Most of us these days use a calendar to organize the tasks in our life. If you also use a calendar, you might need it with you most of the time. The one I use is Google Calendar. Since I’m on Windows 8, and there’s a pretty awesome calendar app pre-installed, I would want my Google Calendar events to appear in my Windows 8 Calendar app (and I know you want to do the same!). Let’s see how it’s done.
First, fire up the calendar app from the Start screen.
You would need to use a Microsoft account (Hotmail , Live, or any MS account) to use the app. You cannot sign in with your Google account yet.
After signing in, you’ll be able to see the calendar. You’ll also see any events (if you have added any) in your Microsoft account’s calendar.
But now it’s time for the real deal: adding your Google calendar to it. So open up settings from the Charms bar.
Click Accounts.
Here you’ll see all the added accounts. Currently there’s just one, the Microsoft account I signed in with. So we’re going to add another account by clicking “Add an account”.
In the next step, click Google.
Fill in your details and press Connect.
Once syncing is done (which will take an instant), you will be able to see your Google Calendar events alongside the MS account events. I have set the calendar view to Month.
To differentiate between events of your Microsoft account and any other account that you add afterwards, there’s colour coding built in. You can set which colour should be default for an account. You can even set whether events and tasks from a particular account should always (or never) be displayed in your calendar. In this case, I’ve (temporarily) hidden my MS account calendar.
Now let’s try adding an event. Click any date in the calendar.
Give it a title, and some description.
You can even set which calendar you want to add this event to. If you haven’t hidden any calendar so far (as shown earlier), you’ve got to make the choice here.
Trust me, I added an event to the calendar (unknowingly using my MS account to do so, not using the Google account), and was going crazy over the fact why it didn’t sync with my Google Calendar (when I checked with the Google Calendar on the web). I even came to the decision that the syncing is one-way only (from Google to Windows 8, and not the other way around). Too bad I forgot to see that there’s a list of calendars to choose from. Once you choose the right calendar, the entire colour scheme of the event changes, and all is well.
You can also click “Show More” to reveal some more options.
Once you’ve set it all, click the Save button.
Notice how the button colours and highlights have changed to ‘Raspberry’ colour, compared to when the MS calendar was selected and it was all blue. Colour coding helps a lot! Once you hit save, the event will appear in your calendar.
You can open Google Calendar to verify if it has been synced or not.
You can even modify or delete an event. For instance, let’s cancel the lunch that I’ve scheduled for December 30. Click the event to see its details.
Click the trash icon to delete it.
And it’s gone from Google Calendar as well.
So there you go, it’s pure synchronization (works both ways).
