Google Calendar is an important part of the Google ecosystem. The Google ecosystem is a group of integrated applications. Google Calendar, like all of the other online tools, are services. They are software as a service that lives in the cloud.

You can have many calendars. You can create multiple calendars that stack one on top of the other. For example, you could have a work calendar and a personal calendar. You can view these two calendars all at once or one at a time, which is great. You can also subscribe to public calendars, such as Holidays in Canada or your favourite sports team’s calendar. Also, you can add in private calendars such as your spouse’s calendar or a friend’s calendar.

Events

In the Google Calendar world, appointments are called events. One easy way to create an event is to click inside one of the days on your Calendar. A popup window appears that allows you to specify when, where, what kind, why and other details of the event. The first thing you can do is add a title for the event. You can add a time as well. Fill in the rest of the fields as desired.

Notice that you can pick a time and make it repeatable if you want. You can add a physical location and notifications if you want. If you have multiple calendars, you can pick which calendar you want to add this event to. I only have one calendar so it says Michael Porter by default. To the right side of that you’ll notice that you can color-code the event.

If the event was an online meeting with Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Team meeting, or something else, you can specify the type where it says “Add Google Meet video conferencing” by clicking on that button. If you want to set up a Zoom meeting but you don’t see the option there, you can install Zoom into Chrome. So you can integrate other tools into the Google ecosystem. You can install the Chrome extension for Zoom meetings. To install it, go to the Zoom page zoom.us/download. Scroll down the page a bit until you see Zoom Extension for Browsers. Uder that there are two buttons. One for Chrome and one for Firefox. Click the one you are using and follow the instructions. When you create a new Event, you might find a blue button at the bottom of that initial popup screen previously discussed here. The button will say Make it a Zoom Metting. If you see that, you’ve successfully added the Zoom extension.

Create a New Calendar

You may create a new calendar by clicking the gear icon, which is settings. It’s located in to upper-right corner of the browser windows when you are in Calendar. You can share your calendar with individals or you can create a public calendar. When your calendar is public, a sharable link is created. Anyone can click on this link and gain access to this calendar. Why would you do this? Organizations that have public events, such as sports teams or musical groups will create these public calendars that anyone can see as long as they know the link. If you run a sports team you can do this. You caould create the public calendar and then email the link to everyone on the team. Now everyone on the team can see the game schedule on their Google Calendar.

Learning Calendar

You can watch a YouTube tutorial on Google Calendar at dottech at Google Calendar – Google Basic Part 3. There are many other tutorials that are also very good.