Google Calendar is great for managing your time and even letting others from your family or work chime in. You can easily create different calendars, name them and share them with other people. You can have reminders for appointments, special notifications, etc. Having a shared calendar with your wife/husband or your significant other is always a good idea. So is one with your teammates at work or one shared with your boss. Sharing a calendar from your personal account is pretty straight forward. But it can get a bit tricky if your team is using Google Apps email. I’ll explain the step by step process below for both instances.
Sharing Google Calendar From The Web
Step 1: Login to www.google.com/calendar. Step 2: You’ll see the calendars listed in the left pane. Mouse over the calendar in question and from the drop-down menu, select Share this calendar. Step 3: From the Share with specific people tab input the email address and from the drop-down menu either select See all event details if you only want the person to see the calendar or Make Changes if you want them to be allowed editing permissions. You can allot them sharing rights as well. And that’s it. The person will get an email saying you shared a calendar with them. From the web view, it will be visible to them in their calendar section and all the changes will be synced to connected devices automatically. Now, you or your shared contacts are free to add any events and you’ll be notified of them if you have notifications turned on. Same goes for reminders. If you don’t see the newly shared calendar on your Android or iOS device, go to the Calendar app and from the Calendars to display setting, make sure the new calendar is checked.
Sharing Google Apps Calendar
The process of sharing a Google Apps calendar is the same but the guidelines are different. Because of the way Google Apps permissions are structured, only the admin, a.k.a. the owner, has the permission to add specific people who can make changes to the calendar. If you’re not the admin, all you can do is either make the calendar public or share it within your team (all the email addresses running on the Goggle Apps account). You can share it with a specific person but you only get the option to view the new appointments, you can’t create your own.
Viewing Shared Calendars On Android
Shared calendars will be synced automatically on Android. If you’re not seeing updates from a shared calendar for some reason, open the default Calendar app on your phone, tap the three dotted menu and select Calendars to display. Check the shared calendar and the updates will show up.
Viewing Shared Calendars On iPhone
If you’re using the iPhone’s default calendar app to view shared calendars, you need to enable iPhone sync from Google first. Go to this page in any web browser when you’re logged into your own account (you don’t need the permission of person who shared the calendar with you for this) and check the shared calendar (it was unchecked for me). Click Save and exit. Refresh the calendars panel in the iOS 7 app and you’ll see the shared calendar appear (as seen in the screenshots above). Now that the calendars are synced and visible on all your devices, you’re free to create new events and edit them on your shared calendar and the updates will be synced to all the members.
Tell Us How You Manage Shared Calendars
Do you use Google Calendar for sharing appointments or iCloud Calendar perhaps? What are your go to tips and tricks for calendars? Let us know in the comments below.
