it to work for a remote user proved to be better than last week's broad solution in that it doesn't involve a clunky workaround but also far worse in that we've had to move ourselves to Google Calendar to pull it off.
So this Pointers is half how you get this individual syncing and half how to make it look as if you're still using Apple Calendar. How to use the same apps and have them work the same way as you always have.
At times we considered buying these people Macs and iCloud accounts but, looking on a bright side, if we'd done that then this Pointers would've only consisted of a JPEG of a purchase receipt.
This was all tested to death on the latest OS X Yosemite and whatever the latest Google Calendar iteration is.
But first, an aside
Millions of people use Google Calendar and it is genuinely more powerful and capable than Apple's one but it remains preposterously clunky and ugly. We've used this thing to excess in the last week and still every single time we enter a new event we go through the same confusion over where Save is. (It's way up at the top. You've worked down the screen filling in all these details, you have to remember to go back to the start to find Save.)
Then the button that means go back without saving anything has the icon of a keyboard's Return key on it. Theoretically Return is a synonym for Go Back, but usually if you press Return on a screen you enter the data you've just typed.
So every time we do want to save an entry it takes us a beat to remember where the Save button is and every time we don't, it takes a beat for us to remember that this Return button is what we need. Add to that different ways of going back to your calendar from various settings – there will be buttons, there will be hyperlinks, sometimes there will also be the Return button and they can all be on the same page – and we've just found Google Calendar exasperating.
If we hadn't been able to get this to let us continue using Apple's Mail app on our iPhones and iPads plus that or Fantastical on our Macs, we would not be happy bunnies.
Confusion
One important point may be confusing you, as it puzzled us. Both Apple Calendar and Google Calendar are terms for two things. With Apple, you tend to think of the company's Calendar app. With Google, you think of its ugly grey website. However, each of them is also a service, an engine that handles creating and managing calendar events behind the scenes.
This is how on the Mac you can have Fantastical, BusyCal and many more calendar apps that all immediately have your entire Apple Calendar in them. It's brilliant there because it means you can swap to BusyCal instantly, see whether you like it and instantly swap back if you don't. No importing and exporting data, no being unsure that you've got everything in one place.
It's equally how Google Calendar users could get many different apps like CalenMob, Calendars by Readdle or Sunrise and do the same thing: get their data displayed on their apps.
For centuries now, our calendar data lived in Apple Calendar's engine and we accessed it through half a million different apps. Times were good.
Here's what you do
The job here is to create a Google Calendar and get it to have all your current Apple Calendar events in. If we didn't do this first, you could end up having to re-enter each event and you would probably miss some and certainly hate us.
Set up a Google Calendar account for yourself if you haven't already. Then nip back to Calendar on your Mac. Choose File/Export and then pick Export... which will bring up a short dialog box asking you where to export it to. Pick anywhere you feel like – we popped ours on the desktop so we could easily find and delete it later – then click the Export button to save everything as a .ics document. File/Export, Export... Export, what word is being overused here?
Head over to Google Calendar where you'll see an empty month view with options down the left side. One of those options will be the name of your calendar, typically your own name. Underneath that there will be one that says Other Calendars. It's counter-intuitive to but to add events to your main calendar, you start with Other Calendars. Click on that, then choose Import Calendar.
There are two key options in the dialog that appears. The first is where Google Calendar can get all your events: click on Choose File and browse to where your .ics file is.
The second is where Google Calendar should save all these events. Be very careful to choose the name of your main Google Calendar.
Welcome to Google Calendar
You're now on Google Calendar and have all your events in place. If you like Google Calendar, you're pretty much set, we just have to switch on that sharing with these remote people.
Click on your calendar name in the left-hand pane and choose Share this Calendar. You get a page of details about this with a space to add someone's email address plus some options. For us, the options were crucial: we need these people to see our availability, neither they nor we want them to see we schedule naps.
There are four options that range from people being able to see and do everything with your calendar down to them only seeing your free and busy periods. For this stage, for sharing your calendar to other people, choose wisely.
If they already have a Google Calendar account then they will automatically be notified that you've given them access. If they haven't already got a Google Calendar account then please tell us why we've been schlepping through all this.
If you don't happen to like Google Calendar and aren't cheering that you're now a user of it, then once you've done that sharing with these folk, you share it with yourself. Share it with your Apple Calendar account. It's exactly the same process – choose Share this Calendar, enter your email address, choose options – but this time you want to set it so that you can do everything: choose Make Changes AND Manage Sharing.
Now close Google Calendar and never go there again. Back over on your Mac, go to System Preferences and choose Internet Accounts. Unless you've already got a Google Account listed there, click on Google and fill out the email address and password of your new G-based account. You've just added your Google Calendar to your Mac.
Day to day – when it works
Your calendar lives on Google but Apple can see and use it so in theory you carry on using your regular Mac and iOS apps and can even forget that Google is involved. In practice that's exactly what happens – after you work through some fiddles.
The first is that at you have your Apple Calendar and your Google one showing on all your apps so it appears that you have double-booked yourself for everything. Our Apple Watches actually said we had three events at 9am: we can't account for all three but doing what we say next cleared that correctly too.
On your Mac or on iOS, bring up the list of calendars you have. It'll include your regular Apple one under iCloud, the new Google one and things like holidays or maybe a second calendar you share with a partner. Untick everything. Then tick the Google one and tick only other ones you know you really need, such as that partner calendar.
Just between ourselves, we ended up with two calendars from Google at the top. One is the one we want and the other is a previous failed attempt but frankly we'll live with that rather than go through more of this.
Next, in Preferences find the default calendar and change it from your Apple one to your new Google one. If you don't do this then the next time you create an event, Apple will put it in your old calendar and also tick that for you so that you can see what you've just done. Ticking it means you get everything showing twice again and having that event in your old calendar means it isn't in the new Google one and so can't be seen by these remote people you've been slogging through this for.
You'll have to do the same on both your iPhone and iPad: the ticking doesn't sync across. You'll also have to add your Google account to all your devices.
Running in
Don't expect everything to work right away: there are enough fiddly bits in all this that it took us some days to iron everything out. Then when we were sure it all worked, we got an invitation from someone and it didn't. Their emailed invitation somehow opened up BusyCal, which we weren't using, and tried to enter it into our old Apple calendar.
To solve that, we dragged the invitation out of email on our Macs – it's an attachment file with the extension .ics – to the desktop. Click to select it, then choose Get Info. Toward the bottom of the information panel there's a line that says Open In. Choose Calendar – that's Apple's one – or whichever you prefer and specifically also select the Always Open In option.
Then go back to your email, double-click on the event invitation and away you go. It all works and we've been doing it successfully for the last week: by successfully we mean both that we've got our information to these other people and we've not had to go back into Google Calendar once.
You're picking up that this wasn't a fun Pointers to do. It was satisfying working it all out. It was very disappointing that it has to be done this way around: you can't live in Apple Calendar and reliably share this detail to remote people on Google Calendar, you have to start with Google.
Yet for all that and all the verbiage you've just had to go through just to read the thing, once it's set up it does solve a specific and very much required business need.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
Top